kinds of humour in literature

Words with Friends Cheat
Wordle Solver
Word Unscrambler
Scrabble Dictionary
Anagram Solver
Wordscapes Answers

Make Our Dictionary Yours

Grammar and writing tips
Fun language articles
#WordOfTheDay and quizzes

By signing in, you agree to our Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy .

We'll see you in your inbox soon.

Common Types of Humor Used in Literature

Woman laughing while reading funny literature

DESCRIPTION Woman laughing while reading funny literature
SOURCE Jose Luis Pelaez Inc / DigitalVision / Getty

If you’re studying literature or considering how to make your own writing funnier, it helps to learn about the types of humor used in books and poetry. Literary humor can take several forms, and learning to recognize them is both fun and useful for your own work.

Surprise and Incongruity

One type of humor used in literature is incongruity or surprise. This type of humor can be something as simple as a ridiculous sight like a pig in a submarine, or it can be based on a surprise in the situation. Something unexpected happens, and this makes the reader laugh.

Consider this example from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams:

“So this is it,” said Arthur, “We are going to die.” “Yes,” said Ford, “except… no! Wait a minute!” He suddenly lunged across the chamber at something behind Arthur’s line of vision. “What’s this switch?” he cried. “What? Where?” cried Arthur, twisting round. “No, I was only fooling,” said Ford, “we are going to die after all.”

Self-Deprecating Humor

Self-deprecating humor is when the speaker or a character makes fun of himself or herself. This makes the character vulnerable to the reader, but at the same time, it also shows strength. It’s a unique type of humor, but you see it in some of the great stories.

Here’s an example from Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse:

“Beginning with a critique of my own limbs, which she said, justly enough, were nothing to write home about, this girl went on to dissect my manners, morals, intellect, general physique, and method of eating asparagus.”

Situational Humor

A situation can be downright hilarious when it’s described properly. The situation, whether real or imaginary, is just funny. Throughout literature, there are many examples of situational humor that leave readers laughing.

Often situational humor is based on perspective as in this example from The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler:

“Ever consider what pets must think of us? I mean, here we come back from a grocery store with the most amazing haul - chicken, pork, half a cow. They must think we're the greatest hunters on earth!”

Irony as Humor

Many literary texts use irony in a humorous way. There are several types of irony, but they all involve the contrast between what is said or seems to happen and what actually happens. One specific type is dramatic irony , in which the reader knows something the character does not. You’ll also see situational irony and verbal irony.

In Cold Comfort Farm , Stella Gibbons offers a great example of verbal irony in the difference between what her character Flora says and what she really thinks:

“‘That would be delightful,’ agreed Flora, thinking how nasty and boring it would be.”

Understatement in Humor

When the writer describes a situation or event in an obviously understated way, this can be hilarious for the reader. The key here is that the reader knows the full extent of the real situation and is conscious of the ridiculous understatement that is happening.

You can see understatement in action in Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions :

“Vietnam was a country where America was trying to make people stop being communists by dropping things on them from airplanes.”

Overstatement or Hyperbole

Similarly, overstating a situation can be funny too. In this case, the reader understands the real situation and is amused when the writer exaggerates it.

Steve Martin uses overstatement in this passage about dieting from his book Cruel Shoes :

“The problem with the diets of today is that most women who do achieve that magic weight, seventy-six pounds, are still fat.”

Humorous Satire

When a writer uses a serious tone to discuss a ridiculous subject, that type of humor is satire. You’ll find many examples of satire in literature. This technique is popular with everyone from Shakespeare to Douglas Adams.

One famous example of satire is A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift. In this essay, Swift pretends to propose that people should eat children to take care of the hunger problem and overpopulation at the same time:

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.

The Why of Humor

If you enjoy using humor in your writing or identifying it in books you read, you might get a laugh out of some different examples of humor or silly book puns . You’ll find that with enough familiarity, you’ll be able to explain exactly why something is funny in one of your favorite books.

Excellence in Literature: Because reading well can change your life.

Resources for Teaching / Writer's Handbook

Types of Humor

by Janice Campbell · Published January 17, 2017 · Updated May 11, 2017

Literary devices that create humor

As you read, you will encounter many types of humor, and you will find some types funnier than others. If you want to learn to use humor in writing, it helps to identify some of the literary devices commonly used in humor.

There are many ways to be funny in writing, including these five types of humor.

Exaggeration or overstatement : To represent as thing as greater than it is; to make a mountain out of a molehill.
One example of understatement is the Victorian reaction to Cleopatra’s scandalous conduct as portrayed in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra : “How different, how very different, from the home life of our own dear Queen!”
Incongruity: The juxtaposition of two not-quite-related ideas; something that is out of harmony with expectations.
Irony : A stylistic device or type of humor in which the real meaning of the words is different from (and opposite to) the literal meaning. Irony, unlike sarcasm, tends to be ambiguous, bringing two contrasting meanings into play.
“It wasn’t a good summer for Humpty Dumpty, but he had a great fall.”

Five ways to be funny with words

In this informal video by Jeff Roy you will get an overview of these five commonly used literary devices or types of humor.

Setup and Switcheroo humor

Novelist K.M. Weiland offers a brief look at another type of humor in which the writer or speaker foreshadows something, then does something different at the last minute.

Additional information on humor

Psychology Today defines 4 Styles of Humor : affiliative, aggressive, self-enhancing, or self-defeating.

You can learn more about which types of humor you prefer by taking the Humor Styles Questionnaire at PsychToolkit.

Download our printable newsletter!

Here’s the Everyday Educator — our annual newsletter handout. It has book lists and helpful articles about homeschooling topics. We’d rather be sharing it in person, but for now, you can download the Everyday Educator here. I hope you enjoy it!

New Articles

Alexander Pope Biography
Virginia Woolf Biography
Prayer for Deliverance from the Pestilence
Eveline by James Joyce
Poetry by the Month

Join us on Facebook!

Visit our other sites!

Doing What Matters — Janice Campbell’s blog on education, entrepreneurship, and soul care
Everyday Education — Janice Campbell’s Homeschool Website

Excellence in Literature Awards

New Resources

Edith Wharton Biography
It’s Time to Rediscover the Power of Poetry, by Ellen Condict
Homer Biography
How to Read Ash Wednesday by Eliot
Sophocles Biography
Entries feed
Comments feed
WordPress.org

English Studies

This website is dedicated to English Literature, Literary Criticism, Literary Theory, English Language and its teaching and learning.

Humor in Literature

Humor in literature is a powerful and versatile literary device that transcends cultural and temporal boundaries, infusing narratives with wit, amusement, and intellectual depth.

Introduction: Humor in Literature

Table of Contents

Humor in literature is a powerful and versatile literary device that transcends cultural and temporal boundaries, infusing narratives with wit, amusement, and intellectual depth. Authors employ humor to engage readers, challenge social norms, and convey complex ideas through lighthearted and often subversive means.

From the clever wordplay of Shakespeare to the satirical commentary of Mark Twain, humor has served as a lens through which authors explore human nature, society, and the human condition. By juxtaposing the serious and the comical, literature has the capacity to both entertain and enlighten, leaving a lasting impact on readers and enriching the literary landscape.

This multifaceted use of humor in literature underscores its enduring relevance in the world of storytelling and intellectual discourse.

Examples of Humor in Literature

How to create humor in literature or writing.

Utilize clever wordplay, puns, and linguistic humor to create witty and humorous connections between words and phrases.
Play with double meanings, homophones, and unexpected language twists to engage the reader’s sense of humor.
Craft humorous situations or scenarios where characters find themselves in absurd, ironic, or comically exaggerated circumstances.
Exaggerate the incongruity between expectation and reality for comedic effect.
Employ satire to criticize or mock individuals, society, or institutions through humor.
Create parodies that imitate and exaggerate the style, content, or tone of other works or genres for comedic commentary.
Develop characters with distinct and humorous personalities, quirks, or eccentricities.
Use their interactions and reactions to situations to generate comedic moments.
Pay attention to comedic timing and the pacing of humor within your writing.
Build anticipation and use well-placed punchlines or comedic reveals to maximize the impact of the humor.

Remember that humor is subjective, and what one reader finds funny, another may not. Tailor your humor to your target audience and the overall tone of your work while maintaining consistency in your comedic style.

Benefits of Using Humor in Literature

Humor captivates and entertains readers or listeners, making your content more engaging and memorable.
It establishes a connection by evoking positive emotions, increasing audience receptivity to your message.
Humor serves as a stress reliever, promoting relaxation and reducing tension in the audience.
It can create a light-hearted atmosphere, making the experience more enjoyable.
Humor can clarify complex ideas and improve communication by simplifying or illustrating concepts through amusing anecdotes or examples.
It facilitates understanding and retention of information.
In social interactions, humor in literature is a powerful tool for building rapport and establishing a friendly atmosphere.
It fosters a sense of camaraderie and can ease social tensions, making communication more enjoyable.
Humorous in literature tends to be more memorable than dry or serious information.
It can leave a lasting impression, making your message more impactful and shareable.

However, it’s essential to use humor judiciously and consider the appropriateness of the context and the preferences of your audience to ensure that it enhances rather than detracts from your communication or writing.

Humor in Literature and Literary Theories

Definition of Humor

Humor is a literary tool that makes audiences laugh, or that intends to induce amusement or laughter. Its purpose is to break the monotony, boredom, and tedium, and make the audience ’s nerves relax. The writer uses different techniques, tools, words, and even full sentences in order to bring to light new and funny sides of life. Humor is often found in literature, theater, movies, and advertising, where the major purpose is to make the audience happy.

Types of Humor

There are several types of devices that create humor. Humor is, in fact, the end product and not the device itself. These devices are:

Hyperbole / Exaggeration
Incongruity

Examples of Humor in Literature

Example #1: pride and prejudice (by jane austen).

Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice is one of her most popular works. Throughout the entire novel, Jane Austen uses humor. She presents a very hilarious scene between Mr. and Mrs. Bennet. Mrs. Bennet endlessly breaks down and makes complaints for her husband’s lack of understanding her nerves, and then he responds by saying:

“You mistake me, my dear. I have a high respect for your nerves. They are my old friends. I have heard you mention them with consideration these twenty years at least.”

He constantly pokes fun at her. Likewise, Austen bursts with humor in the case of Elizabeth and Darcy as, upon their first meeting, both feel a sense of disgust for one another. However, later they enjoy teasing each other.

Example #2: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (By Mark Twain)

“No, don’t you worry; these country jakes won’t ever think of that. Besides, you know, you’ll be in costume, and that makes all the difference in the world; Juliet’s in a balcony, enjoying the moonlight before she goes to bed, and she’s got on her night- gown and her ruffled nightcap. Here are the costumes for the parts.”

In this example, the duke is unable to notice the silliness of his own actions, instead he makes comments on the low level of understanding of the country jakes.

Example #3: To Kill a Mockingbird (By Harper Lee)

Harper Lee has inserted humor by creating funny situations with a serious tone in her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird . Many descriptions about Dill are funny and humorous, as he is presented as a larger-than-life person. When we first meet him, the kids take him a puppy. Then he says his name is Charles Baker Harris, saying that he can read, in spite of his age.

We also see a lot of humor in Scout’s actions, coming from her efforts to comprehend adult ideas, which are very complex for a child like her. Author is showing her to be a very smart kid. A humorous event occurs during Scout’s first day at school. Miss Caroline, the teacher, is naive, and “looked, and smelled like a peppermint drop.” We meet her when Scout tells her she had already been punished before lunch on her very first day at school, making children mildly suspicious.

Example #4: Great Expectations (By Charles Dickens)

Charles Dickens derives humor through characterization in his novel Great Expectations . The tone is serious, but there are humorous touches that punctuate the main action. We see a humorous scene in the dinner party when Joe Gargery tells his life story to Pip, and subtly measures gravy on Pip’s plate, while Mrs. Gargery gets onto him. Another funny situation happens when Magwitch wants to sleep and asks Pip:

“Where will you put me?” [Magwitch] asked, presently. “I must be put somewheres, dear boy.”

Function of Humor

Humor is one of the most effective literary weapons to please the audience , as it develops characters and makes plots useful and memorable. Humor plays many functions in a literary work. It arouses interest among readers, sustains their attention, helps them connect with the characters, emphasizes and relates ideas, and helps the readers picture the situation. Through this tool, writers can also improve the quality of their works by pleasing the audience . Apart from that, the most dominant function of humor is to provide surprise, which not only improves quality, but improves memorable style of a literary piece. The writers learn how to use words for different objectives.

Definition of Humor Humor is a literary device that makes audiences laugh, or that intends to induce leisure or laughter. Its cause is to break the monotony, boredom, and tedium, and make the audience’s nerves relax. The writer makes use of one-of-a-kind techniques, tools, phrases, and even full sentences that allows you to deliver to light new and humorous sides of life. Humor is frequently determined in literature, theater, movies, and advertising, in which the major motive is to make the target audience happy. Types of Humor There are several forms of gadgets that create humor. Humor is, in fact, the quit product and not the device itself. These gadgets are: Hyperbole/Exaggeration Incongruity Slapstick Surprise Sarcasm Irony Pun Examples of Humor in Literature Example #1: Pride and Prejudice (By Jane Austen) Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice is one among her most popular works. Throughout the complete novel, Jane Austen makes use of humor. She presents a completely hilarious scene among Mr. And Mrs. Bennet. Mrs. Bennet ad infinitum breaks down and makes court cases for her husband’s lack of know-how her nerves, and then he responds with the aid of pronouncing: “You mistake me, my dear. I even have a excessive respect to your nerves. They are my vintage friends. I even have heard you point out them with consideration these two decades at least.” He constantly pokes fun at her. Likewise, Austen bursts with humor in the case of Elizabeth and Darcy as, upon their first meeting, both sense a sense of disgust for one another. However, later they revel in teasing each other. Example #2: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (By Mark Twain) “No, don’t you worry; these u . S . jakes won’t ever consider that. Besides, you know, you’ll be in costume, and that makes all of the difference inside the world; Juliet’s in a balcony, enjoying the moonlight before she is going to bed, and she’s were given on her night- gown and her ruffled nightcap. Here are the costumes for the parts.” In this example, the duke is not able to be aware the silliness of his very own actions, as an alternative he makes comments at the low degree of understanding of the u . S . jakes. Example #3: To Kill a Mockingbird (By Harper Lee) Harper Lee has inserted humor through developing funny conditions with a critical tone in her novel, To Kill a Mockingbird. Many descriptions approximately Dill are funny and humorous, as he is offered as a larger-than-life person. When we first meet him, the youngsters take him a puppy. Then he says his call is Charles Baker Harris, pronouncing that he can read, no matter his age. We additionally see loads of humor in Scout’s actions, coming from her efforts to comprehend adult ideas, which might be very complex for a kid like her. Author is displaying her to be a completely clever kid. A funny occasion happens all through Scout’s first day at school. Miss Caroline, the teacher, is naive, and “looked, and smelled like a peppermint drop.” We meet her whilst Scout tells her she had already been punished earlier than lunch on her first actual day at school, making kids mildly suspicious. Example #4: Great Expectations (By Charles Dickens) Charles Dickens derives humor through characterization in his novel Great Expectations. The tone is critical, however there are humorous touches that punctuate the main action. We see a funny scene inside the dinner party while Joe Gargery tells his life story to Pip, and subtly measures gravy on Pip’s plate, at the same time as Mrs. Gargery receives onto him. Another humorous situation happens whilst Magwitch wants to sleep and asks Pip: “Where will you put me?” [Magwitch] asked, presently. “I need to be positioned somewheres, expensive boy.” Function of Humor Humor is certainly one of the most effective literary weapons to please the target audience, because it develops characters and makes plots useful and memorable. Humor performs many capabilities in a literary work. It arouses interest among readers, sustains their attention, allows them hook up with the characters, emphasizes and relates ideas, and helps the readers picture the situation. Through this tool, writers also can improve the exceptional of their works by fascinating the target market. Apart from that, the most dominant feature of humor is to offer surprise, which now not handiest improves first-rate, however improves memorable style of a literary piece. The writers discover ways to use phrases for one-of-a-kind objectives.

Alliteration
Anachronism
Antimetabole
Aposiopesis
Characterization
Colloquialism
Connotation
Deus Ex Machina
Didacticism
Doppelganger
Double Entendre
Flash Forward
Foreshadowing
Internal Rhyme
Juxtaposition
Non Sequitur
Onomatopoeia
Parallelism
Pathetic Fallacy
Personification
Poetic Justice
Point of View
Portmanteau
Protagonist
Red Herring
Superlative
Synesthesia
Tragicomedy
Tragic Flaw
Verisimilitude

Satire vs Parody: Humor in Literature (Explained)

by Team Experts
July 2, 2023 July 3, 2023

Discover the surprising difference between satire and parody in literature and how they both use humor to make a point.

What are the Different Types of Literary Humor?

What techniques are used for exaggeration in satirical writing, what is the purpose of social commentary in satire and parody, who are common targets of ridicule in satirical writing, what is the subversive approach to humor, common mistakes and misconceptions.

Definition of Comedy

Comedy is generally defined as a literary work that is written to amuse or entertain a reader. In a comedy, characters can certainly suffer misfortune, but they are typically comedic situations with positive outcomes. Not all examples of comedy as a literary device are funny. However, its light-hearted treatment of plot and tone does allow a reader and/or audience to release emotion and tension as a satisfying escape from the mundanity of life or tragic circumstances, with the potential of gaining insight into humanity and the self.

The Ancient Greeks utilized drama as a means of investigating the world and the meaning of being human. Comedy is among the genres they developed, first as a means of satirizing and mocking men in power for vanity and being foolish. Aristotle defined comedy as an imitation of less than average men and in terms of portraying the “Ridiculous.” Unlike Greek tragedy , Greek comedy focused on human weaknesses and foibles and less “virtuous” people.

In a sense, much of modern comedy focuses on human frailties as well. For example, in his memoir Me Talk Pretty One Day , David Sedaris provides witty observations about himself and others that showcase everything from hypocritical thinking to nonsensical behaviors:

Every day we’re told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it’s always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are born between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it’s startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are ‘We’re number two!

In this passage, Sedaris uses comedy and humor to point out that Americans often believe things to be true that the rest of the world may not see quite the same way. His observations call attention to the frailty of blind patriotism that is often demonstrated and encouraged within America .

