tragicomedy

tragicomedy

Literary genre consisting of dramas that combine elements of tragedy and comedy. Plautus coined the Latin word tragicocomoedia to denote a play in which gods and mortals, masters and slaves reverse the roles traditionally assigned to them. In the Renaissance and after, tragicomedy was mainly comic, though Elizabethan and Jacobean tragedies almost always include some comic or grotesque elements. Modern tragicomedy is sometimes used synonymously with absurdist drama, which suggests that laughter is the only response left to people faced with an empty and meaningless existence.