Tragicomedy

Tragicomedy is a literary genre that blends aspects of both tragic and comic forms: a tragic play with enough comic elements to lighten the mood, or a serious play that ends happily. Plautus coined the term jokingly in the prologue to Amphitryon, because gods, kings and a slave shared one comedy; the Renaissance made it a rule-bound genre, with John Fletcher defining it as a play that "wants deaths" yet comes near them, and Shakespeare's late romances qualify. In the twentieth century the mode came to dominate: Friedrich Dürrenmatt called tragicomedy the inevitable genre of the century, and it flourished in postwar British theatre through Beckett, Pinter and Stoppard.

For novel and web-serial writers, tragicomedy is a tonal contract to name deliberately: the reader must be allowed to laugh and hurt in the same chapter, which is tragedy's stakes told with comedy's timing. Alternating registers also keeps a long serial from flattening into one note.