Knowra Burlesque Burlesque Burlesque is comic imitation that mismatches a subject and its style: a serious subject receives trivial treatment, or a trivial one receives elevated treatment.
Parody : Parody imitates a recognizable work, style, or genre to expose or ridicule its conventions. Like burlesque, parody depends on imitation, but it targets recognizable conventions more directly.
Ancient Greek comedy : Athenian stage comedy, especially Old Comedy, used fantasy, parody, and political ridicule. Its comic treatment of public figures and literary conventions supplied early precedents.
Hudibrastic verse : Hudibrastic verse is comic English poetry using irregular rhyming couplets and deliberately awkward diction. Samuel Butler used it to burlesque heroic and philosophical subjects in a low style.
Lampoon : A lampoon is a sharp, often personal attack that ridicules a person or institution. A lampoon targets its subject directly; burlesque is defined by a mismatch of style and subject.
Travesty : Travesty treats a serious subject in a low, comic style, often through distortion and incongruity. This is the specific low-style form of burlesque’s defining mismatch.
Aristophanes : Aristophanes was an Athenian comic playwright whose surviving plays include political and literary satire. His plays parody tragic conventions and elevate comic fantasy into elaborate dramatic forms.
The Beggar’s Opera : John Gay’s 1728 ballad opera sets criminal characters and London life against conventions of Italian opera. It burlesques operatic grandeur by placing elevated musical conventions among ordinary and criminal figures.
Irony : Irony is a contrast between apparent and intended meaning, expectation, or outcome. Irony can support burlesque, but it does not require imitation or stylistic mismatch.
Mock-heroic : Mock-heroic writing applies the elevated conventions of epic to trivial subjects for comic effect. It is the high-style form of burlesque, especially in verse.
Renaissance drama : Renaissance drama encompasses plays written and performed in Europe from the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries. Its transformations of classical genres helped burlesque flourish on the early modern stage.
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