Examples of Comedy Types

Comedy appears in many art forms, including books, movies, plays, improvisation, and more. As a literary device, the comedy features recurring formulas that appeal to readers. Some examples of these comedy types are:

Situational Comedy: It is also called a sitcom and comprises a comedy play and characters playing episodes after episodes.
Romantic Comedy: It is a sub- genre of comedy comprising lighthearted themes and humorous plots.
Physical Comedy (Slapstick): Also called slapstick, it is a physical comedy comprising body movements, clowning, and making faces.
Dark Comedy (Gallows humor): Also called dark humor, black humor , or black comedy, dark comedy makes heavy or grave subjects and themes look lighter through fun and comic remarks.
Farce : This comedy uses exaggeration of the situation.
Spoof or Parody : This comedy uses imitation to ridicule or ironize life events.
Satire : Satire ridicules vices, follies, and foibles with the purpose to correct them.
Dramatic Irony : Its objective is to use irony through drama or dramatic situations.
Tragicomedy : Its objective is to use the mixture of tragedy and comedy to make tragic moments seem lighter.

Examples of Shakespearean Comedies

During William Shakespeare ’s time, the term comedy referred to a light-hearted dramatic work with a characteristically happy ending, often involving marriage. Though Shakespeare’s comedies do feature humorous language and comic devices, they differentiate themselves from his dramatic tragedies and history plays in their tone and plots. Some of these common plots include deception, character disputes, overcoming obstacles for a reunion, mistaken identities or disguises, and even supernatural elements. Overall, the primary theme of most Shakespearean comedy is love with an underlying tension between reason and passion.

Here is a list of some well-known examples of Shakespearean comedies:

All’s Well That Ends Well
As You Like It
The Comedy of Errors
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Measure for Measure
The Merchant of Venice
The Merry Wives of Windsor
A Midsummer Night ’s Dream
Much Ado About Nothing
The Taming of the Shrew
The Tempest
Twelfth Night
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Winter ’s Tale

Famous Examples of Modern Comedies

Comedy is an effective literary device in its appeal to diverse groups of readers. Most people respond positively to comedic works due to their light-hearted tone and typically happy outcomes. In addition, comedic literature allows writers a sense of freedom in style and subject matter such as dark satire or sentimental melodrama .

Here are some famous literary examples that can be considered modern comedy:

Slaughterhouse-Five
The House of Mirth
The Odd Couple
Pride and Prejudice
The Importance of Being Earnest
The Joy Luck Club
A Prayer for Owen Meany
Fried Green Tomatoes
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
Everyday Use

Difference Between Comedy and Tragedy

As a literary device, it may seem that comedy is the opposite of tragedy. Though comedy and tragedy are different, they are not in opposition to each other in a way that some readers might assume. For example, most people associate humor with comedy and sadness with tragedy. However, most tragic literature features humor and comic literature often features elements of sadness. These incorporations bring balance to a literary work and the reader or audience’s expectations. In general, there is a shared experience that results from viewing or reading comedy and tragedy, though they evoke different reactions and emotions. Comedy tends to evoke laughter and a sense of likeness among humans, whereas tragedy often evokes suffering and isolation.

In terms of the protagonist of a literary work, most main characters in a tragedy are complex and flawed. This allows the reader/audience to feel compassion for the tragic hero ’s downfall or defeat. Comic protagonists tend to be less complex and less realistic, which can create an emotional barrier between the character and the reader/audience. Comedy and tragedy also differ in their plot elements. Tragic plots typically involve suffering, and a sense of inevitability, and allow for dramatic reflections. Comic plots tend to have a happy resolution that often involves characters realizing their true connections to and/or love for each other.

Elements of Comedy in Literature

Substance: It is text, words, sentences , phrases , or dialogues that are used in comedy.
Expression and Communication: It is the communicative ability of the actors and the persons in question.
Originality: It means the nature of jokes and content.
Timing and Rhythm : It is the situation and the use of jokes and fun to suit the purpose.
Setting : It means where you perform and how you perform in a specific situation.

Elements of Shakespearean Comedy

There are several elements significant in Shakespearean comedies such as given below.

Mistaken Identity and/or Misconceptions: It means mistaken identity or misconception about others such as happens in As You Like It or Twelfth Night regarding Rosalind and Viola.
Reason versus Emotion: It means using emotions or reason such as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the character of Hermia.
Fate and the Fantastical: It means using human beings as playthings such as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream where Puck and Oberon play with human beings.
Idyllic Settings: It means the use of idyllic situations such as in As You Like It where there is the Forest of Arden and the city of Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Separation and Reconciliation: It happens in Love’s Labour Lost with Berowne and Rosaline or in Much Ado About Nothing such as with Benedick and Beatrice.
Happy Endings: These situations happen in As You Like It with Duke Frederick.

Use of Comedy in Sentences

Have you seen Dany’s new car, I suppose it’s better than the tricycle he bought for his daughter.
You can show yourself out if you are done passing all the news of the day from the street.
Hey, don’t be a Debby Downer! It’s just spilled milk, we still have pizza.
There are a few people in this world, I won’t miss even a bit if they kick the bucket.
Everything will be back to normal you say… yeah when the pigs fly!

Examples of Comedy in Literature

Comedy is important as a literary device in that it typically uplifts readers through overall positivity. Writers construct comedy to amuse and entertain, thereby creating an appeal to a broad readership and/or audience. Humorous situations, word play , and other comedic devices evoke laughter which often results in an effect of happiness. Of course, comedy is a means of addressing lighthearted topics as well as more impactful and serious subjects. Ultimately, comedy allows a reader/audience the opportunity to enjoy the meaning of a literary work as well as its entertainment value.

Here are some examples of comedy in literature:

Example 1: Lysistrata by Aristophanes

What matters that I was born a woman, if I can cure your misfortunes? I pay my share of tolls and taxes, by giving men to the State. But you, you miserable greybeards, you contribute nothing to the public charges; on the contrary, you have wasted the treasure of our forefathers, as it was called, the treasure amassed in the days of the Persian Wars. You pay nothing at all in return; and into the bargain you endanger our lives and liberties by your mistakes. Have you one word to say for yourselves?… Ah! don’t irritate me, you there, or I’ll lay my slipper across your jaws; and it’s pretty heavy.

“Lysistrata” is one of the best-known ancient Greek comedies by Aristophanes, first performed in 411 BCE. This comedy is set during the Peloponnesian War and its title character decides she is tired of the men fighting. As a result, she convinces women from the Greek city-states to withhold sex from men until they end the war. In addition, as the above passage reflects, the women take over the Acropolis and the treasury so that the war cannot be funded. As the play progresses, the men become desperate for sex, begin peace talks, and agree to terms.

This plot is humorous on many levels and has resonated with readers/audiences across time. It’s a satirical piece about the foolishness of men and the cost of war. Just as Lysistrata and the other Greek women are frustrated that their men make ridiculous decisions and “mistakes” during war, Aristophanes satirizes the war between the sexes as well and the way primal urges for sex, power, and battle affect everyone.

Example 2: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

“They’re trying to kill me,” Yossarian told him calmly. “No one’s trying to kill you,” Clevinger cried. “Then why are they shooting at me?” Yossarian asked. “They’re shooting at everyone,” Clevinger answered. “They’re trying to kill everyone.” “And what difference does that make?

In his satirical novel about war, Heller utilizes subversive and dark humor to explore the psychological horrors of war and absurdity of military life. As indicated by the passage above, Yossarian attempts to make sense out of what is fundamentally illogical and Catch-22 : that only an insane person would agree to risk their life performing a mission in war, but through that recognition of the insanity of such an action, the person proves that he is sane and able to perform the mission. Heller uses comedy to demonstrate hypocrisy in the way countries and military leaders prioritize institutions over individuals. The dark humor within the novel functions to help the reader understand Heller’s satire while at the same time allowing the reader relief through laughter at such absurdity.

Example 3: An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

One of the hurdles of adulthood is when holidays become measuring sticks against which you always fall short. For children, Thanksgiving is about turkey and Christmas is about presents. Grown up, you learn that all holidays are about family and few can win there.

As a literary device, comedy is often an opportunity for writers to explore difficult subjects and present universal truths to readers. In her novel, Jones is able to communicate commonalities that readers can understand at a fundamental level but may not have considered in the way it is portrayed. In this passage, Jones describes the difference in a child’s typical approach to holidays compared to that of an adult. Readers can identify with the fact that holidays become more complex as people grow and families become more complicated. The humorous “delivery” of this fundamental truth, in a sense, allows the reader to understand its meaning and feel a sense of belonging with others who also understand.

Synonyms of Comedy

There are several synonyms for comedy. However, none of them come close to the direct meaning. Thus, every synonym is a word or even a literary device in its own right with distinct meanings and examples. Some of the nearest terms are light entertainment, comic movie, comic play, farce , burlesque , pantomime, slapstick, satire, comic opera, and sitcom.

Search Menu
Browse content in Arts and Humanities
Browse content in Archaeology
Anglo-Saxon and Medieval Archaeology
Archaeological Methodology and Techniques
Archaeology by Region
Archaeology of Religion
Archaeology of Trade and Exchange
Biblical Archaeology
Contemporary and Public Archaeology
Environmental Archaeology
Historical Archaeology
History and Theory of Archaeology
Industrial Archaeology
Landscape Archaeology
Mortuary Archaeology
Prehistoric Archaeology
Underwater Archaeology
Urban Archaeology
Zooarchaeology
Browse content in Architecture
Architectural Structure and Design
History of Architecture
Residential and Domestic Buildings
Theory of Architecture
Browse content in Art
Art Subjects and Themes
History of Art
Industrial and Commercial Art
Theory of Art
Biographical Studies
Byzantine Studies
Browse content in Classical Studies
Classical History
Classical Philosophy
Classical Mythology
Classical Literature
Classical Reception
Classical Art and Architecture
Classical Oratory and Rhetoric
Greek and Roman Papyrology
Greek and Roman Epigraphy
Greek and Roman Law
Greek and Roman Archaeology
Late Antiquity
Religion in the Ancient World
Digital Humanities
Browse content in History
Colonialism and Imperialism
Diplomatic History
Environmental History
Genealogy, Heraldry, Names, and Honours
Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing
Historical Geography
History by Period
History of Emotions
History of Agriculture
History of Education
History of Gender and Sexuality
Industrial History
Intellectual History
International History
Labour History
Legal and Constitutional History
Local and Family History
Maritime History
Military History
National Liberation and Post-Colonialism
Oral History
Political History
Public History
Regional and National History
Revolutions and Rebellions
Slavery and Abolition of Slavery
Social and Cultural History
Theory, Methods, and Historiography
Urban History
World History
Browse content in Language Teaching and Learning
Language Learning (Specific Skills)
Language Teaching Theory and Methods
Browse content in Linguistics
Applied Linguistics
Cognitive Linguistics
Computational Linguistics
Forensic Linguistics
Grammar, Syntax and Morphology
Historical and Diachronic Linguistics
History of English
Language Evolution
Language Reference
Language Acquisition
Language Variation
Language Families
Lexicography
Linguistic Anthropology
Linguistic Theories
Linguistic Typology
Phonetics and Phonology
Psycholinguistics
Sociolinguistics
Translation and Interpretation
Writing Systems
Browse content in Literature
Bibliography
Children's Literature Studies
Literary Studies (Romanticism)
Literary Studies (American)
Literary Studies (Asian)
Literary Studies (European)
Literary Studies (Eco-criticism)
Literary Studies (Modernism)
Literary Studies - World
Literary Studies (1500 to 1800)
Literary Studies (19th Century)
Literary Studies (20th Century onwards)
Literary Studies (African American Literature)
Literary Studies (British and Irish)
Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
Literary Studies (Fiction, Novelists, and Prose Writers)
Literary Studies (Gender Studies)
Literary Studies (Graphic Novels)
Literary Studies (History of the Book)
Literary Studies (Plays and Playwrights)
Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
Literary Studies (Postcolonial Literature)
Literary Studies (Queer Studies)
Literary Studies (Science Fiction)
Literary Studies (Travel Literature)
Literary Studies (War Literature)
Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
Mythology and Folklore
Shakespeare Studies and Criticism
Browse content in Media Studies
Browse content in Music
Applied Music
Dance and Music
Ethics in Music
Ethnomusicology
Gender and Sexuality in Music
Medicine and Music
Music Cultures
Music and Media
Music and Religion
Music and Culture
Music Education and Pedagogy
Music Theory and Analysis
Musical Scores, Lyrics, and Libretti
Musical Structures, Styles, and Techniques
Musicology and Music History
Performance Practice and Studies
Race and Ethnicity in Music
Sound Studies
Browse content in Performing Arts
Browse content in Philosophy
Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
Epistemology
Feminist Philosophy
History of Western Philosophy
Metaphysics
Moral Philosophy
Non-Western Philosophy
Philosophy of Language
Philosophy of Mind
Philosophy of Perception
Philosophy of Science
Philosophy of Action
Philosophy of Law
Philosophy of Religion
Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic
Practical Ethics
Social and Political Philosophy
Browse content in Religion
Biblical Studies
Christianity
East Asian Religions
History of Religion
Judaism and Jewish Studies
Qumran Studies
Religion and Education
Religion and Health
Religion and Politics
Religion and Science
Religion and Law
Religion and Art, Literature, and Music
Religious Studies
Browse content in Society and Culture
Cookery, Food, and Drink
Cultural Studies
Customs and Traditions
Ethical Issues and Debates
Hobbies, Games, Arts and Crafts
Lifestyle, Home, and Garden
Natural world, Country Life, and Pets
Popular Beliefs and Controversial Knowledge
Sports and Outdoor Recreation
Technology and Society
Travel and Holiday
Visual Culture
Browse content in Law
Arbitration
Browse content in Company and Commercial Law
Commercial Law
Company Law
Browse content in Comparative Law
Systems of Law
Competition Law
Browse content in Constitutional and Administrative Law
Government Powers
Judicial Review
Local Government Law
Military and Defence Law
Parliamentary and Legislative Practice
Construction Law
Contract Law
Browse content in Criminal Law
Criminal Procedure
Criminal Evidence Law
Sentencing and Punishment
Employment and Labour Law
Environment and Energy Law
Browse content in Financial Law
Banking Law
Insolvency Law
History of Law
Human Rights and Immigration
Intellectual Property Law
Browse content in International Law
Private International Law and Conflict of Laws
Public International Law
IT and Communications Law
Jurisprudence and Philosophy of Law
Law and Politics
Law and Society
Browse content in Legal System and Practice
Courts and Procedure
Legal Skills and Practice
Primary Sources of Law
Regulation of Legal Profession
Medical and Healthcare Law
Browse content in Policing
Criminal Investigation and Detection
Police and Security Services
Police Procedure and Law
Police Regional Planning
Browse content in Property Law
Personal Property Law
Study and Revision
Terrorism and National Security Law
Browse content in Trusts Law
Wills and Probate or Succession
Browse content in Medicine and Health
Browse content in Allied Health Professions
Arts Therapies
Clinical Science
Dietetics and Nutrition
Occupational Therapy
Operating Department Practice
Physiotherapy
Radiography
Speech and Language Therapy
Browse content in Anaesthetics
General Anaesthesia
Neuroanaesthesia
Clinical Neuroscience
Browse content in Clinical Medicine
Acute Medicine
Cardiovascular Medicine
Clinical Genetics
Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics
Dermatology
Endocrinology and Diabetes
Gastroenterology
Genito-urinary Medicine
Geriatric Medicine
Infectious Diseases
Medical Toxicology
Medical Oncology
Pain Medicine
Palliative Medicine
Rehabilitation Medicine
Respiratory Medicine and Pulmonology
Rheumatology
Sleep Medicine
Sports and Exercise Medicine
Community Medical Services
Critical Care
Emergency Medicine
Forensic Medicine
Haematology
History of Medicine
Browse content in Medical Skills
Clinical Skills
Communication Skills
Nursing Skills
Surgical Skills
Browse content in Medical Dentistry
Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
Paediatric Dentistry
Restorative Dentistry and Orthodontics
Surgical Dentistry
Medical Ethics
Medical Statistics and Methodology
Browse content in Neurology
Clinical Neurophysiology
Neuropathology
Nursing Studies
Browse content in Obstetrics and Gynaecology
Gynaecology
Occupational Medicine
Ophthalmology
Otolaryngology (ENT)
Browse content in Paediatrics
Neonatology
Browse content in Pathology
Chemical Pathology
Clinical Cytogenetics and Molecular Genetics
Histopathology
Medical Microbiology and Virology
Patient Education and Information
Browse content in Pharmacology
Psychopharmacology
Browse content in Popular Health
Caring for Others
Complementary and Alternative Medicine
Self-help and Personal Development
Browse content in Preclinical Medicine
Cell Biology
Molecular Biology and Genetics
Reproduction, Growth and Development
Primary Care
Professional Development in Medicine
Browse content in Psychiatry
Addiction Medicine
Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Forensic Psychiatry
Learning Disabilities
Old Age Psychiatry
Psychotherapy
Browse content in Public Health and Epidemiology
Epidemiology
Public Health
Browse content in Radiology
Clinical Radiology
Interventional Radiology
Nuclear Medicine
Radiation Oncology
Reproductive Medicine
Browse content in Surgery
Cardiothoracic Surgery
Gastro-intestinal and Colorectal Surgery
General Surgery
Neurosurgery
Paediatric Surgery
Peri-operative Care
Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery
Surgical Oncology
Transplant Surgery
Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery
Vascular Surgery
Browse content in Science and Mathematics
Browse content in Biological Sciences
Aquatic Biology
Biochemistry
Bioinformatics and Computational Biology
Developmental Biology
Ecology and Conservation
Evolutionary Biology
Genetics and Genomics
Microbiology
Molecular and Cell Biology
Natural History
Plant Sciences and Forestry
Research Methods in Life Sciences
Structural Biology
Systems Biology
Zoology and Animal Sciences
Browse content in Chemistry
Analytical Chemistry
Computational Chemistry
Crystallography
Environmental Chemistry
Industrial Chemistry
Inorganic Chemistry
Materials Chemistry
Medicinal Chemistry
Mineralogy and Gems
Organic Chemistry
Physical Chemistry
Polymer Chemistry
Study and Communication Skills in Chemistry
Theoretical Chemistry
Browse content in Computer Science
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Architecture and Logic Design
Game Studies
Human-Computer Interaction
Mathematical Theory of Computation
Programming Languages
Software Engineering
Systems Analysis and Design
Virtual Reality
Browse content in Computing
Business Applications
Computer Security
Computer Games
Computer Networking and Communications
Digital Lifestyle
Graphical and Digital Media Applications
Operating Systems
Browse content in Earth Sciences and Geography
Atmospheric Sciences
Environmental Geography
Geology and the Lithosphere
Maps and Map-making
Meteorology and Climatology
Oceanography and Hydrology
Palaeontology
Physical Geography and Topography
Regional Geography
Soil Science
Urban Geography
Browse content in Engineering and Technology
Agriculture and Farming
Biological Engineering
Civil Engineering, Surveying, and Building
Electronics and Communications Engineering
Energy Technology
Engineering (General)
Environmental Science, Engineering, and Technology
History of Engineering and Technology
Mechanical Engineering and Materials
Technology of Industrial Chemistry
Transport Technology and Trades
Browse content in Environmental Science
Applied Ecology (Environmental Science)
Conservation of the Environment (Environmental Science)
Environmental Sustainability
Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Environmental Science)
Management of Land and Natural Resources (Environmental Science)
Natural Disasters (Environmental Science)
Nuclear Issues (Environmental Science)
Pollution and Threats to the Environment (Environmental Science)
Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Environmental Science)
History of Science and Technology
Browse content in Materials Science
Ceramics and Glasses
Composite Materials
Metals, Alloying, and Corrosion
Nanotechnology
Browse content in Mathematics
Applied Mathematics
Biomathematics and Statistics
History of Mathematics
Mathematical Education
Mathematical Finance
Mathematical Analysis
Numerical and Computational Mathematics
Probability and Statistics
Pure Mathematics
Browse content in Neuroscience
Cognition and Behavioural Neuroscience
Development of the Nervous System
Disorders of the Nervous System
History of Neuroscience
Invertebrate Neurobiology
Molecular and Cellular Systems
Neuroendocrinology and Autonomic Nervous System
Neuroscientific Techniques
Sensory and Motor Systems
Browse content in Physics
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Atomic, Molecular, and Optical Physics
Biological and Medical Physics
Classical Mechanics
Computational Physics
Condensed Matter Physics
Electromagnetism, Optics, and Acoustics
History of Physics
Mathematical and Statistical Physics
Measurement Science
Nuclear Physics
Particles and Fields
Plasma Physics
Quantum Physics
Relativity and Gravitation
Semiconductor and Mesoscopic Physics
Browse content in Psychology
Affective Sciences
Clinical Psychology
Cognitive Psychology
Cognitive Neuroscience
Criminal and Forensic Psychology
Developmental Psychology
Educational Psychology
Evolutionary Psychology
Health Psychology
History and Systems in Psychology
Music Psychology
Neuropsychology
Organizational Psychology
Psychological Assessment and Testing
Psychology of Human-Technology Interaction
Psychology Professional Development and Training
Research Methods in Psychology
Social Psychology
Browse content in Social Sciences
Browse content in Anthropology
Anthropology of Religion
Human Evolution
Medical Anthropology
Physical Anthropology
Regional Anthropology
Social and Cultural Anthropology
Theory and Practice of Anthropology
Browse content in Business and Management
Business Ethics
Business Strategy
Business History
Business and Technology
Business and Government
Business and the Environment
Comparative Management
Corporate Governance
Corporate Social Responsibility
Entrepreneurship
Health Management
Human Resource Management
Industrial and Employment Relations
Industry Studies
Information and Communication Technologies
International Business
Knowledge Management
Management and Management Techniques
Operations Management
Organizational Theory and Behaviour
Pensions and Pension Management
Public and Nonprofit Management
Strategic Management
Supply Chain Management
Browse content in Criminology and Criminal Justice
Criminal Justice
Criminology
Forms of Crime
International and Comparative Criminology
Youth Violence and Juvenile Justice
Development Studies
Browse content in Economics
Agricultural, Environmental, and Natural Resource Economics
Asian Economics
Behavioural Finance
Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics
Econometrics and Mathematical Economics
Economic History
Economic Systems
Economic Methodology
Economic Development and Growth
Financial Markets
Financial Institutions and Services
General Economics and Teaching
Health, Education, and Welfare
History of Economic Thought
International Economics
Labour and Demographic Economics
Law and Economics
Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
Microeconomics
Public Economics
Urban, Rural, and Regional Economics
Welfare Economics
Browse content in Education
Adult Education and Continuous Learning
Care and Counselling of Students
Early Childhood and Elementary Education
Educational Equipment and Technology
Educational Strategies and Policy
Higher and Further Education
Organization and Management of Education
Philosophy and Theory of Education
Schools Studies
Secondary Education
Teaching of a Specific Subject
Teaching of Specific Groups and Special Educational Needs
Teaching Skills and Techniques
Browse content in Environment
Applied Ecology (Social Science)
Climate Change
Conservation of the Environment (Social Science)
Environmentalist Thought and Ideology (Social Science)
Natural Disasters (Environment)
Social Impact of Environmental Issues (Social Science)
Browse content in Human Geography
Cultural Geography
Economic Geography
Political Geography
Browse content in Interdisciplinary Studies
Communication Studies
Museums, Libraries, and Information Sciences
Browse content in Politics
African Politics
Asian Politics
Chinese Politics
Comparative Politics
Conflict Politics
Elections and Electoral Studies
Environmental Politics
European Union
Foreign Policy
Gender and Politics
Human Rights and Politics
Indian Politics
International Relations
International Organization (Politics)
International Political Economy
Irish Politics
Latin American Politics
Middle Eastern Politics
Political Behaviour
Political Economy
Political Institutions
Political Methodology
Political Communication
Political Philosophy
Political Sociology
Political Theory
Politics and Law
Public Policy
Public Administration
Quantitative Political Methodology
Regional Political Studies
Russian Politics
Security Studies
State and Local Government
UK Politics
US Politics
Browse content in Regional and Area Studies
African Studies
Asian Studies
East Asian Studies
Japanese Studies
Latin American Studies
Middle Eastern Studies
Native American Studies
Scottish Studies
Browse content in Research and Information
Research Methods
Browse content in Social Work
Addictions and Substance Misuse
Adoption and Fostering
Care of the Elderly
Child and Adolescent Social Work
Couple and Family Social Work
Developmental and Physical Disabilities Social Work
Direct Practice and Clinical Social Work
Emergency Services
Human Behaviour and the Social Environment
International and Global Issues in Social Work
Mental and Behavioural Health
Social Justice and Human Rights
Social Policy and Advocacy
Social Work and Crime and Justice
Social Work Macro Practice
Social Work Practice Settings
Social Work Research and Evidence-based Practice
Welfare and Benefit Systems
Browse content in Sociology
Childhood Studies
Community Development
Comparative and Historical Sociology
Economic Sociology
Gender and Sexuality
Gerontology and Ageing
Health, Illness, and Medicine
Marriage and the Family
Migration Studies
Occupations, Professions, and Work
Organizations
Population and Demography
Race and Ethnicity
Social Theory
Social Movements and Social Change
Social Research and Statistics
Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
Sociology of Religion
Sociology of Education
Sport and Leisure
Urban and Rural Studies
Browse content in Warfare and Defence
Defence Strategy, Planning, and Research
Land Forces and Warfare
Military Administration
Military Life and Institutions
Naval Forces and Warfare
Other Warfare and Defence Issues
Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution
Weapons and Equipment

