Comedy of Manners

Comedy of manners refers to a style of comedy that centers on the behavior and mores of society. Characters in a comedy of manners are usually types such as the fop, the aspiring wit, and the jealous husband rather than individuals; these stock characters are the means of satirizing the follies of the world they, the playwright, and the audience inhabit. The plot, usually driven by clever intrigues and conflicts fueled by lust and avarice, is less important than witty, polished dialogue. Although literary scholars disagree about the origin of the genre, there is broad consensus that the comedy of manners reached its zenith in the comedies of the English Restoration (1660–1700). The English comedy of manners enjoyed revivals in the eighteenth century and in the late nineteenth century. Modern playwrights who have written comedies of manners include Noel Coward (1899–1973), Neil Simon (1927–), and Joe Orton (1933–1967).

Brief History

Menander (c. 342–c. 292 BCE) is sometimes considered to be the earliest writer of the comedy of manners, but it may be more accurate to view the Greek dramatist as a precursor of the genre. Menander’s focus was a particular class, the bourgeoisie of fourth century Athens, and he makes use of embellished plots and stock characters such as the crafty slave, the devoted wife, and the young lovers. His influence on the comedy of manners is an indirect one, filtered through the work of Roman playwrights Plautus (254–184 BCE) and Terence (c. 185–159 BCE). These Roman dramatists in turn influenced writers of the English Renaissance. For example, Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, with its elaborate, contrived plot and subplot, which link the play to the comedy of manners, uses Plautus as a major source. But it is Much Ado About Nothing, with its comic intrigues, witty dialogue, and sexual innuendos, that is most frequently described as a comedy of manners by scholars.

The most direct line of descent for Restoration comedies of manners runs from the plays of Molière (1622–1673), France’s most famous writer of comedy. In The School for Wives (1662), Tartuffe (1664), and The Misanthrope (1666), Molière lampooned the affectations and duplicities of his society. He used wit, exaggeration, and stock characters and ridiculed the flaws and foolishness of his age in order to reveal them. The critics who responded to the exposure of religious hypocrisy in Tartuffe with demands for censorship suggest Molière’s satire struck its target.

The restoration of the English monarch in 1660 was accompanied by a restoration of the theater, which had been closed from 1664 to 1660. Restoration theatre was a response to Puritan austerity. Plays were prodigal and frequently immoral according to the strict moral codes of Puritan rule. Although tragedies were produced, comedy was king, and the most popular comedic form was the comedy of manners.

Charles II, shaped by his years at the French court of Louis XIV, was a womanizing ruler who wanted a sophisticated court where style, art, repartee, and sensuality were valued. Because the leading characters in the comedy of manners were patterned after members of aristocratic society, the most frequently recurring types included the promiscuous rake, the fashion-obsessed fop, the faithless wife, and the cuckolded husband. Love (often illicit), sexual subterfuge, marriage, adultery, and money were common themes, and witty dialogue, both as a dramatic device and for the audience’s delight, was a defining characteristic.

George Etherege (1635–1692) is generally recognized as the father of Restoration comedy. Etheredge, in his first comedy, The Comical Revenge; Or, Love in a Tub, demonstrated that Molière could serve as inspiration for English plays. Etheredge’s final play, The Man of Mode (1676), widely praised as his best work, is a brilliant model of the characters, themes, and language of the comedy of manners.

Other writers of the Restoration comedy of manners include William Wycherley (1640–1716), John Vanbrugh (1664–1726), William Congreve (1670–1729), and George Farquhar (1678–1707). Wycherly, whose satire can be dark, based his third play, The Country Wife (1675), on several of Molière’s plays, and based The Plain Dealer (1676) on The Misanthrope. George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706) was the most performed play of its time, but The Country Wife has been a favorite revival choice from the eighteenth century through the twenty-first, including a 1977 BBC production with Anthony Andrews as Horner, the archetypal rake, and Helen Mirren as Margery Pinchwife, the titular wife who exchanges innocence for the ability to lie and cheat.

