Comic Relief

Comic relief is commonly defined as the use of humor in parts of a serious or nonhumorous text, in particular in tragedy or dramatic texts, to relieve the tension or dark mood of the main narrative. Comic [Page 154]relief is not to be confused with tragicomedy, which is a tragedy with a happy ending or which mixes tragic and comedic elements. Likewise, comic relief should not be confused with the widespread use of humor and irony in postmodern literature, in which the humor or irony serve to set the tone of the narrative and are an integral part of the narrative's setting. This entry gives examples of comic relief and discusses its purposes.

Examples of comic relief can be found in almost all literary genres. The characters of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet are only one of many examples in Shakespeare. The character of Thersites in Homer's Iliad can also be seen as comic relief, as can some passages, such as Hera's seduction of Zeus. The idiosyncrasies of various detectives like Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, or Miss Marple can be seen as comic relief in detective novels, as can the bumbling sidekick (e.g., Dr. Watson, at least in some film versions). In Dante's Inferno, some of the descriptions of the devils' behavior provide comic relief, for example, in canto XXI, the devil Barbariccia signals to his troop of devils to start “escorting” Dante and Virgil by “making a trumpet of his ass” (farting). It should be noted that this occurs at the end of the canto, which has described the torture of the sinners guilty of cheating and swindling who are immersed in boiling pitch.

Humor relief is often found in film: The characters of the androids R2D2 and C3P0 in the movie Star Wars as well as Data in the television series Star Trek the Next Generation often provide comic relief in the dramatic action of the main texts. It is also found in violent action films.

Comic relief has also been described outside of literary texts, for example in academic lectures, where it relieves the tension and fatigue of classroom work. Along these lines, humor is seen as a coping strategy providing relief from stress or hardship. It has even been argued that comic relief is found in life, for example in its use by people with disabilities to defuse awkward situations. In this sense, the concept of comic relief loses any specificity and becomes a synonym for the “relief theory” of humor, along the lines of the claim that humor provides a relief from life's hardships.

The concept of serious relief has been proposed to mirror comic relief to indicate serious or nonhu-morous passages in otherwise comic texts, although it is not clear if the function of serious relief would be likewise to relieve the audience of a humorous text of the tension of too much humor. The example discussed is a passage of about 2,400 words in Oscar Wilde's Lord Arthur Savile's Crime in which, unlike in the rest of the story, no obvious humor occurs.

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