The Linguistics of Humor: An Introduction

< Previous
Next chapter >

14 Humor in literature

Published: June 2020
Cite Icon Cite
Permissions Icon Permissions

This chapter considers applications of the linguistics of humor to literary texts. It considers in particular applications of the Semantic-Script Theory of Humor (SSTH) and the General theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH), under two approaches: the expansionist approach, which applies the SSTH as is to larger texts, and the revisionist approach, which introduces a set of other tools for the analysis of longer texts, among which is the distinction between punch lines and jab lines. Other approaches are also considered including narratological, stylistic, and register humor.

Signed in as

Institutional accounts.

GoogleCrawler [DO NOT DELETE]
Google Scholar Indexing

Personal account

Sign in with email/username & password
Get email alerts
Save searches
Purchase content
Activate your purchase/trial code

Institutional access

Sign in with a library card Sign in with username/password Recommend to your librarian
Institutional account management
Get help with access

Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways:

IP based access

Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account.

Sign in through your institution

Choose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Shibboleth/Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institutionâ€™s website and Oxford Academic.

Click Sign in through your institution.
Select your institution from the list provided, which will take you to your institution's website to sign in.
When on the institution site, please use the credentials provided by your institution. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.
Following successful sign in, you will be returned to Oxford Academic.

If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institutionâ€™s website, please contact your librarian or administrator.

Sign in with a library card

Enter your library card number to sign in. If you cannot sign in, please contact your librarian.

Society Members

Society member access to a journal is achieved in one of the following ways:

Sign in through society site

Many societies offer single sign-on between the society website and Oxford Academic. If you see â€˜Sign in through society siteâ€™ in the sign in pane within a journal:

Click Sign in through society site.
When on the society site, please use the credentials provided by that society. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.

If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society.

Sign in using a personal account

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below.

A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions.

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members.

Viewing your signed in accounts

Click the account icon in the top right to:

View your signed in personal account and access account management features.
View the institutional accounts that are providing access.

Signed in but can't access content

Oxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. The institutional subscription may not cover the content that you are trying to access. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian.

For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.

Our books are available by subscription or purchase to libraries and institutions.

About Oxford Academic
Publish journals with us
University press partners
What we publish
New features
Open access
Rights and permissions
Accessibility
Advertising
Media enquiries
Oxford University Press
Oxford Languages
University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
Cookie settings
Cookie policy
Privacy policy
Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

What is Satire? Definition, Usage, and Literary Examples

Satire definition.

Satire (SAH-tie-urr) uses humor and exaggeration to criticize something or someone, typically a public figure, social norm, or government policy. The term can describe both the genre of satirical writing and the literary device of satire, which a writer might utilize in a particular scene or passage of a work that isn’t a wholly satirical piece.

Most satires aim to make the reader laugh at the foolishness and absurdities of human nature, but they also possess an undercurrent of seriousness by shedding light on important social issues or commenting on corruption, hypocrisy, or incompetence. Fictional characters and events in satires are often allegorical , symbolizing real people or incidents as a way of critiquing behavior or policies.

The word satire comes from the Latin satira , meaning “poetic medley,” which derives from the earlier Latin term lanx satura , meaning “a full dish of different fruits.”

The Elements of Satire:

Writers frequently use other literary devices to satirize their subjects.

Anachronisms

An anachronism is a thing appearing in a narrative that belongs to an era different from the story’s setting . It can depict how out of touch a satirical character is. Mark Twain’s novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is a satire of feudalism and the monarchy, and it chronicles the adventures of a 19th-century man named Hank as he time-travels to the sixth century. Hank regularly manipulates those he encounters with anachronistic items he brings from his own day and time, like fireworks.

A satirist employs irony to express something different—and often contradictory—to what is actually happening or being said. For example, Jane Austen opens Pride and Prejudice with the line “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” As events unfold, however, virtually none of the wealthy male characters wants to marry, thus adding an element of situational irony to the story.

Juxtaposition

A juxtaposition places two things side by side to show similarities and differences. Satiric juxtaposition occurs in Ian Fleming’s James Bond novel Moonraker . Bond comes across a Shell Gas billboard that’s blinking the message “SUMMER SHELL is HERE.” From where Bond stands, however, tree branches obscure parts of the sign, and all he can see is “HELL is HERE.”

Overstatement

An overstatement exaggerates the significance of something, usually to illustrate a character’s tenuous understanding of reality. Humorist Dave Barry uses overstatement in his essay “Revenge of the Pork Person” to show how some men have an inflated sense of their own attractiveness:

A man can have a belly you could house commercial aircraft in and a grand total of eight greasy strands of hair, which he grows real long and combs across the top of his head so that he looks, when viewed from above, like an egg in the grasp of a giant spider, plus this man can have B.O. to the point where he interferes with radio transmissions, and he will still be convinced that, in terms of attractiveness, he is borderline Don Johnsons.

Parody in satire imitates another literary style for comedic purposes, resulting in an exaggeration of storytelling technique. Satire and parody are often confused for one another, but parodies are generally more direct, have a lighter tone without serious undercurrents, and mimic the voice of their targets. For example, Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies mimics Jane Austen’s literary style to satirically mash up a romantic novel of manners and a zombie thriller. Consider the opening line of the book, a direct parody of Austen’s opening Pride and Prejudice line: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.”

Understatement

An understatement is the opposite of an overstatement. It minimizes the significance of something to portray a character’s cluelessness or disconnect from reality. J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye contains many satiric elements, including understatement. At one point in the story, Holden Caulfield says, “I have to have this operation. It isn’t very serious. I have this tiny little tumor on the brain.”

The Types of Satire

There are three primary types of satire: Menippean, Horatian, and Juvenalian.

Menippean Satire

The oldest type of satire, Menippean is also one of the least common. It gets its name from Ancient Greek polemicist Menippus, who pioneered a sort of indirect satire. This approach satirizes opinions and attitudes rather than people or institutions. Still, Menippean satires can be biting and harsh in their criticism.

Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is a classic Menippean satire, chronicling the travels of an everyman character placed in increasingly unusual situations. These situations target human nature and various aspects of 18th-century life, including economics, politics, science, and society—but not specific individuals.

Horatian Satire

Horatian satire is a much lighter type, inspired by the works of ancient Roman poet Horace. A Horatian satirist is generally more interested in eliciting laughs rather than making bold commentary or stinging criticism. This humor is achieved by targeting flaws and weaknesses common in humanity.

The Devil’s Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce is a Horatian satire presented as a lexicon of alternative definitions to everyday words. These definitions underscore the foibles and absurdities of human nature. For example, Bierce defines love as “a temporary insanity curable by marriage.”

Juvenalian Satire

Named for the Roman poet Juvenal, Juvenalian satire leans toward the dark side rather than the overtly humorous. It takes aim at public figures, institutions, and social norms, often with pronounced sting.

Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club is a contemporary Juvenalian satire, set in an underground club where members savagely fight one another as a form of venting their frustrations in a misguided idea of therapy. It is a scathing indictment of toxic gender roles and consumer culture.

The Function of Satire

Satire is meant to critique people, power, and society in an entertaining way. Satirists set out to expose the flaws in current systems or ways of thinking in hopes of informing, educating, and improving humanity. Humor is a central component of many satires, but comedy is not the sole purpose of the satire. It’s simply a tool through which the writer can express their criticisms in ways that readers can appreciate. A satirist may make readers laugh, but they also want to make them think. Depending on the subject, the author may set out to change minds, reveal corruption, or illuminate little-known injustices in a society.

Satire and Other Devices of Critique

Satire vs. Sarcasm

Both satire and sarcasm contain some form of critique and, often, humor, but that’s where their similarities end. Sarcasm uses insincere language to criticize someone or something, while satire uses exaggeration to expose flaws or inequities. That exaggeration often has some truth to it, while sarcasm’s insincerity comes from a place of intentional deceit. The result is that sarcasm tends to be taunting and mean-spirited rather than constructive.

A satirical writer might include sarcastic elements in their writing, but this usually isn’t the tone of the entire work. A long sarcastic screed wouldn’t be entertaining to read, as it would come off as sharp and hurtful with little helpful commentary.

Satire vs. Parody

The line between these terms is a bit murkier. The goal of a parody is, first and foremost, entertainment. It imitates the writing style of another work for comedic effect, typically by applying the style to a ridiculous or opposing subject. These elements separate it from satire, which doesn’t encompass any specific type of writing style. Additionally, because satire is meant to say something meaningful about its subjects and what they represent, it makes the satirist’s goal somewhat larger than that of the parodist.

Goodnight iPad by Ann Droyd—a bit of word play in the author pseudonym—is a parody of the classic children’s book Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown. Written in the same simple language but going through all the different technologies holding people’s attention, Goodnight iPad is a silly sendup of Brown’s story.

Compare that to, say, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , a Menippean satire written in its own style that follows a girl down a rabbit hole and the oddball characters she encounters on the other side. Rather than spoof another story or style, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is an original tale that gently ridicules upper-class intellectualism—albeit it through zany anthropomorphic characters.

Satire in Popular Culture

Many pop culture touchstones feature abundant use of satire. The sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live is perhaps the most instantly recognizable. Since its inception in 1975, the series has often satirized people in positions of power, human idiosyncrasies, social trends, and political issues. Similarly, The Simpsons is an animated satire of the typical American family, and episodes have satirized everything from politics and religion to pop culture and consumerism.

Satirical films include Blazing Saddles , which mocks the western genre; Zoolander , which targets the fashion industry; and Borat , which lampoons American exceptionalism.

Satire and Freedom of Speech

The First Amendment of the United States Constitution’s Bill of Rights protects satire as a form of free speech. However, other legal issues can come into play with the device and genre, such as copyright infringement, slander or libel, and emotional distress. The subject of the satiric work, if said work is clearly reminiscent of a real person, might sue the author for any one of these perceived infractions. The law, though, often comes down on the side of free speech.

For instance, author Alice Randall wrote a 2001 satire of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind called The Wind Done Gone . The storyline critiqued and reimagined Mitchell’s offensive depictions of African Americans in her Reconstructionist-era classic, and the Mitchell estate sued Randall. While the two parties eventually settled the case, a court found that Randall didn’t violate any existing copyright laws and that fair use policies protected The Wind Done Gone .

Satire itself is a form of criticism, but it is frequently the subject of criticism. People don’t like to have their weaknesses amplified and exposed, and this is one of the biggest objectives of any good satire. Satirical writers and performers often find themselves the targets of disparagement or dismissal by those they are satirizing.

Notable Satirists

Djuna Barnes, Ladies Almanack
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
Mary Dunn, The World of Lady Addle
Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho
Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Fran Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life , Social Studies
George Orwell, Animal Farm
Dorothy Parker, “Résumé,” “Comment,” “A Telephone Call”
Alexander Pope, “The Rape of the Lock”
Alice Randall, The Wind Done Gone
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Voltaire, Candide

Examples of Satire in Literature

1. Dorothy Parker, “A Telephone Call”

Parker’s short story is a satirical take on love and dating. It reads as an urgent plea, with the narrator, presumably a young woman, revealing her insecurities as she begs God for her boyfriend to call her. Her boyfriend said he would call at 5:00, but it’s now 7:10 and she hasn’t heard from him. Sitting, starting at the phone, the narrator slowly goes into panic mode and reviews virtually every second of her last encounter with her boyfriend, trying to see if she missed some sign or indicator that he was no longer interested in her. She vacillates between declaring her love for him and never wanting to see him again, but by the end, she’s bargaining with God to make her boyfriend call her.

2. Joseph Heller, Catch-22

Catch-22 takes place during World War II and charts the exploits of American antihero Captain John Yossarian, a bombardier in the Air Force. Feeling allegiance to neither nation nor principles, Yossarian spends much of the war angry that his life is constantly in danger. He fakes multiple illnesses to try to avoid battle, and the memory of a dead fellow soldier, Snowden, haunts him. Situations, ranging from the heartbreaking to the ludicrous, challenge Yossarian at every turn until he finally refuses to fly any further missions. The novel satirizes war, religion, bureaucracy, idealism, human suffering, and wartime politics.

3. Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

Ellis’s novel is set in 1980s New York City, where investment banker Patrick Bateman lives a secret life as a serial killer. He moves seamlessly between the daily routine of work, nightclubbing, snorting cocaine, spending time with his fiancée, and committing murders in the dark of night. Bateman’s grip on reality erodes as the story progresses, but he ultimately takes no responsibility for the killings, is never held accountable, and ends up back with his friends in a Manhattan nightclub. Through Bateman, Ellis satirizes yuppie culture, Wall Street ruthlessness, and ‘80s-era excess.

