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noun
Comic  n.  A comedian. (Obs.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Comic" Quotes from Famous Books



... I must answer that your accusations are at once both true and false. I have been foolish, but it was not in despising the constrictions and falsity of the academic world. I have flouted authority, but it was not the authority of the movingpicture heroes, whose comic errors are perpetuated for generations, like those of Pasteur, or so quietly repudiated their repudiation passes unnoticed, like those of Lister, in order to protect a vested interest. The authority I have flouted, in my arrogance as you call it, is that authority all scientists recognized ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore

... incidents of this "relief" were pathetic, and some were comic. One day the banker and his staff, which was composed of his wife and their friends, were startled by the apparition in the front office of a group of American plains Indians, Blackfeet and Sioux, all in the most Fenimore Cooperish of full Indian dress, feathers and skins, ...
— Herbert Hoover - The Man and His Work • Vernon Kellogg

... solo sung, by way of novelty, behind the Curtain, by TURIDDU,—(what a name! like the commencement of a comic nonsensical chorus! TURIDDU ought to have been in love with Tulla Lieti and have behaved badly to Tralala. "But this is another story.")—the choruses, and most of the concerted pieces are charming; and, above all, the intermezzo, which, were the piece ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, December 19, 1891 • Various

... He assumed a comic expression. 'Unhappily, not a thief,' he objected. 'This young lady prevented me from appropriating your diamonds. Convey, the wise call it. I wanted to take your jewel-case—and she put me off with a sandwich-tin. I wanted to make an honest penny out of Mrs. Evelegh; and—she confronts me ...
— Miss Cayley's Adventures • Grant Allen

... morning I rose early to see Allan off Just at the last moment Carrie came down in her pretty white wrapper to bid him good-by. Allan was strapping up his portmanteau in the hall, and shook his head at her in comic disapproval. "Fie, what pale cheeks, Miss Carrie! One would think you had been burning the midnight oil." I wonder if Allan's jesting words approached the truth, for Carrie's face flushed suddenly, and she did ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... me?" said Ned, swaying himself to and fro as he endeavoured to look steadily in the face of his friend; "fire away, shen. I'm sh' man f'r conv'shash'n, grave or gay, comic—'r—shublime, 's all the shame ...
— Fighting the Flames • R.M. Ballantyne

... inebriate roll in all his movements, that lead one mechanically to peer into the darkness of his den with the view of seeing what the Bar fixings are like. It would be a rare freak to treat the huge fellow to a cask of rum and sugar, and then stand by with a comic artist, and take down for PUNCHINELLO the traits of BRUIN the Grizzly on a "bender," and with all his repressed nature brought out by ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 36, December 3, 1870 • Various

... the comic weekly press, not much falls to be said. It may be separated into three divisions. First, Punch (threepence), which for several decades has stood, and still stands, quite alone. It is usual to say that Punch has of late years been steadily losing its reputation, ...
— Journalism for Women - A Practical Guide • E.A. Bennett

... speech- adaptation, and to many ears are a pleasant relief from the fixed jingle of the perfect rhyme; whereas his false ear-rhymes ask to have their slight but indispensable differences obliterated in the reading, and thus they expose their defect, which is of a disagree- able and vulgar or even comic quality. He did not escape full criticism and ample ridicule for such things in his lifetime; and in '83 he wrote: 'Some of my rhymes I regret, but they are past changing, grubs in amber: there are only a few of these; others are unassailable; ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins

... various voyages she "did not receive him kindly;" but, contrariwise, sometimes received him on the side of "a poker," on the end of "a dirk" or at the muzzle of "pistol." Moreover—and this is dolefully comic—"she repeatedly left this deponent imprisoned in the house for hours under lock and key!" What a situation for a foaming mariner, accustomed to roam the vastness of the majestic, the free, the uncontrollable ...
— Danger! A True History of a Great City's Wiles and Temptations • William Howe

... final quarter of the nineteenth century an American adaptation of a French comic opera, 'La Mascotte', was for two or three seasons very popular. The heroine of its story was believed to have the gift of bringing luck. So it is that Americans now call any animal which has been adopted by a racing crew or by an athletic team (or even ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 5 - The Englishing of French Words; The Dialectal Words in Blunden's Poems • Society for Pure English

