Comedy

Comedy is a dramatic genre in which reality is depicted in a laughable, exposing light: through satire, humor, and irony it ridicules human vices, social shortcomings, and absurd situations; the conflict usually ends happily. One distinguishes the comedy of character, of situation, of everyday life, and of satire. The most important dramatist of ancient Greek Old Comedy was Aristophanes; unsurpassed examples were given by Molière (Tartuffe, The Bourgeois Gentleman), Carlo Goldoni, and Nikolai Gogol. In Ukrainian literature the classic comedy was created by Ivan Kotliarevsky (The Muscovite-Sorcerer), Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko (Courtship at Honcharivka), and Ivan Karpenko-Kary (Martyn Borulia, One Hundred Thousand, The Master — satirical comedies about the ruinous power of money), and in the 1920s by Mykola Kulish (Myna Mazailo — a satire on philistinism and Russification).