Further Resources on Satire

Since 1925, The New Yorker has featured satire by some of the world’s preeminent writers.

The Onion isn’t as highbrow as The New Yorker , but its raucous humor illuminates important social and political issues.

Thanet Writers delves deeper into the three types of satire .

What are the limits of satire ? The New York Review of Books explores the answer.

Goodreads has a comprehensive list of popular satires .

Related Terms

Non Sequitur
Perspective
Point of View

Humour in Children’s and Young Adult Literature: The Work of Gilles Bachelet

Original Paper
Open access
Published: 16 September 2021
Volume 54 , pages 73–96, ( 2023 )

Cite this article

You have full access to this open access article

Diana Muela Bermejo ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6162-6603 1

4101 Accesses

1 Altmetric

Explore all metrics

This article has been updated

The work of the French illustrator and writer Gilles Bachelet has been recognised through numerous awards, but he is not yet sufficiently well known in the critical community. In this article, the multilevel humour that constructs his work is studied, both from an iconic and a textual perspective, as well as the situational humour and the humour of characters that emerge through metafiction, self-referentiality and heteroreferentiality. For this purpose, the theories of humour in children’s literature and the classifications of types of humour offered by different researchers are used as a starting point, and a mixed model of analysis applicable to Bachelet’s work as a whole is proposed. In addition, the analysis of each of the picturebooks is based on the most recent studies on the components of the current picturebook, such as its narrative construction, type of reading, characteristics and organisation of text and image. In this way, the postmodern features of Gilles Bachelet's works, which make him a crossover author, are revealed.

The sociocognitive approach in critical discourse studies and the phenomenological sociology of knowledge: intersections

Daniel Gyollai

Teaching creative writing in primary schools: a systematic review of the literature through the lens of reflexivity

Georgina Barton, Maryam Khosronejad, … Debra Myhill

Critical Discourse Analysis: Definition, Approaches, Relation to Pragmatics, Critique, and Trends

Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.

In recent decades, several researchers have claimed the presence of humour as one of the main mechanisms of children’s and young adult literature which, however, had not received sufficient attention from the critical community (James, 1986 ; Cross, 2011 ). Cross distinguished three main theories of humour (physiological, psychological and social): ‘relief’ theories (which report the benefits of laughter), ‘incongruity’ theories of humour (the subject’s perception of something unexpected or inappropriate) and ‘superiority’ theories (which analyse the pleasure of the cognitive domain of the joke). As far as theories of humour related to developmental psychology are concerned, several researchers apply Piaget’s stages to the understanding of humour or reflect on children’s processes of detecting different humour strategies (notably McGhee, 1977 and Arter, 2019 ; also Ackerman, 1983 and Kummerling Meibauer, 1999 , Pexman et al., 2005 ; among others).

However, in this study, I will focus on analysis of the humour strategies present in children’s books, which classify types of humour and propose different models of categorisation. In this sense, three types of research can be distinguished.

Firstly, there are studies that analyse a specific corpus of children’s books on the basis of theories of humour from a general perspective. In the 1980s, several proposals emerged that tried to anticipate readers’ responses to humour children’s books (Harrison, 1986 ) or to classify the types of humour present in children’s literature, according to characters, situations or discourses (Beckman, 1984 ; Cashore, 2003 ). Incongruity emerged as one of the main strategies (Vliet, 1986 ) that continues to be an important focus of analysis today (Marimón Llorca, 2017 ; Ruiz-Gurillo, 2017 ; Orozco López, 2020 ). More recently, studies such as Mallan ( 1993 ) have offered a general perspective on humour in children’s literature and its possible applications in the classroom. On the other hand, Dueñas ( 2011 ) and Serafini ( 2015 ) have applied theories on humour to some of the main cultural references in their language. In line with these studies, the different types of humour in children’s books that these authors use as a starting point will be applied to the analysis of Gilles Bachelet’s work. Beckman ( 1984 ) proposes three: humour characters, humour situations and humour discourse; as opposed to the classic irony/parody/satire tripartition (Orozco López, 2020 ), which is based on the consolidated study by Hutcheon ( 1984 ).

Secondly, in the first decades of the twenty-first century, studies on humour in children’s literature began to address more specific aspects. These studies focused on one type of humour and applied it to a particular corpus of children’s books, abandoning the previous general perspective. McGillis ( 2009 ) deals with body humour as one of the most important resources in children’s literature, including scatology. Beckett ( 2001 ) and Marín Ortiz (2002 and 2004) study parody in the work of different authors, either from the metafictional presence of painting and art or from the use of nonsense, satire and scatology. The analysis of parody will be especially important in this study, since Bachelet uses it as a humour-homage to works of art, historical or metaliterary characters. The scatological content that these researchers analyse is based on the Bakhtinian distinction, already pointed out by Cross ( 2011 ), between the "high" and the "low" applied to children’s literature (the low degrades the individual to his contact with the earth and with the lower part of his body—belly, genitals—as opposed to the "high" which elevates him to spirituality and reason. The contemporary grotesque, however, loses the regenerative character it possessed in the Middle Ages, and this is how Bachelet will apply it in his work.

Thirdly, Karababa and Alamdar ( 2017 ) identify the resources of humour in the Saftirik series and, from these, draw a model for categorising humour that encompasses three types: visual resources (physical deformation, wild exaggeration, exaggerated reduction, disguise, etc.), verbal resources (nonsense words, denominations different from the original, etc.) and situational resources (surprise situation, blunders, role reversal, etc.). Van Niekerk and Van der Westhuizen ( 2004 ) had proposed a model to study humour in children’s stories a priori, i.e., aimed at testing its validity with any work and not in an inductive way. These researchers provide a very detailed subcategorisation, which includes nineteen subcategories of situational humour, twenty-five of verbal humour and a more general view of humour based on typographies and illustrations.

These studies on humour in children’s literature form the first pillar on which the analysis of Gilles Bachelet’s work is based. The second pillar is made up of the main studies on picturebooks and crossover literature, which place him within the framework of postmodern children’s and young adult literature. Thus, insights by Nikolajeva and Scott ( 2006 ), Sipe ( 1998 ), Sipe and Pantaleo ( 2008 ), Van der Linden ( 2007 ) and Beckett ( 2012 ) aid analysis of Gilles Bachelet’s humour according to its internal and external aspects.

Therefore, on the basis of these multiple studies of humour in children’s literature, a mixed system of analysis of the humour in Gilles Bachelet’s work is proposed, addressing four main blocks: (a) multilevel visual humour and textual humour: metafiction and self-referentiality (b) situational humour: humour transgressions of everyday life and incongruity, (c) character humour: parody and children’s metafiction and (d) characteristics of the postmodern picturebook.

Gilles Bachelet in Current Children’s and Young Adult Literature

Over the last fifteen years, Gilles Bachelet has become one of the leading authors on the international children’s literature scene. His greatest success, Mon chat, le plus bête du monde , was published in 2004 and received the Baobab Picturebook Award that year. From then until the present, he began a series that consolidated his reputation as a major author and illustrator of children’s picturebooks (the most recent, Résidence Beau Séjour , in 2020), which he combines with his work as a professor of illustration at the Cambrai School of Art. With a production of children’s picturebooks that now exceeds ten, in recent decades specialised research on his work has begun to be published, from memoirs and degree theses to exhibition catalogues and magazine issues devoted entirely to his personality and publications. The quality of his picturebooks has earned him a French nomination for the Hans Christian Andersen Prize in the field of illustration in 2022. However, there is still a significant gap between the number of readers, reprints and translations of Gilles Bachelet’s picturebooks and the few analyses of his narrative and iconic strategies within the framework of post-modern children’s and young adult literature.

Among the few publications on Bachelet’s work that can be found, most of them focus on the study of his picturebooks in relation to his biography or on a brief chronological tour through each of his picturebooks (Kotwica, 2013 ). However, more recent studies point to Bachelet’s place in children’s literature, mainly through his humorous strategies (Van der Linden, 2017 ; Varrà, 2017 ) and the multilevel references to cultural, metaliterary or self-referential elements that the French author inserts in his picturebooks (Bruel, 2018 ; Cabrera, 2012 ; Vandevooghel, 2014 ; Stocchino, 2012 ). Empirical studies are practically non-existent, with some exceptions on reader responses to the humour of his picturebooks in early childhood education (Rérat and Monnier, 2010 ). A fundamental idea about Bachelet’s work has already been noted and needs further study: the relationship between the French author’s publications on social networks and his picturebooks generates digital epitexts that extend the reading of his works (Kotwica, 2013 ).

Finally, the interviews with the author that several magazines offer (Lallouet et al., 2018 ; Lallouet, 2018 ; Andrieux, 2018 ) should be taken into account, where he responds to the most important aspects of his work, since they explain the intentions regarding the use of metafiction, self-referentiality or the iconic and literary sources from which Bachelet draws (Kotwica, 2013 ; Hamelin, 2017 ).

Humour in the Work of Gilles Bachelet

This study aims to achieve two objectives. The first is to identify the strategies of humour in Gilles Bachelet’s picturebooks in the context of children’s and young adult literature. This objective derives from the first hypothesis: comic textual and iconic characteristics that constitute the main value of Gilles Bachelet’s work and give it its originality in the context of the postmodern picturebook. In turn, this objective is broken down into two micro-objectives: (a) to apply a mixed model of analysis to Bachelet’s humour, based on the proposals validated by current children’s literary criticism, and (b) to verify which principles of the postmodern picturebook appear in his works. A second objective is to pave the way for future empirical studies on the reception of Bachelet’s multilevel humour in primary school classrooms, perhaps making use of the analysis as a theoretical reference. Thus, the second hypothesis is that the multilevel humour of Gilles Bachelet’s work makes him a paradigmatic author of the transversal picturebook.

Multi-level Visual Humour and Textual Humour. Metafiction and Self-referentiality

Gilles Bachelet’s work is characterised, firstly, by the anthropomorphisation of flat, static animals and objects (Nikolajeva and Scott, 2006 ). The reason he chooses these main characters for his stories, as he argues in interviews (Ville de Ploufragan official, 2019 ), stems from his personal preference for giving expressiveness to the animals he is obsessed with drawing, an effect he does not achieve with the same intensity through humans (Ville de Ploufragan officiel, 2019 ). Rudd ( 2009 ) suggests that, in the process of anthropomorphising animals and objects in children’s literature, there is an impulse to control both human and animal behaviour and, at the same time, a need on the part of the author to create distance from lesser beings, closer to nature (children, animals) than the "civilised" (adults). This impulse, however, seems to hint at the anxieties of the writers who try to distance themselves from them. In Bachelet’s case, the distance produced by the anthropomorphisation of an animal or an object allows him to recreate situations that would lose their comicality from a human perspective. In Le singe à Buffon , for example, Bachelet narrates the tensions of the everyday life of a father—the character of the Count of Buffon- who is given a monkey to live with him. The monkey is the animalisation of his son Arthur and the Count is a parody of Bachelet himself, as he explains in his interviews. The picturebook is constructed by linking a series of scenes, all of which consist of the monkey’s mischief in his house over the course of a day. The unit of time, kept at twenty-four hours, recreates a father’s routine and the animal character’s ‘low’ drives (doing his business, drinking alcohol, awakening the sexual instinct, etc.). In this case, focalisation is internal as it presents the vision of the father-author (Nikolajeva and Scott, 2006 ) transmitted through the “collaborative” relationship (Van der Linden, 2007 ) of the images with the text:

As can be seen in these three scenes (Images 1 , 2 and 3 ) the arrangement of text and image in the picturebook is linear: text on one side of the double page (recto or verso, depending on the case) and image on the symmetrical one, creating a simultaneous succession that represents moments that are disjunct in time but are perceived in a specific order (Nikolajeva and Scott, 2006 ). Humour is thus created on several levels: a first literal level in which the monkey’s antics are observed with amusement and a second, more complex level, which plays with the double meanings of the expressions. The first level is in line with the more frequent anthropomorphisation of children’s picturebooks characters described by Mallan ( 1993 ) as the architects of confronting established order. On the second level, iconic-textual humour intervenes: the literalness of the sentence (“toucher avec les yeux”, for example) is complemented by the information provided by the image (“toucher avec les mains”) or requires decoding the image in order to understand the meaning of the text (“être mauvais joueur” means losing the well-known game “Je te tiens, tu me tiens par la barbichette” which consists of slapping the person who laughs first). On a third, adult level, is the empathy produced by the humorous situation of the routine of a new father, as each scene is a cliché about children’s education (having a bad temper, not touching things with your hands, never wanting to go to bed, etc.). Through this level of humour, the author broadens his readership, as he appeals not only to the feelings of children but also to the empathy of adults, who identify with the character of the Count.

Bachelet ( 2002 ), pp. 5–6

Bachelet ( 2002 ), pp. 15–16

Bachelet ( 2002 ), pp. 19–20

In the case of Bachelet’s famous Mon chat trilogy, the multilevel humour develops in a similar way, except that the arrangement of text and image varies slightly (recto and verso illustrated with the text placed in the footer with a white background). In this case, the first level of humour is the perception of the anthropomorphised animal: an elephant that exceeds the size of its belongings based on the concept of “physical exaggeration” (Karababa and Alamdar, 2017 ) and human facial expression of the animal—anger, apathy, frustration, satisfaction, etc.—(Images 4 and 5 ); also appealing to the culture of “the low” already described by Bakhtin and taken up by Cross ( 2011 ):

Image 4. Bachelet ( 2004 ), p. 8. Image 5. Bachelet ( 2004 ), p. 1

Bachelet ( 2004 ), pp. 14–15

The second level of humour is determined by the text-image relationship. In this case, it is articulated in terms of “collaboration” and sometimes “disjunction” (Van der Linden, 2007 ). Beckett ( 2012 ) analyses this picturebook as one of the examples of crossover literature that introduces pictorial parody and, what is particularly interesting in this section, reflects the contradiction between the meaning of what is narrated and what is represented visually (Image 6 ):

Comicality arises precisely from the situational absurdity caused by the protagonist’s confused identity and his excessive size compared to that of a cat. This is the narrative core of the work and what researchers have valued most positively about it as a “texte résistant” (Tauveron, 1999; in Rérat and Monnier, 2010 ) in that it encourages multiple readings, does not exhaust itself in the first linear approach and encourages interaction between pupils as they jointly face the decoding of the picturebook (Rérat and Monnier, 2010 ).

The third level emerges from metafiction and self-referentiality as part of the construction of the picturebook’s meaning. Bachelet inserts himself into the fiction again as the “father” of the animal main character and, at the same time, introduces metafictional references to his work and that of other well-known painters or illustrators (Images 7 and 8 ):

Bachelet ( 2004 ), pp. 16–17

Bachelet ( 2004 ), pp. 18–19

In Images 7 and 8 , books about the illustrators Bachelet considers most influential in his work (Rockwell, Brunhoff, Rabier, etc.) can be seen stacked on the floor, allowing the adult reader to discover incidental detail into Bachelet’s identity and self-concept as a children’s illustrator.

The picturebooks Le chevalier de ventre-à-terre and Résidence Beau Séjou r maintain this same scheme of multilevel visual and textual humour with some nuances. In Le chevalier de ventre-à-terre the layout is similar. Bachelet combines the spread with sequences of images that bring movement to the pause produced by the reading of this double page (Nikolajeva and Scott, 2006 ). The second level of humour is constituted by the disjunctive relationship between text and image, while the first level is determined by the anthropomorphisation of the protagonist procrastinating snail (Image 9 ):

Bachelet ( 2014 ), pp. 4–5

In this case, the third level is determined by the metafictional references to the universe of children’s literature, which Bachelet had already explored in other works, such as Les coulisses du livre jeunesse or Il n’y a pas d’autruches dans les contes de fées . In Le chevalier de ventre-à-terre the snail knight rescues a Rapunzel who has just fallen from the tower, guides Little Red Riding Hood on her way and turns a mushroom into Trajan’s column. The adult reader finds references to contemporary cinema—far removed from a child’s world, one imagines—in the chess game where the snail plays with death, reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (Image 10 ). On the other hand, self-referentiality once again articulates this third level, since Bachelet becomes the snail by recording the reason that led him to compose the work: the publisher of Seuil Jeunesse requested a new picturebook from the French author after the success of Madame le Lapin Blanc , but he did not finish illustrating it because he was absorbed by his publications on social networks. Reading Image 11 , where this biographical component is reflected, demands a level of reading of the comedy that goes beyond the literalness of the image:

Bachelet ( 2014 ), pp. 12–13

Bachelet ( 2014 ), pp. 6–7

The same three levels of humour can be found in the best-known spread of Résidence Beau Séjour (Image 12 ):

Bachelet ( 2020 ), pp. 5–6

In this case, pause—as a pattern of duration when reading of the image (Nikolajeva and Scott, 2006 )—is essential to understand the three levels of humour, which appeal to readers of different ages: the unicorn as a fetish object of current fashion versus the defenestrated stuffed animals of children’s rooms (Pikachu, penguins with whistles, dolphins, etc.). Once again, in this picturebook, the anthropomorphised fantastic animal (unicorn) produces the first level of humour: he goes to the beauty salon, posts for his social networks on a float in the swimming pool, bakes cakes, etc., and the second level is seen through the contradictory relationship between text and image. Bachelet’s evolution in this picturebook is not so much in the humour as in the narrative component, which moves from a succession of everyday scenes to a story based on the Poe’s “final effect” tradition, which takes up self-referentiality: the author who is done with drawing animals that generate success and becomes a mutilator of animal species (Image 13 ):

Bachelet ( 2020 ), p. 27

We return here to Rudd’s ( 2009 ) idea set out at the beginning of this section: that anthropomorphisation helps to express more easily the concerns and anxieties of the author himself, who explicitly expresses that the text is an autonomous entity with its own identity, not just a fictional construct (Sipe and MacGuire, 1996, in Sipe and Pantaleo, 2007).

Situational Humour. Humour Transgression of Everyday Life and Incongruity

The second type of humour that appears in Bachelet’s work is situational humour, a subcategory included in many models of child humour analysis (Van Niekerk and Van der Westhulzen 2004 ; Karababa and Alamdar, 2017 ). Van Niekerk and Van der Westhulzen ( 2004 ) develop situational humour in more detail, with nineteen subcategories found in their corpus that are partially exportable to other books. I will focus on three of them: incongruity, situational irony and awkwardness. Cross ( 2011 ) describes different modes of situational humour, such as the “humour transgression of everyday life” (p. 25) transferred to children’s picturebooks. In particular, this author explains the evolution in children’s literature from moralising works that were approached from everyday humour to others that dealt with "serious themes, often encompassing wider social concerns, in which humour is also used to temper or mask the message in some way" (Cross, 2011 , p. 25).