... Russia in a troika, with Selifan the coachman as a sort of Russian Sancho Panza, gives Gogol a magnificent opportunity to reveal his genius as a painter of Russian panorama, peopled with characteristic native types commonplace enough but drawn in comic relief. "The comic," explained the author yet at the beginning of his career, "is hidden everywhere, only living in the midst of it we are not conscious of it; but if the artist brings it into his art, on the stage say, we shall roll about with laughter ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... Elegiac and Lyric Poets. Prose Writers. Philosophers and Historians. Lyric Poets, Dramatic Poets. Comic Poets. ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet

... Vere just then that he could hardly have explained, master though he was of explanation of the feelings of man. It seemed to him that all the purity, and the beauty, and the whimsical unselfconsciousness, and the touchingness of youth that is divine, appeared in that little, almost comic action of the girl. He loved her for the action, because she was able to perform it just like that. And something in him, suddenly adored youth in a way that ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens

... were probably wreathed with golden vines and bunches of grapes made of amethysts, as we know of a Persian tent so adorned, and the whole idea of the erection was evidently fresh from the East.[448] A frieze eight cubits high was composed of niches containing groups of tragic, comic, and Satyric figures "in their natural garb;" and nymphs and golden tripods from Delphi. The tent was separated from the outer peristyle by scarlet hangings, covered with choice skins of wild beasts. Upon these were hung the celebrated Sikyonian pictures, the heritage of the Ptolemaic dynasty, ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford

... mended." Later in 1701 she brought out at Drury Lane her only comedy, Love at a Loss, dedicated in most enthusiastic terms to Lady Piers, to whom "I owe the greatest Blessing of my Fate," the privilege of a share in her friendship. Love at a Loss was made up of the comic scenes introduced into an old tragedy which the author had failed to get acted. This is not a fortunate method of construction, and the town showed no favour to Love at a Loss. The first and only public ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... &c. The good-humour of the poet upon occasion of this parody has been noticed in the Preface. "It's all very well for once," said he afterwards, in comic confidence, at his villa at Petersham, "but don't do it again. I had been almost forgotten when you revived me; and now all the newspapers and reviews ring with this fashionable, trashy author.'" The sand and "filings of glass," mentioned in the ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith

... turning round, and making a comic threatening gesture with her floury fingers; 'you ought not to have come till we were fixed. Go and sit in your chair ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge

... 'Old Mooney' in him, but it must be driven out of everyone. His concerts, in which he took a leading part, became celebrated in the district, deputations called to beg for another, and once in these words, 'Wull 'ee gie we a concert over our way when the comic young gentleman ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley

... Miss McQuinch, when her turn came, played worse than before, and the audience, longing for another negro melody, paid little attention to her. Marian sang a religious song, which was received with the respect usually accorded to a dull sermon. The clergyman read a comic essay of his own composition, and Mrs. Fairfax recited an ode to Mazzini. The concertinists played an arrangement of a quartet by Onslow. The working men and women of Wandsworth gaped, and those who sat near the door began ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw

... been certainly guilty of forgery. But to get up at once and leave his seat because Melmotte had placed himself by his side, did not suit the turn of his mind. He looked round to his neighbour on the right with a half-comic look of misery, and then prepared himself to bear his punishment, whatever ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope

... little soldiers. Behind them followed a tiny little creature not higher than one's knee, with his mother's wooden shoes on his feet, and wearing a paper cap on his head. The whole band was in high spirits, and sang with a ringing voice a national air, according to the comic version which was in ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland

... in well doing, and for the last few days Hooker's Bend had switched from its intellectual staple of conversation to consider the comedy of Tump Pack's undoing. The incident held undeniably comic elements. For Tump to start out carrying a forty-four, meaning to blow a rival out of his path, and to wind up hard at work, picking cotton at nothing a day for a man whose offer of three dollars a day he had just refused, certainly held ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling

... thought drift over the details of her home-coming. Li Ho had been so surprised. His consternation at seeing her had been comic. But he had asked no questions, and had given her breakfast in hospitable haste. In the cottage nothing was altered. It was as if she had been away overnight. And against this changelessness she knew herself changed. She was outside of it now. ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

... strengthen them for the return journey. Ron's knowledge of the native dialect was so slight that he fell back upon the more stately phraseology of the early English poets, introducing a strange Scotch term now and again with irresistibly comic effect. ...
— Big Game - A Story for Girls • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... Gomez was not a whit confused, and merely touched his face with comic gestures, feigning a dumb submission, which made the others laugh. Amalia, seeing the conversation was getting dangerous, ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds

