| Term | Definition |
|---|
| flyting | "word duels" (scolding in Scottish); improvised, strongly rhythmical, very personal, must follow closely and in proper sentence structure, held in public |
| comedy | reintegraton; the need of (family, social order) drives the plot |
| satire | fragmentation; chaos, institutions lose their meaning, |
| horatian | light-hearted; speaker is indulgent, tolerant, amused, witty; gentle ridicule to the absurdities and foilles; aims to have reader enjoy themself |
| juvenalian | bitter, mean; formal satire in which speaker attacks error with contempt; realisitc satire; very harsh |
| burlesque | ridiculous exaggeration and distortion; a serious subject treated frivolously, frivolous subject treated seriously |
| litotes | when a writer uses a statement in the negative to create the effect; a type of understatement |
| travesty | the debasement of a serious subject; treating a dignified topic in a silly or inappropriate manner; uses a mock serious tone |
| wit | denotes originality, ingenuity and mental acuity by using paradoxes, clever erbal expressions and coining concise or deft phrases; elements designed to make audience laugh; basically humor |
| parody | an imitation of the serious manner and characteristic features of a particular work; a humorous imitation of something famous |
| pun | a clever and intentional play on words; use of a word to suggest two or more of its meanings or a similar word |
| mockery | repeating with a negative tone |
| spoonerism | a transposition of usually initial sounds of two or more words |
| mock epic | turning something trivial into something epic |
| malapropism | misusing words to create a comic effect or characterize the speaker as being too confused, ignorant or flustered to say word correctly; involves the confusion of words that sound similar but have different meanings |
| farce | a form of humor based on exaggerated, improbable incongruities; shift between action and emotion, slapstick comedy |
| lampoon | a crude, coarse, bitter satire ridiculing a person's appearance or character |
| invective | attacking, insulting or denouncing a person, topic or institution, using negative emotional language |
| double entendre | double meaning |
| spoof | comedy that satirizes behaviors and attitudes in contemporary life |
| understatement | the opposite of exaggeration; matter-of-factly |
| romance | wish-fulfillment; main character desires something, then gets it |
| tragedy | disintegration; a person is separated from family/social order, a govn't falls apart |
| purpose of satire | through laughter and invective, is to cure, folly and punish evil but if it does not achieve this purpose, it is content to jeer at folly and to expose evil to bitter contempt |
| purpose of comedy | to evoke laughter; to preserve |
| purpose of invective and lampoon | to destroy |
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