Starting from this idea, I suggest that the humour in Bachelet’s work cannot be classified according to watertight categories, but there is a very clear continuity between some types of humour and others, as they often overlap to generate a unified comedy. One of the clearest examples of situational humour is in Une histoire d’amour , starring a pair of dishwashing gloves. Once again, Bachelet resorts to anthropomorphisation, in this case of objects, and his great achievement is the movement and expressiveness he gives to each of them. The picturebook narrates a love story between the two main characters (Georges and Josette) from the time they meet until Georges’ decease. The situational humour is generated precisely by dealing with serious themes attenuated through visual humour (Images 14 , 15 and 16 ):

Image 14. Bachelet, 2017 , p. 22. Image 15. Bachelet, 2017 , p. 23. Image 16. Bachelet, 2017 , p. 27

In Image 14 , Bachelet narrates the moment when Georges commits an infidelity and is attacked by his wife, who learns what has happened. Image 15 shows a winter in which Josette falls seriously ill, and Image 16 closes the love story with Georges’ decease. As can be seen, both visual humour and incongruity attenuate the gravity of the situations addressed: the thimble/pot with which Josette tries to attack Georges and the kiss marks on Georges’ neck (stamped seals) detract from the seriousness of the infidelity and provoke laughter; Josette’s bed/can of anchovies and the coffin/pencil case propped up with books that contains Georges add amusement to the sadness of the scene’s content. Here, the text maintains the gravity of the situation: “Et puis un jour…. Georges mourut. Josette se retrouva seule” (‘And then one day…. Georges died. Josette found herself alone’) (Bachelet, 2017 , p. 27) and the situational humour is sustained solely by the visual humour.

The picturebook Xox et Oxo maintains the situational humour that attenuates the tension provoked by the serious themes, but in a different way from the previous one. In this case, Bachelet introduces his critical stance on the question of the usefulness of art: two extraterrestrials living on planet Ö become sculptors thanks to a 3D photocopier that allows them to reproduce terrestrial objects they see on television. The final reflection on the usefulness of art, the central idea of the picturebook, is presented from a humour perspective with the introduction of objects converted into the universe of the planet Ö and with the transcription of its language, changing the spelling s for x (Images 17 and 18 ):

Image 17. Bachelet, 2018 , pp. 25–26 Image 18. Bachelet, 2018 , p. 27

Incongruity acts through the introduction of an absurd context in otherwise conventional circumstances (Mallan, 1993 ; Cross, 2011 ): the conversion of the most commonly used objects in human routines into the alien world generates strangeness and astonishment and, with it, amusement through the awareness of this absurdity (Arter, 2019 ). Again, this learning of incongruity is related to the theory of the superiority of children’s humour described by Cross ( 2011 ).

However, the most interesting example of situational humour in Bachelet’s work is to be found in one of his most critically acclaimed works: Madame le Lapin Blanc . In it, he pays homage to Alice’s universe by responding to the White Rabbit's “I’m late” from a feminist perspective, even though Bachelet acknowledged in several interviews (Hamelin, 2017 ; Ville de Ploufragan officiel, 2019 ) that his aim was not to reinterpret Alice in a gendered way. The focus is internal, as the everyday life of the White Rabbit's family is narrated by the wife, who transfers her feelings to her diary. The anthropomorphisation of the rabbits generates incongruity through the attribution of disguises and objects that are alien to them, as shown in Image 19 , which pictures the different professions in which the eldest sister, Beatrix (the name of the first-born chosen as a tribute to Beatrix Potter), wishes to devote herself:

Bachelet, 2012 , pp. 4–5

The scatology shown in Bachelet’s other picturebooks, as mentioned in the previous section, is not a central type of humour in his work, but rather a secondary one (Image 20 ):

Bachelet, 2012 , p. 8

The character who rebels against societal rules from a situational perspective is represented by one of the best double-page spreads in Bachelet’s set of picturebooks, where he introduces metafiction by turning Alice’s characters into the pupils of the school attended by the middle sister (Image 21 ):

Bachelet, 2012 , pp. 10–11

The situational humour that emerges from this double page is, once again, articulated on the basis of a multilevel proposal. The anthropomorphisation and degradation of the animal/child universe, which does not require knowledge of the hypotext, is situated on the first level of humour, while the second level requires the decoding of each of the Carrollian details hidden behind the objects (John Tenniel’s painting, for example), the characters (Mad Hatter, Humpty Dumpty, flowers, Tweedledee and Tweedledum, etc.) and the environments represented. The reading movement will thus not be linear but bidirectional (Nikolajeva and Scott, 2006 ): it allows for a multiple approach and a perception of the new incongruity in each reading, generated from the discovery of each metafictional reference. In this sense, the second level is both self-referential and heteroreferential: the reader can find references to other picturebooks by Bachelet ( Champignon Bonaparte , Il n’y a pas d’autruches dans les contes de fées , etc.), in addition to the homage to Carroll and John Tenniel.

From a more general perspective, situational irony (Van Niekerk and Van der Westhulzen, 2004 ) dominates the entire picturebook, as it arises from the textual irony of what is narrated through the diary and the visual irony expressed by the gaze of the protagonist. This situational irony has facilitated the reading of Madame le Lapin Blanc from a gender perspective, with the justification that it conveys a feminist claim against the inconsiderate and selfish attitude of the patriarch (Image 22 ):

Bachelet, 2012 , pp. 2–3

The images that show the situational irony most clearly are two of the most important double-page spreads in this picturebook (Images 23 and 24 ):

Image 23. Bachelet, 2012 , pp. 18–19. Image 24. Bachelet, 2012 , pp. 24–25

In them, Bachelet draws on the Carrollian universe to ironically reflect the clichés of nineteenth-century and present-day gossiping and patriarchal society: “Mais mon mari a beaucoup trop à faire avec son travail au Palais… et il est même bien souvent obligé de rentrer tard” (‘But my husband has too much to do with his work at the Palace… and he often has to come home late’) (Bachelet, 2012 , pp. 24–25). In short, this situational humour is on a second level of decoding that requires the reader to be aware of the social mechanisms that underpin Bachelet’s iconic parody, and not only of the intertextual references to Alice’s universe.

The last subcategory within situational humour is “awkwardness” (Van Niekerk and Van der Westhulzen 2004 ), and relates this section to the next one. In his picturebooks, Bachelet introduces some situations of awkwardness related to the inflexible mechanisation of a character, in accordance with Bergson’s ( 1911 ) ideas that are still taken up by other scholars on humour in children’s literature (Vliet, 1986 ; Dueñas, 2011 ; Orozco López, 2020 ). In the process of anthropomorphising animals or objects, the dehumanisation of the character brings him closer to a mechanical construction, which generates a situational humour that is produced by mechanisation itself and by the absurd situation to which it leads (Image 25 ):

Bachelet ( 2009 ), pp. 8–9

As this image from Des nouvelles de mon chat —one of the most moving illustrations in Bachelet’s picturebooks—shows, the humour comes, on the one hand, from the character’s confusion of identity (explained above) and, on the other, from the elephant’s conversion into an object (its trunk and tail resemble two ropes) that allows the cat to play with it. The text reinforces the association of the elephant with an object: “La fiancée de mon chat est espiègle, espiègle et vive…” (‘ My cat’s fiancée is mischievous, playful and lively’) (Bachelet, 2009 , pp. 8–9). As can be seen, the text omits the elephant’s feelings and focuses on the cat, who uses it as a tool for her amusement.

However, Bachelet’s picturebooks that make greater use of a character’s mechanisation as a humorous device and generate situational awkwardness are those that construct humour precisely through the character itself, as will be seen in the following section.

Character Humour. Parody and Children’s Metafiction

In the case of character humour, Bachelet starts from visual and verbal comedy and produces situational humour, triangulating the comic composition of the work. However, I refer to “character humour” when this type of humour prevails over the two previous ones, articulating the entire composition of the picturebook. In Il n’y a pas d’autruches dans les contes de fées , the square format of the book reinforces its arrangement around the humour of the character, since it is composed of a succession of close-ups of the ostrich disguised as one of the best-known characters from the Grimm and Andersen fairy tales (Images 26 , 27 and 28 ):

Image 26. Bachelet, 2008 , p. 3. Image 27. Bachelet, 2008 , p. 4. Image 28. Bachelet, 2008 , p. 5

The centre of the image is an intertextuality that emerges from character humour, constructed, in turn, through visual humour (disguise and mechanisation of the ostrich) and textual humour—disjunction between text and image and irony in the deconstruction of the story: “L’Autruche n’a pas inventé la poudre” (Bachelet, 2008 , p. 5), with the idiomatic? play on words between “avoir inventé la poudre” (‘not being very clever’) and “poudre” (‘gunpowder’, as Andersen’s Little Match Girl) -. Character humour is also constructed on several levels: a first level through disguise and incongruity (with elements that are alien to him and provoke ridicule) and a second intertextual level that depends on the knowledge of the children’s hypotext. This level of recognition remains in the realm of children’s literature, without so many references to adult culture. The character’s visual traits are comical because they are conveyed through repetition and comparison with other literary characters (Nikolajeva and Scott, 2006 ): long legs, a tendency to hide his head when he is afraid, and a questioning gaze. In this way, the gestures add new visual dimensions of interpretation (Nikolajeva and Scott, 2006 ) of his awkwardness to those already provided by the excessive size of his body and limbs.

The mechanisation is evident in the interpretation of the ostrich as Puss in Boots, which is based on the hyperbole of its neck, which has become its third leg, thus establishing the analogy with a wheel (Image 29 ):

Bachelet, 2008 , p. 10

From this triangulation between visual, textual and character humour, Bachelet constructs the parody of fairy tales as a transgressive recreation of the children’s hypotext (Hutcheon, 1984 ). However, as Hutcheon pointed out, the postmodern parody interprets the original text with a certain degree of homage, not only from critical deconstruction, a resource that Bachelet uses more clearly in Les Coulisses du Livre Jeunesse . In this picturebook, the French author transposes the scenario of children’s stories into the everyday reality of adult life (which he had already tried in Madame le Lapin Blanc ):

Little Red Riding Hood’s wolf who goes to the doctor to cure his stomach problems (Image 30 ) or Carle’s Gluttonous Caterpillar who returns Petit Ours’ jacket with a hole in it (Image 31 ) are two examples of the substitution of the children’s universe to adult everyday life, through parody and character humour. Interestingly, in this picturebook, Bachelet makes the intertextuality explicit at the end of the illustrations, making it easier for readers unfamiliar with children’s literature. Furthermore, in Image 32 it can be seen again how he uses humour and metafiction to deal with serious issues, such as the analogy between the Little Mermaid’s tail and a physical handicap.

Image 30. Bachelet, 2015 , p. 10. Image 31. Bachelet, 2015 , p. 36. Image 32. Bachelet, 2015 , p. 30

Finally, one of Bachelet’s best picturebooks is constructed precisely through character humour: Champiginon Bonaparte . Bruel ( 2018 ) noted that Bachelet’s referential system ranged from open quotation to encryption, parodic evocation and allusion. In this picturebook, he draws on his passion for mycology (whose sources Bruel makes explicit) to construct a critical parody of Napoleon Bonaparte. The focus of the work is the movement of the mushroom as it grows and, above all, the facial expression that denotes ambition, perspicacity and the will to dominate his fellow man. The picturebook is full of self-references to his works and heteroreferences to early 19th-century French history, and pictorial metafiction takes centre stage, with the reproduction on double silent pages of great works of painting in a mycological key, by means of a mise-en-abyme (Images 33 and 34 ):

Image 33. Bachelet, 2005 , pp.17–18. Image 34 Bachelet, 2005 , pp. 13–14

Thus, satire and parody are key to Bachelet’s work from pictorial and literary intertextuality, which demands a more complex reading than that of literal humour, since the reader must know the content of the parodied work/biography in order to understand the joke (Beckett, 2001 ). As Mallan ( 1993 ) states, one of the aims of parody is the author’s attempt to persuade the reader to reconsider conventional stereotypes, as well as to find amusement in intertextual connections (McGillis, 2009 ).

Conclusions

Bachelet’s work shows the fulfilment of the first hypothesis and of the two objectives set out at the beginning: that the originality of the his picturebooks is based on multilevel humour, built on the features of the postmodern, for the definition of which I take the six characteristics described by Sipe and McGuire (1996, in Sipe and Pantaleo, 2008 ). First, Bachelet blurs the distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ humour through the combination of subtle intertextuality and complex cultural references and the occasional recourse to scatology and sexuality. Secondly, he explores the boundaries between author, narrator and reader, constructing self-referential discourses and animalising their concerns, beliefs and thoughts which he attenuates through visual, textual and situational humour. Thirdly, his works reveal multiple intertextual connections, transferred in an ironic and parodic way. Fourthly, his picturebooks are articulated on the basis of a multiplicity of meanings and non-linear reading directions, which are not exhausted in the first approach to the text but resist its interpretation at different ages. Fifthly, his proposals have a playful character, in which the reader is invited to participate actively in these intertextual searches, in the activation of previous knowledge and in the construction of the meaning of each humour discourse. Sixthly and finally, Bachelet offers a metafictive stance by drawing attention to the text as an independent literary entity, and not as a fictional secondary world (Sipe and MacGuire, 1996, in Sipe and Pantaleo, 2008 ).

At the same time, as I have suggested, Bachelet’s picturebooks make him a paradigmatic author of the picturebook crossover. Following Beckett’s ( 2012 ) considerations and in relation to the characteristics of post-modernity exposed above, they are multilevel works that adapt to all ages because they invite different forms of reading, according to the reader’s experience. They are also “artist’s books”, in that they challenge the limits of the book itself and experiment with format and design, according to the type of humour articulated by each of them. They combine humour through the interaction between text and image with purely visual humour that sometimes relates to wordless picturebooks through the use of silent double-page spreads. References to the fine arts are constant, both from the point of view of parody and metadiscourse and from the allusion to Bachelet’s own stylistic sources or to the artistic movements with which he identifies himself. Finally, his work tackles cross-generational themes previously considered aimed at adults that rarely feature in children’s literature (death, infidelity, imperialism, the difficulty of parent–child relationships), attenuating their seriousness through situational humour.

With all this, the aim of my analysis is to contribute to establishing a theoretical reference on humour in Gilles Bachelet’s work within the framework of postmodern picturebooks and crossover literature. In this way, I hope it will serve as a guide for future empirical studies that transfer the reading of his works to primary school classrooms and analyse children’s reading responses. At the same time, it will allow interested readers to approach Bachelet’s work from a critical perspective, since his consolidation in the publishing scene is already evident.

Change history

25 september 2021.

There is typo error in CV part, right at the end line, it includes a sentence from the reviewer" now it has been corrected

Ackerman, Brian P. (1983). Form and Function in Children's Understanding of Ironic Utterances. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 35 , 487–509.

Article Google Scholar

Andrieux, Brigitte. (2018). Irrésistible Gilles Bachelet. La Revue Des Livres Pour Enfants , 301 , 104–125.

Google Scholar

Arter, Lisa M. (2019). Linguistic Gymnastics: Humor and Wordplay in Children’s and Adolescent Literature. In Eleni Loizou and Susan L. Recchia (Eds.), Research on Young Children’s Humor. Theoretical and Practical Implications for Early Childhood Education , (pp. 169–183). Cham: Springer.

Chapter Google Scholar

Bachelet, Gilles. (2002). Le Singe à Buffon . Paris: Seuil Jeunesse.

Bachelet, Gilles. (2004). Mon Chat, Le plus Bête Du Monde . Paris: Seuil Jeunesse.

Bachelet, Gilles. (2005). Champignon Bonaparte . Paris: Seuil Jeunesse.

Bachelet, Gilles. (2008). Il N’y a Pas D’autruches Dans Les Contes De Fées . Paris: Seuil Jeunesse.

Bachelet, Gilles. (2009). Des Nouvelles De Mon Chat . Paris: Seuil Jeunesse.

Bachelet, Gilles. (2012). Madame Le Lapin Blanc . Paris: Seuil Jeunesse.

Bachelet, Gilles. (2014). Le Chevalier De Ventre-à-Terre . Paris: Seuil Jeunesse.

Bachelet, Gilles. (2015). Les Coulisses Du Livre Jeunesse . Paris: Seuil Jeunesse.

Bachelet, Gilles. (2017). Une Histoire D’amour . Paris: Seuil Jeunesse.

Bachelet, Gilles. (2018). XOX et OXO . Paris: Seuil Jeunesse.

Bachelet, Gilles. (2020). Résidence Beau Séjour . Paris: Seuil Jeunesse.

Beckett, Sandra. (2012). Crossover Picturebooks. A Genre for All Ages . New York: Routledge.

Beckett, Sandra. (2001). Parodic Play with Paintings in Picturebooks. Children’s Literature. , 29 , 175–195.

Bekman, Aileen K. (1984). The psychology of humor and children’s funny books: where do they meet? Paper presented at the 17th Annual Meeting of the Keystone State Reading Association, Hershey PA, 11–14 November; microfilm ED 258194.

Bergson, Henri. (1911). Laughter; An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic . London: Macmillan.

Book Google Scholar

Bruel, Christian. (2018). Les Histoires Naturelles de Gilles Bachelet. La Revue Des Livres Pour Enfants. , 301 , 126–137.

Cabrera, Roberto. (2012). Duplicados del yo Autorial en la Literatura Infantil: Maniobras Autoficcionales en Anthony Browne y Gilles Bachelet. Revista Laboratorio , 7 , 1–19.

Cashore, Kristin. (2003). Humor, Simplicity and Experimentation in the Picturebooks of Jon Agee. Children’s Literature in Education , 34 (2), 147–181.

Cross, Julie. (2011). Humor in Contemporary Junior Literature . New York: Routledge.

Dueñas, José Domingo. (2011). Fomentar el Deleite: el Humor en la Literatura Juvenil. ANILIJ (anuario De Investigación En Literatura Infantil y Juvenil). , 9 , 21–31.

Hamelín. (2017). Nella testa di Gilles Bachelet. Intervista Con L’autore. Oblò , 1 , 28–53.

Harrison, James. (1986). Reader/listener Response to Humour in Children’s Books. CCL , 44 , 25–32.

Hutcheon, Linda. (1984). A Theory of Parody. The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms . New York: Routledge.

Karababa, Safiye, and Alamdar, Suphi Günes. (2017). Humor in Children’s Literature Books: Saftirik Example. International Journal of Language Academy , 5 (8), 331–347.

Kotwica, Janine. (2013). Gilles Bachelet. Humour Toujours. Catalogue de l’éxposition . Amiens: Yvert-Ympam.

Kummerling Meibauer, Bettina. (1999). Metalinguistic Awareness and the Child’s Developing Concept of Irony: The Relationship Between Pictures and Text in Ironic Picturebooks. The Lion and the Unicorn , 23 , 157–183.

