Comedy

Comedy is "a genre of dramatic works intended to be humorous or amusing by inducing laughter." The Greek kōmōidía joins kômos, "revel," to ōidḗ, "song," and the older senses are structural: Greeks and Romans used "comedy" only for stage-plays with happy endings, the Middle Ages extended it to narrative poems with happy endings, Dante's La Commedia among them, and only later did it become tied to any performance meant to cause laughter. Aristotle called comedy "an imitation of men worse than the average," its ridiculousness "a mistake or deformity not productive of pain or harm to others," and divided it into farce, romantic comedy and satire; an Elizabethan comedy simply meant a play with a happy ending.

The structural residue is what a novelist keeps: comedy is an ending first and a joke second, the promise that conflict resolves without ruin. The romantic comedy still runs on that contract, while satire turns the laughter outward.