Congreve’s masterpiece, The Way of the World (1700), which has been called the quintessential comedy of manners, includes rakes and fops and love as a game, and other conventions of the genre, but this play, written late in the period when a reaction against the cynicism of earlier plays had begun, features a redeemed rake and a look at marriage that allows for true love even as it mocks the commercial aspects of the institution.

The popularity of the comedy of manners declined as the taste for sentimental comedy rose in the eighteenth century. However, by the 1770s, the genre experienced a revival. Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer (1773) with its tangled plot of misdirection and mistaken identities mounted a direct challenge to sentimental comedy and restored the luster to the comedy of manners. Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775) and The School for Scandal (1777) have been favorably compared to those of Congreve. Sheridan’s plays, like Goldsmith’s, are reactions against the sentimental comedy. They possess the convoluted plot, the stock characters, and the sparkling wit characteristic of Restoration comedies, and the themes include courtship, marriage, love, and the strategems people employ to achieve their desires. But Sheridan’s comedies are free of the lasciviousness that generated the backlash against Restoration comedy.

A century after Sheridan, Oscar Wilde's skewering of the Victorian upper class was hailed as a superb example of the comedy of manners. David Hirst, in Comedy of Manners (1979), identifies The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) as the play that realizes "the full potential of the dramatic genre" of comedy of manners.

Impact

In the twentieth century, the comedy of manners was kept alive through revivals of plays from earlier eras and through new work from playwrights such as Noel Coward, Neil Simon, and Joe Orton. Coward’s best comedy of manners is generally thought to be Private Lives (1930), in which he satirizes expatriate English people in France. Susan Koprince traces the roots of Neil Simon’s plays to the comedies of Menander. Critics compare Joe Orton to Oscar Wilde, and Orton uses the conventional comedy of manners themes of marriage and money in his plays such as Loot (1965).

The tradition of the comedy of manners has also been continued through movies and television. The tradition can be traced in films ranging from George Cukor’s 1940 adaptation of Philip Barry's play The Philadelphia Story (1939), which centers on mainline Philadelphia society in the 1930s, to Paul Mazursky’s Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986), with its look at what Steve Vineberg terms "the conspicuously consumptive Beverly Hills aristocracy."

David Pierson argues that the situation comedies of American television are direct descendants of classic comedies of manners because the TV series, like the plays of Molière, Congreve, and Sheridan, reveal characters adhering to, fighting with, and evading prevailing social codes. Situation comedies from The Beverly Hillbillies (1962–1971) to Beverly Hills 90210 (1990–2000), from Seinfeld (1989–1998) and Friends (1994–2004) to The Big Bang Theory (2007–) have been labeled comedies of manners.

Bibliography

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Fest, Kerstin. "Dramas of Idleness: The Comedy of Manners in the Works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Oscar Wilde." Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature. Ed. Monika Fludernik and Miriam Nandi. New York: Palgrave, 2014. 154–73. Print.

Fink, Edward J. "Writing the Simpsons: A Case Study of Comic Theory." Journal of Film & Video 65.1/2 (2013): 43–55. Academic Search Premier. Web. 11 June 2015.

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Koprince, Susan. Understanding Neil Simon. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2002. Print.

Mather, Rachel R. The Heirs of Jane Austen: Twentieth-century Writers of the Comedy of Manners. New York: Lang, 1996. Print.

Pierson, David. "American Situation Comedies and the Modern Comedy of Manners." The Sitcom Reader: America Viewed and Skewed. Ed. Mary M. Dalton and Laura R. Linder. Albany: State U of New York P, 2005. 35–48. Print.

Stevens, Donna. "The Great Comedy of Manners of 2023." Slate, 23 Dec. 2023,

Thompson, Peggy. Coyness and Crime in Restoration Comedy: Women’s Desire, Deception, and Agency. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2013. Print.

Vineberg, Steve. High Comedy in American Movies: Class and Humor from the 1920s to the Present. Lanham: Rowman, 2005. Print.