Lallouet, Marie. (2018). Éditer Gilles Bachelet. Entretien Avec Céline Ottenwaelter. La Revue Des Livres Pour Enfants , 301 , 156–164.

Lallouet, Marie, et al. (2018). La Revue des Livres pour Enfants . (301), June, 100–170.

Mallan, Kerry. (1993). Laugh Lines: Exploring Humour in Children’s Literature. Literature Support Series . Newtown: Primary English Teaching Association.

Marimón Llorca, Carmen. (2017). Estrategias para Construir El Humor. Las Figuras Retóricas en Relatos Humorísticos de Niños de 8 y 12 Años. CLAC , 70 , 61–80.

McGhee, Paul E. (1977). A Model of the Origins and Early Development of Incongruity-Based Humour. In Chapman and Foot (Eds.), It's a Funny Thing, Humour (pp. 27–36). Oxford: Pergamon Press.

McGillis, Roderick. (2009). Humour and the Body in Children’s Literature. In Matthew O. Grenby and Andrea Immel (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature , (pp. 258–271). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nikolajeva, Maria, and Scott, Carole. (2006). How Picturebooks Work . New York: Routledge.

Orozco López, María Teresa. (2020). Humor and Carnival in Children’s Literature. Sincronía, XXIV , 78 , 453–467.

Pexman, Penny, Glenwright, Melanie, Krol, Andrea, and James, Tammy. (2005). An Acquired Taste: Children’s Perceptions of Humour and Teasing in Verbal Irony. Discourse Processes , 40 (3), 259–288.

Rérat, Justine and Monnier, Christelle. (2010). “Un chat, ça trompe énormément”. Étude comparative des réceptions d’un album de jeunesse dans des classes de 1P/2P et 5P. II Congrés International de Didactiques , 1–7.

Rudd, David. (2009). Animal and Object Stories. In Matthew O. Grenby and Andrea Immel (Eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Children’s Literature , (pp. 242–257). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ruiz-Gurillo, Leonor. (2017). Humour Production in Children’s Narratives in Spanish. Caleidoscopio , 15 (2), 222–231.

Serafini, Frank. (2015). Humour in Children’s Picturebooks. The Reading Teacher , 68 (8), 1–10.

Sipe, Lawrence R. (1998). How Picturebooks Work: A Semiotically Framed Theory of Text-Picture Relationships. Children’s Literature in Education , 29 (2), 97–108.

Sipe, Lawrence R., and Pantaleo, Sylvia (Eds.). (2008). Play, Parody and Self-Referentiality . New York: Routledge.

Stocchino, Julie. (2012). L’univers de Gilles Bachelet: le jeu avec les références communes . Mémoire de recherche, Université de Montpellier II. Inédita. Recuperado de [ https://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/dumas-00841006 ].

Van der Linden, Sophie. (2007). Lire l’album . Le Puy-en-Velay: L’Atelier du Poisson Soluble.

Van der Linden, Sophie. (2017). Gilles Bachelet, Made in France. Oblò , 1 , 20–27.

Vandevooghel, Louise. (2014). L’intertextualité à travers les âges. Gilles Bachelet, un créateur d’albums intergénérationnels . Mémoire de Máster, deuxième année. UFR de Léttres Modernes. Lille 3-Charles de Gaulle. Inédita.

Varrà, Emilio. (2017). Il Controcanto Paródico Di Gilles Bachelet. Oblò , 1 , 8–19.

Ville de Ploufragan officiel. (2019). Rencontre avec Gilles Bachelet, auteur jeunesse . (Accessed January 24th, 2021). From https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=540249466526356 .

Vliet, Ann. (1986). Me Parece Que Aquí Algo No Está Bien: Incongruity as the Basis of Children’s Humour. Studies in American Humor , 2 (5), 299–306.

Van Niekerk, Jani, and Van der Westhuizen, Betsie. (2004). Humour in Children’s Literature in the Tertiary and Intermediate Phases of Language Education. Literator , 25 (3), 151–179.

Download references

Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Department of Specific Didactics, University of Saragossa, Faculty of Education. C/ Pedro Cerbuna, 12, 50009, Saragossa, Spain

Diana Muela Bermejo

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Diana Muela Bermejo .

Additional information

Publisher's note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Diana Muela Bermejo is a graduate in Spanish Philology (Extraordinary Prize) and PhD in Spanish Philology (with International Mention and Academy of Hispanism award) from the University of Zaragoza. She currently works as a PhD Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Education, where she teaches classes in Children’s and Youth Literature in Primary Education, among other subjects. She is a specialist in children’s and youth literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and has devoted special attention to the recovery of children’s heritage, to the analysis of children’s literary texts from a comparative perspective, and to children’s and youth theatre. This work is part of the research line of the ECOLIJ (Communicative and Literary Education in the Information Society, Children's and Young Adult Literature in the construction of identities) group of the Government of Aragon, of which the author is currently a researcher.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Muela Bermejo, D. Humour in Children’s and Young Adult Literature: The Work of Gilles Bachelet. Child Lit Educ 54 , 73–96 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-021-09463-8

Download citation

Accepted : 15 August 2021

Published : 16 September 2021

Issue Date : March 2023

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-021-09463-8

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Children’s literature
Picturebook
Metafiction
Gilles Bachelet
Find a journal
Publish with us
Track your research

Different Types of Comedy in Literature

Types of Comedy in Literature

Table of Contents

Introduction

It is not that a dramatist sets out to write a particular types of comedy . In fact a number of elements go to make a comedy what it is. Hard and fast border lines of types are not always discernible in comic plays. And yet certain dominant types have emerged in the field of comic plays and there are distinctions which can usefully be made.

That is why a reference to the broad categories or types of comic plays is useful and desirable.

Romantic Comedy

The romantic comedy or the comedy of romance and humour is often used to describe the type of comedy which Shakespeare used. This is the type of play which imaginatively creates an idyllic world replete with young lovers, stern but ultimately understanding parents, a pleasant natural setting (often a forest, usually in spring or early summer) and imaginative language.’ Young lovers, freshness of youth, settings in the heart of exotic forests, action and speech that are basically not realistic, glamour of courts, magnificence and all this sometimes spiced with supernatural elements these are the standard elements that go to make a romantic comedy .

Such is Shakespeare’s As you Like It or A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Twelfth Night . The elements of the romantic comedy can be seen clearly in The Honourable History of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay by Robert Greene who, in his days, tried to run down Shakespeare out of professional jealousy. This play which appeared in 1594 set the pattern of farcical scenes in prose and love and romance scenes in blank verse. Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay provide farce and tomfoolery in the play while the Prince of Wales and Lord Lacy supply the love interest through their rivalry for Marguerite of Fressingfield.

Shakespeare streamlined this type of comedy and brought it to a level of sophisticated perfection using kindly and good natured fun, romantic love of young lovers, sometime purely farcical characters (Bottom and others) and scenes, supernatural creatures like fairies behaving just like human beings and of course the triangular love conflict with everything ending with marriage bells. Enchanting songs and sometimes masques and dances add to the entertainment value of such comedies

The romantic comedy takes us in the world of dreams where nothing is impossible; the fanciful and the real may barely be separated and our senses are dulled under the spell of ‘charmed magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in fairly lands forlorn.’ Shakespeare, with the instinctive artistic taste, has made, as Allardyce Nicoll puts it

“I ally the spiritual home of his comic characters.”

This device opens the door for music sunshine, colour, enchantment of old forgotten far off things and places, and a harmonious bleeding of imagination, wonder and reality. The romantic comedy borrows ecstatic abandonment of Aristophanes , hilarious merriment of Plautus, sophisticated sentimentalism of Terence and crude humour of the medieval farce. Here the objective and the subjective unite artistically, intellectual laughter laughs at itself, clowns speak wisely and wise men act like fools.

“We scoff at ridiculous absurdities in these plays and discover that we are mocking ourselves in superior manner we look down on the Dogberries and find that they alone hold the true secrets in their clumsy hands. Over all breathes an atmosphere of natural beauty where in the common flowers of the fields have implications and the hedgerows are invested with a strange unwonted grace.”

And there is the pastoral atmosphere in a number of comedies In As You Like It we have shepherds and aristocrats beguiling time in the forest of Arden , under the greenwood trees. Here is God’s plenty: here, at least in Shakespeare’s plays , is the basic eternal human nature caught in the eternal romantic texture of drama , Touchstone’s motley is no longer in fashion but his thoughts belong to all times. As Nicoll puts it,

“Claudios and Dogberries, Lysanders and Bottoms, are as common today, and everywhere as they were in Shakespeare’s time.”

The romantic comedy has to show an exquisite balance between the reality and the ideal -in characters, in speech, in action. Shakespeare and many of his contemporaries knew this art of tight rope-walking very well.

Comedy of Humours

Critics have a tendency to latch on to philosophical, medical or psychological theories to justify their points of view in relation to literary values. Coleridge brought in a lot of metaphysical speculation to bear upon literary activities and even in modern times philosophy and psychology play an important role in certain literary theories.

Such is the situation in the case of the Comedy of Humours . (Note the laurel form). The medieval theory of humours was already out of date in the days of Ben Jonson. But Jonson was quite happy to press into service this defunct theory.

The original meaning of the word ‘humour’ is liquid. According to the old Greek and Latin medical theory the human body possessed four humours or liquids-phlegm, blood, choler and melancholy. The predominance of any one of these four humours in the body decided the temperament of the person concerned. Thus the preponderance of phlegm would mean calm temperament, and sanguine would mean ardent temperament; choleric people are easily angered and melancholy would imply depressive temperament. In the latter part of the 16th century, humour had come to mean a man’s characteristic disposition or obsession or mania. In the comedy of humours , the character is completely dominated by a single obsession.

Jonson believed that he could get maximum humour and satire out of a situation if he showed human beings dominated by humours or obsessions or rolling passions or dominant traits of character. Jonson initiated this in the introduction to his play, Every Man Out of His Humour .

Thus basing his conception of humours on old Greek and Latin medical theories and traditional psychology, Jonson explained a temperament as the product of the prevalent humour. According to Jongen the ruling passion or humour distorts human nature by egotism and self-regarding appetites like greed etc. In this way the comedy of humours becomes a timeless satire on human nature. But it is also a social satire because personal foibles are fed by social tendencies. In The Alchemist we find unbounded lust (Sir Epicure Mammon), unlimited credulity in the foolish Fitzlottrel is found in The Devil is an Ass ; in Volpone we find the cunning Volpone and Mosca over reaching themselves in their contempt for their victims In other words Jonson’s characters are stock characters, which are, in fact, not uncommon in the comic plays of those days. The boastful soldier, the greedy merchant, the hard-headed swindler, the gullible fool, -all these were not exactly new. Some such characters can be found in the plays of Plautus also.

Thus the world of Jonson is filled with people having ruling passions and obsessions, people who are either adventurers or who are victims of such sharks. This mode of humours was first established by Jonson’s play Every Man in His Humour.

Since the use of such characters is not a new thing, what exactly did Jonson invent? He gave this practice a name the comedy of humours which was a new thing. Also equally new was his insistence on realism in comedy. The following lines from the Prologue to Every Man in His Humour (1958) underscore Jonson’s views more clearly

“But deeds and language as men do use, And persons such as Comedy would choose, When she would show an image of the times And sports with human follies, not with crimes”

Jonson was the one person who stood stalwartly against romanticism in the first decades of the seventeenth century. We find certain elements of it in Barrie.

“Barrie’s sentimentalism was of an entirely different sort: it was conscious, deliberate, an attitude indulged in, not because of a surface skimming over the darker sides of life, but because of a sad contemplation of man’s follies and errors.”

The comedy of humours actually does not depend upon humour. It uses satire also to create its effect. Thus the absence of pure humour in this so-called comedy of humours is one of the anomalies of literary nomenclature. It could, in reality, better be called the comedy of realism or the comedy of satire.

Comedy of Manners (Comedy of Wit)

Comedy of manners is a commonly used phrase in literary criticism but its meaning is not always clear.

After Puritanic upsurge of austerity, Charles II came to throne of England and he brought French manners, French courtiers and French morals along with him. In his court witty remarks and flippancy passed for cultured sophistication and fashions of dress and manners were considered all-important in the aristocratic gay carefree, immoral upper class society.

The plays of those days reflect the aspirations and manners of that society. This term particularly applies to Restoration comedies written by Congreve (1670-1729), Wycherley (1640-1716), Etherege (1634 ?1691 ?), and others. Comedies of Sheridan (1751-1816), Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) are also comedies of manners .

The comedy of manners is usually set in a highly sophisticated society and the main characters are usually very witty and lax in moral tone. The situations are very often farcial and vulgar and its humour is mainly verbal.

Coming in the wake of staunch Puritanic morals, the comedy of manners went to the other extreme in its reaction against conventional morality. True, we find a group of brilliant writers of comic plays in this period; in fact the greatest glory of the literary field of this period is the comedy of manners. The Restoration comedy , better known as the comedy of manners, deals with the extreme side of life and fashions of that society.

The characters are people of fashion; the theme is usually love, intrigue and the dialogue, mainly on superficial topics, is brilliantly witty. So much were the writers obsessed with the idea of witty laughter, that they never worried about the theme that gave rise to such laughter. Wit at any cost was their motto, and they did not hesitate to bring in indecent ideas and situations to that end. They palmed off vulgar jokes as intellectual elegance.

Emphasis on fashion, latest cut of dress and manners had its offshoot in jokes at the expense of country gulls who, on the strength of their wealth, tried to mix in the foppish society. Such jokes at boorish manners and lack of wit form the staple food for laughter in the comedy of manners. In actuality, manners, conventions and even follies belong to an artificial society which prided on its so-called refined culture. It has also the artificiality of personality and theme.

The scene of the comedies of manners written during the Restoration period is always London it never leaves the bounds of London. Satire and witty remarks keep the audience roaring with laughter. Life in such plays consists of parties, evening walks and love intrigue. To be virtuous is to be considered an utter fool. Characters are all people of leisure whose sole aim in life is to pass as witty gentlemen and ladies. Feeling and morality have no place in them.

These comedies hinge on intrigue and deception and tricks. A gallant uses tricks to marry an heiress or to fool a husband. These are followed by counter tricks and their success or failure sums up the plot of the play.

“Along with this pleasure in trickery, however, goes amusement in the absurdities of certain persons, the country booby, the amorous old lady, the city fop, the Puritan clergyman, the avaricious alderman. Acts two, three, and four elaborate these plots and counterplots, deceptions and mistakes, varying the confusion by the antic of the eccentrics. Act five reveals certain tricksters successful and others defeated. But there is no success without a trick.”

There arises a question of morality in such comedies. It was this occasional indecency and permissiveness of the Restoration comedy which led Jeremy Collier (1650-1726) to write a scathing pamphlet Short View of Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage . To our twentieth century theatre-goers this indecency may be simply harmless but in the seventeenth century, Collier’s denunciation against the immorality of the comedies of his days went home to the public. It appeared as if the comedy of manners had the monopoly of immorality in those days.

To our modern mind it appears as if too much fuss has been made by the critics about the immorality of these plays. First, there is no need to take these plays seriously. They are just the light moments of pleasurable distraction. They also have some social interest in the sense that they paint a particular section of that society. The authors have pictured affectations of such society which are held up to ridicule. The comic poet was the mouthpiece of this society and his plays contained the indecent and coarse jokes of that society.

Charles Lamb has gallantly defended this immorality on the ground that it takes us to an artificial, imaginary world where everyday morals do not exist, but nineteenth century moralists have usually been very stern in their condemnation. Perhaps the most telling indictment is to be found in Leslie Stephen’s charge of “a perpetual gush of cynical sentiment.” This might be defended as a part of the conventions of Restoration comedy, as a sort of pose, a pretence that must be kept up as an accompaniment of the display of affection and follies.

On the credit side of this comedy we can say that it is intellectual; it appeals to our head and not to our emotions. It has brilliant dialogue in which the best possibilities of English language have been fully explored. It is witty, ingenuous and refined.

The most noteworthy writers of the comedy of manners are William Wycherley and Congreve. Congerve’s The Way of the World is as famous as Wycherley’s The Country Wife and The Plain Dealer .

The Sentimental Comedy

The Sentimental Comedy represents a reaction against the loose morals and general cynicism of the Restoration Comedy. Of course, during the last decades of the seventeenth century, so popular were the comedies of manners and their imitations that there was no room for new types of plays in the existing theatres in England.

But gradually as we enter the eighteenth century the tide turns and a tendency towards sentiment is manifest. The comedy of sentiment emerged as a serious rival of the comedy of manners. Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729) is one of the creators of the sentimental comedy.

The sentimental comedy was an attempt to prove that virtue and innocence also could be entertainingly attractive on stage and vulgarity and wit are not necessarily the only sources of stage laughter. Steele attempted to make comedy respectable again. In actuality, the sentimental comedy became the least humorous of dramatic forms. Its main ingredients were domestic situations and thwarted innocent love. It aimed at exciting the gentle emotions in the audience and proving the triumph of sheer goodness. Yet this type of comedy became popular for the time being because the desire for a less immoral theatre was indeed widespread. The Conscious Lovers of Steele is such a comedy underlining the devotion to morality and a virtuous view of love.

Old conventional themes gave place to new comic topics. “The under-taker and his man exposing in their talk the tricks of the trade, the lawyer and his clerk, the soldiers, the widow and her lady visitors. The widow again at a toilet ‘talking with Tattleaid her mouth full of pins’ all these provide dialogue that is diverting and fresh. The essentials of this type of comedy are decency in language, praise of virtuous love and marriage, attack on social abuse and an emotional appeal to compassion What Thorndike says of The Conscious Lovers applies to the entire type of the sentimental comedy:

“But neither Steele, subsequent dramatists nor the general public could stop half-way, and this play was to have many successors which reveal virtue in act one and ask for it our incessant sympathy during the excitements of an improbable story, which present problems and attack on evils of society with moral earnestness, which excite us to morality by both preaching and weeping, and which have little room left for fun or wit.”

Unfortunately an over dose of virtue cannot be long sustained by the theatre audiences and this so-called sentimental comedy. A number of parodies by more skillful comic writers like Sheridan and others came out.

The sentimental comedy ceased to exercise any influence for some two centuries but in the twentieth century the sentimental comedy has made its appearance again in a new garb. There have always been critics who feel that the stage must have some morally uplifting influence. The drama of social consciousness and the drama of commitment are some of the terms applied to this new rebirth of the sentimental comedy. For example the comedies of Shaw have purpose. Brecht ushered in the drama concern with political and social problems-a sort of drama commitment. This type of approach (propaganda or commitment) is not actually healthy for pure comedy.

