X-Nico

3 unusual facts about Comedy of manners


Comedy of manners

In the 20th century, the comedy of manners reappeared in the plays of the British dramatists Noël Coward (Hay Fever, 1925) and Somerset Maugham and the novels of P.G. Wodehouse, as well as various British sitcoms.

Other contemporary examples include Douglas Carter Beane's As Bees in Honey Drown, The Country Club and The Little Dog Laughed.

The term comedy of menace, which British drama critic Irving Wardle based on the subtitle of The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace (1958), by David Campton, is a jocular play-on-words derived from the "comedy of manners" (menace being manners pronounced with a somewhat Judeo-English accent).


Drawing room

Drawing room comedy is also sometimes called the "comedy of manners." Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and several of the plays of Noël Coward are typical works of the genre.

Précieuses

The précieuses remembered through the filter of Molière's one-act satire of them in Les précieuses ridicules (1659), a bitter comedy of manners that brought Molière and his company to the attention of Parisians, after years of touring the provinces, and attracted the patronage of Louis XIV; it still plays well today.


see also

Michael Jayston

Jayston played Neville Badger in the 1989 television adaptation of David Nobbs's comedy of manners A Bit of a Do.