The Dark Comedy or Black Comedy

There are a number of plays which are called comedies and yet they do not come under any of the well-known types of comedy. Plays like Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale or Measure for Measure or T.S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party can be called comedies but they were called comedies because any other apt nomenclature did not fit them. Such plays ended happily but were more tragic than comic: the general tone of the play lacked the spontaneous laughter and had a mixture of tears and laughter.

Hence the critics came out with labels like tragi-comedy or comic tragedy. Prof. J. L. Styan has used the name the dark comedy for such plays and that phrase has become now quite popular to label the type of plays like Measure for Measure , Troilus and Cressida etc. You do not have much of laughter in them. They are at times anti-heroic and anti-romantic and these elements lend some humour to them.

These plays contain at times serious discussions of problems and the playwrights like John Osborne ( Look Back in Anger) or Moliere ( Tariffe ) or Ibsen ( An Enemy of the People ) or Shaw ( Mrs. Warren’s Profession ) also contain this dark side of the comedy.

Other Minor Types

Criticism on the types of comedy uses a number of terms one of which is the Italian commedia dell’arte . We rarely come across this type in its pure form, it was at its best in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

This type usually based on some existing story or situation was improvised by actors themselves. It abounded in the usual stock characters whose very entry would create laughter-Arlecchino representing a countrified clown, Pantalone representing the old and doddering fool in love with some young girl and others. The best known writer of such comedies is Carlo Goldoni (1707-1793) whose plays The Servant of Two Masters , The Landlady , The Lively Widow are quite amusing. We do not come across this type of comedy in its pure form in English literature . The English Punch and Judy puppet shows can trace their ancestry to the commedia dell’arte .

In Farce , we may not get the best type of humour, nor does it appeal to refined audiences. It is rough, crude almost elemental in its desire to evoke laughter. In farce laughter is mainly evoked by physical action, absurd situations and poor plot-construction. The situations in a farce are exaggerated and very often impossible (a husband perusing his wife’s chastity while her lover is hiding under the bed). We find rude and coarse incongruity and characterization is deliberately sacrificed to situation, sheer horseplay causes laughter.

Bottom’s antics and the episode of Pryamus and Thisbe in A Mid Summer Night’s Dream are farcial. But an element of force can be found even in a number of better comedies, Restoration comedies and even in the comedies of Shaw.

Comedy of Intrigue

Comedy of intrigue or situation comedy is a term sometimes used by critics to define play in which humour depends mainly upon intricate plotting, hairbreadth escapes and rapidly changing situations. Of course, most of the types of comedies have all these characteristics and it is difficult to find a pure comedy of intrigue. Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer have quite a few traits of the comedy of intrigue along with the traits of the comedy of manners . Fletcher’s plays have preponderance of the element of intrigue or situations in them. Such comedies have little humour, no wit or satire; they depend upon external sources of laughter.

Hello, Viewers! Besides being the Founder and Owner of this website, I am a Government Officer. As a hardcore literary lover, I am pursuing my dream by writing notes and articles related to Literature. Drop me a line anytime, whether it’s about any queries or demands or just to share your well-being. I’d love to hear from you. Thanks for stopping by!

Comedy of Humours | Definition, Characteristics, Examples in Literature
Classical Comedy | Definition, Characteristics, Examples in Literature
Closet Drama | Definition, Examples, Origin, Form
Poetic Drama | Definition, History, Characteristics, Examples in Literature
Problem Play | Definition, Elements, Examples in Literature

3 thoughts on “Different Types of Comedy in Literature”

Great Post. Thanks for defining the types of comedies. This blog is very useful.

Thank you so much

Different Types of Humor

Types of humor in literature, exaggeration/hyperbole, incongruity, follow us on:.

Architecture and Design
Asian and Pacific Studies
Business and Economics
Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies
Computer Sciences
Cultural Studies
Engineering
General Interest
Geosciences
Industrial Chemistry
Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies
Jewish Studies
Library and Information Science, Book Studies
Life Sciences
Linguistics and Semiotics
Literary Studies
Materials Sciences
Mathematics
Social Sciences
Sports and Recreation
Theology and Religion
Publish your article
The role of authors
Promoting your article
Abstracting & indexing
Publishing Ethics
Why publish with De Gruyter
How to publish with De Gruyter
Our book series
Our subject areas
Your digital product at De Gruyter
Contribute to our reference works
Product information
Tools & resources
Product Information
Promotional Materials
Orders and Inquiries
FAQ for Library Suppliers and Book Sellers
Repository Policy
Free access policy
Open Access agreements
Database portals
For Authors
Customer service
People + Culture
Journal Management
How to join us
Working at De Gruyter
Mission & Vision
De Gruyter Foundation
De Gruyter Ebound
Our Responsibility
Partner publishers

Your purchase has been completed. Your documents are now available to view.

Humor in literature

From the book the primer of humor research.

Katrina E. Triezenberg
X / Twitter

Supplementary Materials

Please login or register with De Gruyter to order this product.

Chapters in this book (21)

Irony Definition

What is irony? Here’s a quick and simple definition:

Irony is a literary device or event in which how things seem to be is in fact very different from how they actually are. If this seems like a loose definition, don't worry—it is. Irony is a broad term that encompasses three different types of irony, each with their own specific definition: verbal irony , dramatic irony , and situational irony . Most of the time when people use the word irony, they're actually referring to one of these specific types of irony.

Some additional key details about irony:

The term "irony" comes from the ancient Greek comic character called the "eiron," who pretends ignorance in order to deceive an opponent.
Irony overlaps with, but is not identical to, sarcasm and satire .
In the last twenty years or so, the term "ironic" has become popular to describe an attitude of detachment or subversive humor, like that of someone who wears a Christmas sweater as a joke. This more recent meaning of ironic is not entirely consistent with the original meaning of irony (a fact which itself might be described as being somewhat ironic).

Irony Pronunciation

Here's how to pronounce irony: eye -run-ee

Irony in Depth

The term "irony" usually refers to three particular types of irony:

Verbal irony is a figure of speech in which the literal meaning of what someone says is different from—and often opposite to—what they actually mean. For example, if someone has a painful visit to the dentist and when it's over says, "Well, that was pleasant," they are using verbal irony because the intended meaning of their words (that it wasn't at all pleasant) is the opposite of the literal meaning of the words. Verbal irony is the most common form of irony. In fact it is so common that when people mention "irony," they often are actually referring to verbal irony.
Dramatic irony Is a plot device that highlights the difference between a character's understanding of a given situation, and that of the audience. When the audience watching a movie know what's behind that door, but the character in the movie has no idea... that's dramatic irony.
Situational irony refers to an unexpected, paradoxical, or perverse turn of events. It is an example of situational irony when, in the O. Henry story " The Gift of the Magi ," a young wife cuts off her hair in order to buy her husband a chain for his prized watch, but the husband sells his watch to buy his wife a comb for her beautiful hair.

Although these three kinds of irony may seem very different at first glance, they all share one important quality: a tension between how things appear and how they really are. For a more in-depth look at each of these devices, please visit their individual pages.

Also, it's worth knowing that sometimes instances of irony don't quite fit into any of these categories, and instead align with the more general definition of irony as something that seems to be one way, but is in fact another way. Put more broadly: sometimes irony is verbal irony, sometimes it's dramatic irony, sometimes it's situational irony, and sometimes it's just irony.

Irony, Sarcasm, and Satire

Besides the three main types of irony described above, two other literary devices—sarcasm and satire—share a lot in common with irony:

Sarcasm is a bitter, cutting, or mocking taunt used to denigrate a particular person, place, or thing. It can sometimes take the form of verbal irony. For instance, if you were to say to someone who had just cut you in line, "What a polite, civilized person you are!" that would be sarcasm in the form of irony, since your meaning is the opposite of the literal meaning of your words. Sarcasm very often involves irony. However, it doesn't always have to use irony. For instance, when Groucho Marx says "i never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception," he is being sarcastic, but his words, however witty they are, mean exactly what they say.
Satire is a form of social or political critique. Like sarcasm, it often makes use of irony, but it isn't always ironic.

You can get more details on both sarcasm and satire at their specific pages.

Irony Examples

All three forms of irony are used very frequently in literature, theater, and film. In addition, sometimes the irony found in any of these mediums is broader and doesn't fit into any of the specific categories, and is instead just general irony.

Irony in "The Sell Out"

" The Sell Out " by Simon Rich is a short story recently published in the New Yorker that is full of irony. The story is narrated by a Polish Jew named Herschel, who lives in Brooklyn in the early twentieth century. Herschel accidentally preserves himself in brine for one hundred years, and when he is finally discovered, still alive, in 2017, he is introduced to his great-great-grandson, a young man who lives in present-day Brooklyn. On Herschel's first day, the great-great-grandson Simon tells Herschel about computers. Herschel describes the scene (note that Hershel's English isn't all that great):

It takes him long time, but eventually Simon is able to explain. A computer is a magical box that provides endless pleasure for free. Simon is used to constant access to this box—a never-ending flow of pleasures. When the box stops working—or even just briefly slows down—he becomes so enraged that he curses our God, the one who gave us life and brought us forth from Egypt.

This description is a great example of irony in the most general sense. The humor stems from the disparity between what seems to be true to Herschel (that computers are magic pleasure boxes) and what is actually true (that computers are, well, computers, and that people are kind of stupidly addicted to them). The use of irony is effective here because Hershel's description, as outlandish as it is, actually points to something that is true about the way people use computers. Therefore, the disparity between "what is" and "what appears to be" to Herschel isn't merely a comical error; rather, it's ironic because it actually points to a greater truth about its subject.

Verbal Irony in Don Quixote

One famously ironic work is Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote . At one point, the book's narrator states:

… historians should and must be precise, truthful and unprejudiced, without allowing self-interest or fear, hostility or affection, to turn them away from the path of truth, whose mother is history.

We can identify the above quotation as an example of verbal irony if we consider that the book's hero, Don Quixote, is fundamentally incapable of distinguishing truth from fiction, and any historian of his life would have to follow a double track of reality and fantasy which continuously overlaps, tangles, and flips. One of the most basic premises of the book is that truth is more difficult to identify than it may seem. Therefore, when the narrator vows to follow the single path of truth, he is being ironic; in reality, he believes this to be impossible.

Dramatic Irony in Othello

The device of dramatic irony is especially well-suited to the theater, which displays constantly shifting sets, scenes, and characters to a stationary audience that, therefore, often has a more complete or "omniscient" perspective compared to any of the characters. One excellent example of dramatic irony can be found in Shakespeare's Othello .

Through the play, the audience watches as Iago plots against his commander Othello, and seeks to make Othello believe that his wife Desdemona has been unfaithful to him. The audience watches as Iago plots to himself and with others. Sometimes Iago even directly reveals his plans to the audience. Meanwhile, Othello continues to trust Iago, and the audience watches as the the plan they know that Iago is pursuing slowly plays out just as he intended, and Othello eventually murders the entirely innocent Desdemona. The way that the play makes the audience aware of Iago's plot, even as Othello is not, means that the play is full of dramatic irony almost for its entire length.

Situational Irony in The Producers

In this classic film, two friends come up with a complicated money-making scheme in which they put on a play that they think is absolutely certain to fail. Their plan backfires when the play, entitled "Springtime for Hitler," is so shockingly bad that people think it's a comedy and come to see it in droves. This is an example of situational irony because the outcome is the exact opposite of what the play's producers expected.

Why Do Writers Use Irony?

Irony is a tool that can be used for many different purposes. Though sarcasm and satire are two ways of using irony that are primarily negative and critical, ironic statements can also underscore the fragility, complexity, and beauty of human experience.

Situational irony often demonstrates how human beings are always at the mercy of an unpredictable universe—and that life can always take an unexpected turn.
Dramatic irony emphasizes that human knowledge is always partial and often incorrect, while giving the reader or viewer the satisfaction of a more complete understanding than that of the characters.
In dialogue, verbal irony can display one character's sparkling wit, and another character's thickheadedness. Verbal irony can also create a connection between people who get the irony, excluding those who don't.

Ultimately, irony is used to create meaning—whether it's humorous or profound—out of the gap between the way things appear and how they actually are.

Other Helpful Irony Resources

The Wikipedia page on irony : A helpful overview.
The dictionary definition of irony : A basic definition, with a bit on the etymology.
The comedian George Carlin explaining the difference between situational irony and mere coincidence.
A site with a helpful index of examples of different types of irony in television, film, video games, and other media.

The printed PDF version of the LitCharts literary term guide on Irony

PDFs for all 136 Lit Terms we cover
Downloads of 1895 LitCharts Lit Guides
Teacher Editions for every Lit Guide
Explanations and citation info for 39,904 quotes across 1895 books
Downloadable (PDF) line-by-line translations of every Shakespeare play
Dramatic Irony
Verbal Irony
Characterization
Personification
Protagonist
Epanalepsis

‘Humour is powerful’: Cartoons take on Uganda’s repressive government

Huge potholes and rundown hospitals are actually getting fixed, thanks to a cartoonist’s online satire aimed at the government.

Spire Ssentonga has been using cartoons and his online platform to call attention to issues in Uganda's infrastructure and government [Courtesy of the Observer]

Ugandan cartoonist Jim Spire Ssentongo didn’t know what he was starting last April when he sent out a tweet encouraging people to post photos of the ubiquitous potholes across the country’s capital.

“A friend of mine is organising a mega KAMPALA POTHOLE PHOTO EXHIBITION” he wrote on X , the platform formerly known as Twitter, on April 15 last year. “Share here photos of potholes in Kampala city, with: location, depth, circumference, and estimated age of the pothole.” He asked his followers to tag the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) and their counterpart responsible for the country’s roads.

Keep reading

Russia mulls labelling queen of soviet pop pugacheva a ‘foreign agent’, ‘no women allowed’: the powerful membership of uk’s men-only garrick club, richard serra, known for monumental steel sculptures, dies at the age of 85, photos: india celebrates holi, the festival of colours.

Back in 2005, there were efforts to stage physical exhibitions of the country’s infamous potholes – what locals call “ponds” in the roads because of their size. But these attempts were thwarted by the police, recalls Ssentongo.

So the idea to hold an exhibition online came to mind, says Ssentongo, 45. He comes across as a deep thinker, taking time to consider his responses before speaking. Ssentongo admits that the tweet calling for pothole photos was “partly joking, partly sounding out how it would be received”, adding that he didn’t “plan to turn it into a grand initiative”.

But that’s exactly what happened. Ugandans started uploading their photos immediately. In response, Joshua Mutabazi, added at least five photos to the thread, including one that shows a 30-centimetre (12-inch) pothole with a 3.5-metre (11.5-foot) circumference that he estimated was two years old. By the end of the day, there were more than 13,000 tweets with the hashtag the #KampalaPotholeExhibition, posted by fed-up citizens in the pothole-plagued country.

With physical protests all but barred in the country, this was an opportunity to hold the government accountable. And, to Ugandans’ surprise, there were results. Within a day, KCCA’s executive director, Dorothy Kisaka, made a public statement about the pothole situation, saying that the authority was constrained by inadequate government funding.

The same day in Parliament the deputy speaker, Thomas Tabeywa, asked the minister of Kampala capital city and metropolitan affairs about the state of the roads. Less than a week after the online outrage began, ageing President Yoweri Museveni, 79, ordered the country’s Ministry of Finance to immediately release six billion shillings ($1,538,784) to repair the roads. The next month his son Muhoozi Kainerugaba inspected some of them.

This was the birth of a new form of protest in the East African nation, where those who have taken to the streets to demonstrate tend to languish in jail.

Nearly a year since that first exhibition call, Ssentonga has been involved in six more: about hospital conditions, foreign recruitment scandals, corruption and nepotism within non-governmental organisations (NGOs), human rights abuses, and more. Each campaign has used a specific hashtag such as #UgandaHealthExhibition and asked people to post “evidence” – photos, videos, audio, documents – of neglect or abuse by authorities. Some Ugandans have likened the protests to the Arab Spring.

What’s remarkable is that the soft-spoken and unassuming cartoonist has been able to continue demonstrating online when other physical events, such as climate protests and what was dubbed the Walk to Work campaign in opposition to skyrocketing food prices, have been shut down by police or fizzled out.

Other online protests have been attempted. In 2020, Patience Ahumuza, a digital communications professional, started the “Wear that Mini” campaign, aimed at fighting online body shaming. She posted a photo of herself in a miniskirt and invited other Ugandan women to do the same. Hundreds of photos were uploaded.

Even though it died out, feminist movements like this laid the foundation for Ssentongo’s campaigns, notes human rights lawyer Gowdin Toko, who now helps spearhead the online exhibitions.

A well-drawn history

Ssentongo says that he is motivated by “the desire and passion to see things done better in the country or [have] things done more justly.” He explains that this “caring for the other, being mindful” reflects his training in two religious seminaries – although he was expelled from one institution and dropped out of another because he “didn’t have the calling”.

However, Ssentonga did find a calling as a political cartoonist while he was teaching ethics at a local university.

Ugandan newspapers began printing political cartoons in the 1960s. During the 1970s, in the era of the late dictator Idi Amin, they were used to parody social issues, Ssentongo says. “They avoided political discussions but by the ’80s had moved to cover political matters,” he explains. However, there hadn’t yet been academics, philosophers or writers who were also cartoonists, says Ssentongo. This was an advantage for them in “expanding modes of speech, especially on uncomfortable issues, plus triggering public debate through the hard-to-ignore vessel of humour”, he says.

Despite no formal training, he tried his hand at it – taking inspiration from Ugandan cartoonists such as Fred Senoga Makubuya (“Snoggie”), famous for an illustration in the late 1990s portraying an army major general as a chicken and the president as a chicken owner deciding what to do with his animals.

In 2005, Ssentongo walked into the office of local newspaper The Observer and handed then-Deputy Managing Editor Pius Katunzi a portfolio of work. Katunzi was impressed with one of his illustrations mocking the power cuts that were taking place in Uganda. In the cartoon, one local marabou stork is poking his beak directly in the face of another as they dangle on a power line. “I tell you it used to be quite dangerous to stand on these wires,” the first stork says. “Hmm,” replies his friend.

Ssentongo has been working for the paper on a freelance basis ever since.

“He’s not someone given to excitement, but he cares,” says Katunzi, now managing editor of The Observer. “Generally, he’s a quiet person. You don’t think all these kinds of things will come out of him. But he’s a deep thinker.”

Ssentongo, who is also a columnist and has published several books, is known for his satirical writing. People therefore easily relate to the crossover between his cartoon subjects and his other work, says the cartoonist. “But I’m also facilitated by my philosophy background,” Ssentongo adds.

Still, he didn’t expect his online campaigns to resonate with so many. “The deployment of humour in the exhibitions has been disarming – especially in the pothole exhibition,” says Ssentongo.

“What could they [the government] do about people simply making fun of the horrible capital city roads? They’d have looked stupid had they tried to use violence on us. Humour is powerful in repressive environments.”

Triumphs and tragedies

Social media is uncertain terrain in Uganda, where President Yoweri Museveni has ruled since 1986. In 2021, he banned Facebook in the lead-up to elections, which pushed many Ugandans to Twitter, now X.

The president and his son are prolific users of the platform, making it hard to block it, Ssentongo points out. This is one reason why his digital protests survived. “Partly it is because they cannot shut down all the channels and they know from the experience of shutting down Facebook that you just close the door and people use the other,” he says.

But there have been severe repercussions for some who used social media to criticise the government. Nearly two years ago, satirical novelist Kakwenza Rukirabashaija was detained, tortured and arrested for “offensive communication” after calling the president’s son Kainerugaba “an incompetent pig-headed curmudgeon” and “obese” on X. Activist and academic Stella Nyanzi was jailed for labelling the president a “pair of buttocks” on Facebook and convicted of cyber-harassment in 2017. Both sought refuge in Germany.

Kakwenza Rukirabashaija, who charges that he was tortured for weeks while in detention, appears before a court in a failed bid to have his passport returned so he could seek medical treatment abroad, at a court in Kampala, Uganda on Feb. 1, 2022. The prominent writer and government critic who accused Uganda's security forces of torture has gone into exile ahead of his looming criminal trial, his attorney said Wednesday, Feb. 9, 2022. (AP Photo/Hajarah Nalwadda, File)

Many in Uganda now use a pseudonym on social media, says Isaac Tibasiima, an assistant lecturer in the Department of Literature at Makerere University, who has taught with Ssentonga. “But Jimmy was the kind of guy that said, ‘No, I will use my handle and I do not care what’s going to come out.’”

Social media made him so popular that while once reluctant to call himself a political activist, he now embraces the term. Today, some want Ssentongo to run for president, but he humbly shrugs it off.

He thinks the online exhibitions have been popular because they serve as a form of therapy – “just some avenue to vent, to get some temporary relief”, says Ssentongo. “But it’s really encouraging that it has made so many more people active, even those that have been quiet.”

Many voices – more than 10 million across YouTube, Twitter and Reddit – spoke to the #UgandaHealthExhibition campaign, launched just after the pothole protest. Some of the responses, which are still being posted, show patients sleeping on hospital floors and flag medical and supply shortages and rundown equipment.

The latest protest, the #UgandaParliamentExhibition, which has been running since late February and highlights issues of suspect government, may be the most contentious yet. It has so far led to the country’s Inspector General of Government (IGG), the Ugandan government arm that investigates corruption, to open a probe into Parliament after allegations of misuse of public funds. National police spokesperson Fred Enanga and Kampala metropolitan police spokesperson Patrick Onyango referred Al Jazeera to the IGG, which did not respond to requests for comment.)

This is rare in Uganda. Health ministry spokesperson Emmanuel Ainebyoona — whom many journalists accuse of dodging their questions — responded directly to some of the posts on the Uganda health exhibition last year. He tells Al Jazeera that many of the issues flagged on X “have been addressed” and they’ve tackled health worker shortages, among other measures.

The protests have been successful in exposing nepotism and corruption in Uganda, where the media are restricted, intimidated and bribed, says Agather Atuhaire, a Ugandan journalist and activist who was recently recognised with the International Women of Courage award. She is also co-founder of Agora, a local platform for citizen engagement. Inspired by the pothole campaign, she approached Ssentongo in June about leading an exhibition “about the rotten NGOs”.

“The digital activism revolution has been huge,” says Atuhaire. “It’s a new thing. I think that’s why the authorities must be worried about it – there’s nothing they can do about it.”

‘Smear campaigns’ and threats

Amid the success of the public exhibitions, there have also been worries. The first time that Ssentongo realised his campaigns might be putting his life in danger was last April, after a second healthcare system protest.

An acquaintance alerted him to a possible threat to his life and advised Ssentongo to leave the country soon. He didn’t and then tweeted, “Should they arrest me, proceed with the exhibition. They can’t arrest the exhibition.”

Soon afterwards, he was summoned to a police station for cyberstalking. However, the case was dropped.

Atuhaire says that she has also been threatened “directly and indirectly;” she’s been followed and was warned that her phone had been tapped.

There’s also been what Ssentongo calls a “smear campaign” with tabloids running stories about alleged affairs with university students and claims of sexual harassment – all “clearly geared towards silencing me”, he says.

Rukirabashaija says, “It’s difficult to predict with certainty whether he can end up like me – tortured and exiled – but sometimes, I pity and worry about him”.

“Given the unpredictability of authoritarian regimes like this one in Uganda, their responses to dissent sometimes come indirectly in the form of financial harassment, unexplained knockdown or assassinations, poisoning, trumped up charges among other brutal things,” he says.

Nyanzi expects that Ssentongo will be arrested soon. “The threats [have] already started,” she says. “That’s how it started with me.”

In this photo taken on Monday April 10, 2017, Makerere University researcher Dr Stella Nyanzi, left, gestures in the dock at Buganda Road Court in the capital Kampala, Uganda. The Ugandan academic Nyanzi, who was imprisoned after insulting the president was freed Thursday Feb. 20, 2020, by a judge who said she had been wrongfully convicted. Frank Baine, a spokesman for the prisons service, said Stella Nyanzi was driven back to the maximum-security prison to collect her belongings after the high court ordered her release. (AP Photo)

Ssentongo has evaded the authorities so far, says Toko, because he has “a serious profile with the academia, in the diplomatic circles and even with a lot of ordinary Ugandans now … From what happened with Rukirabashaija [the government] knows that touching him can cause serious issues.”

But it’s too early to declare Ssentongo safe, the lawyer stresses. “He’s been an outright activist for less than a year,” says Toko. “However, his profile keeps growing so this may mean it’s hard now and will be even harder with time.”

Ssentongo says he can’t explain why he hasn’t been arrested yet, nor the motivation and methods of the government. “Hybrid regimes don’t easily render themselves to prediction and explanation,” he says. “How they choose their targets you can’t tell. You only pray that you survive.”

For now, he wishes to remain in Uganda. “If I have a tipping point … there are certain things I wouldn’t want to happen. I wouldn’t want to lose my life, certainly, my job, be harmed in any way physically or mentally, psychologically, by the things you go through when you go through character assassination. But … it’s the current situation that is happening at the time that determines your mental state.”

Does he have an escape plan? “Maybe I’m naive or foolhardy, but I want to tell myself that I won’t have to run,” he says thoughtfully. “I will cross that river when I get to it. I don’t think Stella or Kakwenze planned earlier to escape.”

These days, Ssentonga’s cartoons avoid subjects like people’s personal matters, including those of government figures — unless their privacy is entangled with accountability. “There are some people you have to critique carefully and certain topics that you have to be very careful … about such as LGBTQI related issues,” says Ssentongo, referring to an anti-gay law that Uganda approved a year ago. But he has broached even this subject, drawing a few cartoons about the new act and even several of the president’s son.

Ssentongo can’t say how long the exhibitions will last. And for all of their success, he finds it unsettling that digital protests may become the norm in Uganda because the freedom to take to the streets doesn’t exist. “I find it uncomfortable that many people want to look at that as the new solution,” says Ssentongo.

“They want to look at that as an approach that we should use to run away from other traditional methods. These different approaches should only be reinforcing each other but not be seen as alternatives or replace the other.”

International edition
Australia edition
Europe edition

Ian Sutherland obituary

My father, Ian Sutherland, who has died aged 75, was a secondary school teacher for more than 25 years.

Between 1989 and 2017 he taught history and English literature at Perronet Thompson school (now Kingswood academy) in Hull, and then at Andrew Marvell school (now the Marvell college) in the same city.

He was an academic everyman – highly educated and an avid bookworm, yet someone who swore like a trooper, never took himself too seriously and loved the humour of Blackadder, Reeves and Mortimer and Billy Connolly.

Born in Hull, Ian was the son of Elsie (nee Martin), who worked as a nurse before becoming a housewife, and Donald, a trawlerman. After his education at Francis Askew school in Hull, Ian worked in warehouse roles and as a bus conductor. It was only on becoming the librarian of David Lister school in Hull that he realised he wanted to enter the world of teaching.

He obtained a degree in combined studies from Humberside College, followed by a teaching qualification and then his first teaching job at Perronet Thompson school.

During his retirement years Ian slept as little as possible in order to make the most of each day. He enjoyed taking photographs of old buildings and greenery, which he used as subject matter for sketches, ink drawings and paintings. Many of his works were displayed in open exhibitions at the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull, and he had his own exhibition during Assemble Fest in 2015 along the city’s Newland Avenue.

When not at his drawing board, Ian would watch the latest films on his home cinema system and listen to all kinds of music from across the decades, everything from the Beatles, the Moody Blues and the Stranglers to Elbow, Ben Howard, Oasis, Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush. When the weather allowed, he would spend entire days in his garden, which he nurtured from scratch over the course of a decade into a colourful, calming sanctuary lined with bamboo.

He also enjoyed PlayStation games, a pint of Guinness in the local pub, and reading Folio Society books, the Guardian and the poetry of Wilfred Owen.

Ian’s 1981 marriage to Susan (nee Adamson), ended in divorce in 2003. He is survived by their two sons, me and Dave, his older sister, Ann, and his younger brother, Donald.

Other lives

Most viewed

VIDEO

What is Novel? Novelette, Novela, fiction/kinds of novel #easynotes#bsenglishlectures
Introduction to Literature
Kinds of Literature: 1- Poetry

COMMENTS

Common Types of Humor Used in Literature
Learn to identify the common types of humor and recognize them in your favorite books. From satire to surprise, there's plenty of hilarity in literature. ... One type of humor used in literature is incongruity or surprise. This type of humor can be something as simple as a ridiculous sight like a pig in a submarine, or it can be based on a ...
Humor
Definition of Humor. Humor is a literary tool that makes audiences laugh, or that intends to induce amusement or laughter. Its purpose is to break the monotony, boredom, and tedium, and make the audience's nerves relax. The writer uses different techniques, tools, words, and even full sentences in order to bring to light new and funny sides of life. . Humor is often found in literature ...
Types of Humor
Irony : A stylistic device or type of humor in which the real meaning of the words is different from (and opposite to) the literal meaning. Irony, unlike sarcasm, tends to be ambiguous, bringing two contrasting meanings into play. Wordplay : A type of humor and a literary technique focused on word usage, with the goal of creating humor.
20 Types and Forms of Humor
4. Dark/Gallows/Morbid: Grim or depressing humor dealing with misfortune and/or death and with a pessimistic outlook. 5. Deadpan/Dry: Delivered with an impassive, expressionless, matter-of-fact presentation. 6. Droll: From the Dutch word meaning "imp"; utilizes capricious or eccentric humor. 7.
Humor in Literature
Table of Contents. Humor in literature is a powerful and versatile literary device that transcends cultural and temporal boundaries, infusing narratives with wit, amusement, and intellectual depth. Authors employ humor to engage readers, challenge social norms, and convey complex ideas through lighthearted and often subversive means.
Humour
comedy. black humour. joke. practical joke. frontier humour. humour, communication in which the stimulus produces amusement. In all its many-splendoured varieties, humour can be simply defined as a type of stimulation that tends to elicit the laughter reflex. Spontaneous laughter is a motor reflex produced by the coordinated contraction of 15 ...
PDF Types of Humour Used in Literature
Juvenile humour Also called sophomoric, it is the kind of humour that resorts to name calling, silliness, pranks or stunts and immature behaviour. Rare in literature, it has found a prominent place in modern movie comedies. The Three Stooges' pokes in the eyes, slaps to the head etc. are film versions of this type of humour.
Humor definition and example literary device
Humor is a literary tool that makes audiences laugh, or that intends to induce amusement or laughter. Its purpose is to break the monotony, boredom, and tedium, and make the audience 's nerves relax. The writer uses different techniques, tools, words, and even full sentences in order to bring to light new and funny sides of life.
Humor
Definition of Humor. Humor is a literary device that makes audiences laugh, or that intends to induce leisure or laughter. Its cause is to break the monotony, boredom, and tedium, and make the audience's nerves relax. The writer makes use of one-of-a-kind techniques, tools, phrases, and even full sentences that allows you to deliver to light ...
Humor
Humor. Humor is a literary device that writers use in order to make their readers or audience members laugh. It should be entertaining. Its main purpose is to entertain, amuse, and lighten the mood. It can also be used to break up a more serious storyline, relieve boredom, make a particularly dark story less foreboding, and make the audience ...
Satire vs Parody: Humor in Literature (Explained)
Step Action Novel Insight Risk Factors; 1: Define literary humor types: Literary humor types include satire and parody. Satire is a form of humor that uses irony, exaggeration, and mockery to criticize and ridicule societal issues. Parody, on the other hand, is a comedic imitation of a specific work or genre.: None: 2: Explain irony in satire: Irony is a key element in satire.
Comedy
Comedy appears in many art forms, including books, movies, plays, improvisation, and more. As a literary device, the comedy features recurring formulas that appeal to readers. Some examples of these comedy types are: Situational Comedy: It is also called a sitcom and comprises a comedy play and characters playing episodes after episodes.
Satire
Satire is the use of humor, irony, sarcasm, or ridicule to criticize something or someone. Public figures, such as politicians, are often the subject of satire, but satirists can take aim at other targets as well—from societal conventions to government policies. Satire is an entertaining form of social commentary, and it occurs in many forms ...
Humor in literature
Abstract. This chapter considers applications of the linguistics of humor to literary texts. It considers in particular applications of the Semantic-Script Theory of Humor (SSTH) and the General theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH), under two approaches: the expansionist approach, which applies the SSTH as is to larger texts, and the revisionist approach, which introduces a set of other tools for the ...
Satire in Literature
It has been used throughout human history, in many cultures, and in various types of art. This lesson focuses on the use of satire in literature, which is defined as the use of humor in prose and ...
Satire in Literature: Definition & Examples
Satire Definition. Satire (SAH-tie-urr) uses humor and exaggeration to criticize something or someone, typically a public figure, social norm, or government policy.The term can describe both the genre of satirical writing and the literary device of satire, which a writer might utilize in a particular scene or passage of a work that isn't a wholly satirical piece.
Humour in Children's and Young Adult Literature: The Work ...
For this purpose, the theories of humour in children's literature and the classifications of types of humour offered by different researchers are used as a starting point, and a mixed model of analysis applicable to Bachelet's work as a whole is proposed. In addition, the analysis of each of the picturebooks is based on the most recent ...
Different Types of Comedy in Literature
That is why a reference to the broad categories or types of comic plays is useful and desirable.. Romantic Comedy. The romantic comedy or the comedy of romance and humour is often used to describe the type of comedy which Shakespeare used. This is the type of play which imaginatively creates an idyllic world replete with young lovers, stern but ultimately understanding parents, a pleasant ...
18+ Types Of Humor: What They Are & When They're Used
Types of Humor in Literature. Here are some of the common types of humor in literature. 1. Surprise. Surprise humor is a type of humor that relies on the unexpected or unusual. It can be used for comedic or dramatic effects and can be found in fiction, poetry, and drama. Surprise humor can be used to surprise the reader, the character, or the ...
Comedic genres
Comedy can be divided into multiple genres based on the source of humor, the method of delivery, and the context in which it is delivered. These classifications overlap, and most comedians can fit into multiple genres. For example, deadpan comics often fall into observational comedy, or into black comedy or blue comedy to contrast the morbidity, or offensiveness of the joke with a lack of emotion.
Different Types of Humor
One wonders what are various types of humor in writing? Writers have been genius in conveying emotions through various methods of humor. Some types of verbal humor that are often used in literature are pun, malapropism, spoonerism, mixed metaphor, satire etc. Let us take a look at some of the types of Humor.
Humor in literature
Contents. Theory of humor and practice of humor research: Editor's notes and thoughts. Psychology of humor. A primer for the linguistics of humor. Undertaking the comparative study of humor. Humor in anthropology and folklore. Philosophy and religion. Literature and humor. Humor and popular culture.
Irony
Irony is a literary device or event in which how things seem to be is in fact very different from how they actually are. If this seems like a loose definition, don't worry—it is. Irony is a broad term that encompasses three different types of irony, each with their own specific definition: verbal irony , dramatic irony, and situational irony.
'Humour is powerful': Cartoons take on Uganda's repressive government
Many in Uganda now use a pseudonym on social media, says Isaac Tibasiima, an assistant lecturer in the Department of Literature at Makerere University, who has taught with Ssentonga.
Ian Sutherland obituary
Last modified on Wed 27 Mar 2024 13.50 EDT. My father, Ian Sutherland, who has died aged 75, was a secondary school teacher for more than 25 years. Between 1989 and 2017 he taught history and ...

Common Types of Humor Used in Literature

Surprise and Incongruity

Self-Deprecating Humor

Situational Humor

Irony as Humor

Understatement in Humor

Overstatement or Hyperbole

Humorous Satire

The Why of Humor

Types of Humor

Literary devices that create humor

Five ways to be funny with words

Setup and Switcheroo humor

Additional information on humor

Share this:

Download our printable newsletter!

New Articles

Visit our other sites!

Excellence in Literature Links

Excellence in Literature Awards

Resources by Category

New Resources

Humor in Literature

Introduction: Humor in Literature

Examples of Humor in Literature

Benefits of Using Humor in Literature

Humor in Literature and Literary Theories

Related posts:

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Definition of Humor

Types of Humor

Examples of Humor in Literature

Example #2: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (By Mark Twain)

Example #3: To Kill a Mockingbird (By Harper Lee)

Example #4: Great Expectations (By Charles Dickens)

Function of Humor

Satire vs Parody: Humor in Literature (Explained)

What are the Different Types of Literary Humor?

Definition of Comedy

Examples of Comedy Types

Examples of Shakespearean Comedies

Famous Examples of Modern Comedies

Difference Between Comedy and Tragedy

Elements of Comedy in Literature

Elements of Shakespearean Comedy

Use of Comedy in Sentences

Examples of Comedy in Literature

Example 1: Lysistrata by Aristophanes

Example 2: Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

Example 3: An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

Synonyms of Comedy

Post navigation

14 Humor in literature

Signed in as

Personal account

Institutional access

IP based access

Sign in through your institution

Sign in with a library card

Society Members

Sign in through society site

Sign in using a personal account

Viewing your signed in accounts

Signed in but can't access content

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

What is Satire? Definition, Usage, and Literary Examples

The Elements of Satire:

The Types of Satire

The Function of Satire

Satire and Other Devices of Critique

Satire in Popular Culture

Satire and Freedom of Speech

Notable Satirists

Examples of Satire in Literature

Further Resources on Satire

Related Terms

Humour in Children’s and Young Adult Literature: The Work of Gilles Bachelet

Cite this article

Similar content being viewed by others

The sociocognitive approach in critical discourse studies and the phenomenological sociology of knowledge: intersections