... which in a year or two leaves them cracked and awful. This widespread lack of voice preservation is the result of a want of public musical training. With all the training in Paris, Dawn would never have been a Dolores or Calve, but with other ability she had sufficient voice to make a success in comic opera or in concerts as second fiddle ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin

... marrow. Her cooking surprised me. I had warned young Bute that it might be necessary to regard this dinner rather as a joke than as an evening meal, and was prepared myself to extract amusement from it rather than nourishment. My disappointment was agreeable. One can always imagine a comic dinner. ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome

... the cruel carelessness of childhood, shared the contempt of his father and grandfather for the little peddler. He made fun of him, and treated him as a comic figure; he worried him with stupid teasing, which his uncle bore with his unshakable phlegm. But Jean-Christophe loved him, without quite knowing why. He loved him first of all as a plaything with which he did what he liked. He loved him also because he always gave him something ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland

... not a child's story, nor a comic view of household life,—as some might think from its title—but a domestic novel, full of the delights of home, of pure thoughts, and gentle virtues. It has also sufficient complications to keep the thread of ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... 'Edinburgh' articles are of a very slight texture, though the reader is rewarded by an occasional turn of characteristic quaintness. The criticism is of the most simple-minded kind; but here and there crops up a comment which is irresistibly comic. Here, for example, is a quaint passage from a ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... question. We felt light-hearted on Saturday, and profoundly satisfied, that we were too intrepid for the enemy. Our patrols kept vainly seeking to provoke a quarrel. At the camps the "Death of Nelson," and "comic" melodies not less doleful, were rendered with much feeling. At the hospital, the wounded were doing well, and one man was quite himself again. They were extremely well tended, and thanks to public solicitude, ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan

... brass-band selections, comic songs, and variety items, blared out with ceaseless reiteration; and as the men-folk smoked and talked cattle, and the wee baby—a bonnie fair child—toddled about, smiling and contented, the women-folk spoke of their life "out-back," and listening, ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn

... a part of my own: it is a budget of Venetian nobodies who wished to be somebodies; but paradox is not the only means employed. It is of a serio-comic character, gives genuine portraits in copperplate, and grave lists of works; but satirical accounts. The astrologer Andrew Argoli[185] is there, and his son; both of whom, with some of the others, have place in modern works ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan

... interesting as studies of manners, and for the pictures they afford of the priesthood of modern Ireland in the pleasantest light. If the stories of Miss Somerville and "Martin Ross" are related to the comic stories of the old novelists of the gentry, those of Canon Sheehan must be associated with the work of the older novelists who wrote more or less in the spirit of the peasantry, that is, with Gerald Griffin, the ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox

... "The Cornwalliad, an Heroic Comic Poem," was begun in March, 1779, and was continued through several numbers. It described various incidents in the British retreat to New York after the battles ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth

... annum. He expends it principally in beautifying his delightful summer residence in Mackerelville. It has been his misfortune to pass many years of his life in a lunatic asylum, the unhappy result of organizing plans for American Comic Papers. All is joy and peace with him now, however; he looks hopefully forward to the time when PUNCHINELLO shall have attained to his legitimate rank of the Foremost Journal in the Nation. Meanwhile he lunches ...
— Punchinello Vol. II., No. 30, October 22, 1870 • Various

... glint of the Midas sun. The streets are a crush of jesters and maskers, Jim Crows and clowns, ballet girls and Mephistos, Indians and monkeys; of wild and sudden flashes of music, of glittering pageants and comic ones, of befeathered and belled horses; a dream of colour and melody and fantasy gone wild in an effervescent bubble of beauty that shifts and changes and passes kaleidoscope-like before ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar

... from Cork is Blarney Castle—a noble ruin, towering above a beautiful little lake, all surrounded by delightful, though neglected grounds—made famous by an old comic song, called ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood

... places them below the rest of their species. The unconcealed hostility with which they regard us is a marvellous contrast to the natural or purchasable civility or servility which prevails on British steamers. It has its comic side too, and we are content to laugh at it, and at all the other oddities of ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird

... for us, so Miriam played on the piano, and sang with me on the guitar half a dozen songs, and then the other commenced. I don't know when I have been more amused. There was an odd, piney-woods dash about him that was exceedingly diverting, and he went through comic, sentimental, and original songs with an air that showed his whole heart was in it. Judging from the number of youth too timid to venture in, who peeped at us from the windows, I should say that young ladies are curiosities ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson

... Leipzig student, and afterwards a friend of Luther, was there. Duke George of Saxony frequently attended the proceedings, and listened attentively. His court jester is said to have appeared with him, and a comic scene is mentioned as having occurred between him and Eck, to the great diversion of the meeting. Frederick the Wise was represented by one of his counsellors, ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin

... gentleman did not say at the time that he would, or would not, attempt such an exploit. Moved by Ellen's serio-comic lamentations over her losses, Gram also insinuated that she knew of places in the house in which she could make a hoard that would be hard for us to find; but the girls declared that they would like to see her try to hide a hoard away ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens

... a part, go through a part, perform a part; rehearse, spout, gag, rant; "strut and fret one's hour upon a stage"; tread the boards, tread the stage; come out; star it. Adj. dramatic; theatric, theatrical; scenic, histrionic, comic, tragic, buskined[obs3], farcical, tragicomic, melodramatic, operatic; stagy. Adv. on the stage, on the boards; on film; before the floats, before an audience; behind the scenes. Phr. fere totus mundus ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... Although strong and deep, it was very sweet and tender in its tones, and eminently suited for pathetic and sentimental songs. Indeed Jarwin's nature was so earnest, that although he had a great deal of quiet humour about him, and could enjoy comic songs very much, he never himself sang anything humorous. Now, it chanced that the Big Chief had a good ear for music, and soon became so fond of the songs which his slave was wont to hum when at work, that he used to make him sit down beside him frequently and sing for hours at a time! Fortunately, ...
— Jarwin and Cuffy • R.M. Ballantyne

... he was continually supplying himself with better editions of his favorites. In current, playful conversation with friends he quoted right and left, in brief and at length, from the classics, ancient and modern, and from the drama, tragic and comic. In his speeches, on the contrary, he quoted but little, and only when he seemed to run upon a thought already expressed by some one else with singular force and appositeness. He was the best scholar I ever met for his years and active life, and was surpassed by very few, excepting mere ...
— Oration on the Life and Character of Henry Winter Davis • John A. J. Creswell

... to his revenge him who had put out his eyes, took him home, and the punishment he inflicted upon him was sedulous instructions to virtue." Yet this truly comic paper does not probably know that it is comic, any more than the kleptomaniac knows that he steals, or than John Milton knew he was a humorist when he wrote a hymn upon the circumcision, and spent his honeymoon in composing a treatise on divorce. No more again did Goethe ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler

... little piece of verse intended to be comic, which, on the contrary, is really serious and philosophical, if you understand it. Learn it by heart, and apply it to all kinds and conditions of things, and see if it does not help you ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various

... Comedy stands in a different position. The tricks played by chance often form a principal part of the comic action.] ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley

... to make a Rogers' "Italy" for himself, just as he tried to make a "Harry and Lucy" or a "Dictionary of Minerals." On every place they passed he would write verses and prose sketches, to give respectively the romance and the reality or ridicule; for he saw the comic side of it all, keenly; and he would illustrate the series with Turneresque vignettes, drawn with the finest crowquill pen, to imitate the delicate engravings. By this he learnt more drawing in two or ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood

... exhaustion, that is, stage-playing will be of most use to us where the mind requires help and inspiration to grasp and revel in lofty moral or imaginative conceptions, or where it needs aid and sharpening to appreciate and follow the niceties of repartee, or the delicacies of comic fancy. Secondly, it follows that if this is so with the intellectual few, it must be infinitely more so with the unimaginative many of all ranks. They are not inaccessible to passion and poetry and refinement, but their minds do not go forth, as it were, to seek ...
— The Drama • Henry Irving

... Lit. Anec. viii. 548, 9, Dr. Barnard is thus described:—'In powers of conversation I never yet knew his equal. He saw infinite variety of characters, and like Shakespeare adopted them all by turns for comic effect. He carried me to London in a hired chaise; we rose from our seat, and put our heads out of the windows, while the postboy removed something under us. He supposed himself in the pillory, and addressed the populace against the government ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... only by a hair's-breadth. But they appeared anxious to make much of James, and in his absence had explained who he was to the remaining visitors, and these beheld him now with an awe which the hero found rather comic. ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham

... returned to town towards the end of 1840 he thoroughly explored the ballad literature of Seven Dials,[4] and would occasionally sing not a few of these wonderful discoveries with an effect that justified his reputation for comic singing in his childhood. We get a glimpse of his investigations in Out of the Season, where he tells us about that 'wonderful mystery, the music-shop,' with its assortment of polkas with coloured frontispieces, ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood

... common mind, and, if born in any other epoch, he would probably have done valuable (though never first rate) work; but by glancing (it will be impossible for you to do more than glance) at his illustrations of Balzac's "Contes Drolatiques," you will see further how this "drolatique," or semi-comic mask is, in the truth of it, the mask of a skull, and how the tendency to burlesque jest is both in France and England only an effervescence from the cloaca maxima of the putrid instincts which fasten themselves on national sin, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... there be scenes of distress and scenes of humor, they must either be in a double or single plot. If there be a double plot, there are in fact two. If they be in checkered scenes of serious and comic, you are obliged continually to break both the thread of the story and the continuity of the passion,—if in the same scene, as Mrs. V. seems to recommend, it is needless to observe how absurd the mixture must be, and how little adapted to answer the genuine end of any passion. It is odd to ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... Immediately following the comic picture, all the lights in the theater were turned on and a gentleman stepped on the stage ...
— The Rover Boys on a Hunt - or The Mysterious House in the Woods • Arthur M. Winfield (Edward Stratemeyer)

... comic the way people have of being so particular about the second and fourth commandments, and breaking all the rest with the greatest comfort. For me, I try to keep all the rest rather carefully, and let the second and fourth take ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin

... statesmen, and who in consequence, if they unhappily choose or are compelled to take part in politics, are exposed to those strange paroxysms of giddiness, of which the history of Napoleon's marshals supplies so many tragi-comic examples. He may probably have held himself entitled to rank alongside of Caesar as the second chief of the democracy; and the rejection of this claim of his may have sent him over to the camp of his opponents. His ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... darker and more profound were his cogitations, the droller and more whimsical became the apparitions. They buzzed about him thick as flies, flapping at him, flouting him, hooting in his ear, yet with such comic appendages, that what at first was his bane became at length his solace; and he desired no better society than that of his merry phantasmata. We shall presently find in what way this remarkable phenomenon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various

... to be," Roddy pointed out, "that every comic opera had one act on a tropical island. Then some fellow discovered Holland, and now all comic operas run to blonde girls in patched breeches and wooden shoes, and the back drops are 'Rotterdam, Amsterdam, any damn place at all.' But this town combines both the ancient ...
— The White Mice • Richard Harding Davis

... confided the fact of his college training to her, and he was really thinking just then that he would like to give them a serio-comic song, for which he had been famous with his class. He borrowed the violin of a Kanuck, and, sitting down, strummed upon it banjo-wise. The song was one of those which is partly spoken and acted; he really did it very well; but the Willett and Witherby ladies did not seem to ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells

... conscious, as she had been since she was a tiny child, of two things—the upturned heels of the servants' boots and the discomfort to her own knees. These two facts had always hindered her religious devotions, and they hindered them now. There had always been to her something irresistibly comic in those upturned heels, the dull flat surfaces of these cheap shoes. In the kitchen-maid's there were the signs of wear; Martha's were new and shining; the house-maid's were smart and probably creaked abominably. The bodies above them sniffed and rustled and sighed. The vacant, stupid faces ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole

... the bully and braggart is more in evidence in Kentucky and Texas than in other Commonwealths of the Union, except that each is by the space writers made the favorite arena of his exploits and adopted as the scene of the comic stories told at his expense. The son-of-a-gun from Bitter Creek, like the "elegant gentleman" from the Dark and Bloody Ground, represents a certain type to be found more or less developed in each and every State of the Union. He is not always a coward. Driven, as it were, to ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... used to come to my aunt Rosine's, who was then living at 6 Rue de la Chaussee d'Antin. He was on friendly terms with Rossini, who lived at No. 4 in the same street. He often brought him in, and Rossini made me laugh with his clever stories and comic grimaces. ...
— My Double Life - The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt • Sarah Bernhardt

... sight of him put the American into a friendly humor. He was everywhere, the little pantalon rouge, streaming the walks, dotting the cafes with red, and every wee piou-piou under the great big epaulettes of a great big comic opera generalissimo. His huge military coat fitted him awkwardly, and the crimson pompon cocked on his little fighting kepi was more often awry, and he could not by any effort achieve a strut. He was ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle

... suggest that psychological analysis with an example so absurd provokes the sense of the comic, but it is not quite that. It is not Heinesque irony, the concealment of an insult, nor Wilde's paradox, the burlesque of a truth. It is merely comic: a humorous facility in the use of words, though not barren as such things are apt to be, but quite common and human. The philosophical rules of ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell

... least, she had always felt, would never do anything to injure the family prestige. And now, so to speak, "Lo, Ben Adhem's name led all the rest." In other words, Percy was the worst of the lot. Whatever indiscretions the rest had committed, at least they had never got the family into the comic columns of the evening papers. Lord Marshmoreton might wear corduroy trousers and refuse to entertain the County at garden parties and go to bed with a book when it was his duty to act as host at a formal ball; Maud might give her heart to an impossible ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... ready an ear; and, being a man as well as a dyspeptic, it may be that as he poured his grievances into it he was not insensible to its rosy symmetry. At any rate he engaged Lily so long that the sweets were being handed when she caught a phrase on her other side, where Miss Corby, the comic woman of the company, was bantering Jack Stepney on his approaching engagement. Miss Corby's role was jocularity: she always entered the conversation with ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton

... been clearly proved guilty. Smarting under a sense of shame which was entirely unmerited, every boy sought eagerly for some object on which to vent his indignation; it became necessary, to use the words of the comic opera, that "a victim should be found," and suspicion fell on Kennedy and Jacobs. The result of Diggory's trap seemed to show that the various thefts had been committed at night. It was agreed that the two occupants of the "Main-top" had special opportunity for getting out of the house if so minded; ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery

... The comic portrait of the overseer was by this time finished, and a short, stout wench burst into a fit of uproarious and unquenchable laughter before any of the rest. It came so naturally, too, from the very ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... figures eight feet high, are said to be under the chissel, one of Thalia, and the other of Melpomene, the comic and the tragic muses; the value one hundred and sixty guineas. Places are reserved for their reception, to augment the beauty of the front, and shew ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton

... Germany, who generally resides at Berlin, has just added a new romance, or rather the beginning of one, to his previous publications. It bears the promising, if not pretentious title, of The German Gil Blas (published at Bremen), and claims to be comic, as a matter of course. As a whole, the book is a failure. Though there are passages here and there which may be read with satisfaction, there is not enough unity and connection between the different parts, and the humor is ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various

... Rinkelmann made his living by comic sketches, and all but lost it again by tragic poems. So he was just the man to be chosen king of the fairies, for in Fairyland the ...
— Cross Purposes and The Shadows • George MacDonald

... Irish spirits would permit. Scotty had just a moment before forcibly rescued him from a row with some idle, poker-playing Tommies, and the wild Irishman felt small gratitude towards his preserver. He rolled about restlessly, pronouncing serio-comic denunciations upon everything in Egypt from Lord Wolseley to the baggage-mules, and informing his inexorable keeper at short intervals, that if something didn't hurry up and happen, glory be, but he'd commit ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith

... heroic,' said the painter; 'I now and then dabble in the comic, but what I do gives me no pleasure, the comic is so low; there is nothing like the heroic. I am engaged here on a heroic picture,' said he, pointing to the canvas; 'the subject is "Pharaoh dismissing Moses from Egypt," after the last plague—the death of the first-born,—it ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter

... man who from drink got into debt, and, after having given a paper to a creditor authorizing him to keep the son as a security for his claim, ran away, leaving poor Phil a bond slave. The story involves a great many unexpected incidents, some of which are painful, and some comic. Phil manfully works for a year, cancelling his father's debt, and then escapes. The characters are strongly drawn, and the story is ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic

... of Art in Great Britain, by Dr. Waagen German Poetry, Comic and Humorous Greyson Letters, the, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various

... Farrar's "Life of Christ." Ashurst smiled. Her anxiety about his beliefs seemed to him comic, but touching. Infectious too, perhaps, for he began to have an itch to justify himself, if not to convert her. And in the evening, when the children and Halliday were mending their shrimping nets, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... the miserable fin de siecle church showmen who to draw fashionable audiences did not fear to offer the attraction of cavatinas and waltzes rendered on the cathedral organ by manufacturers of profane music, by ballet mongers and comic opera-wrights. ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans

... however, that he made definite use of this material, and began the sketch for his only comic opera. The first outline was drawn during a sojourn in the Bohemian mountains, when he felt in an unusually light and festive mood. But the work was soon set aside, and was not resumed until 1862, when it was finished in Paris. The score was then begun, and written almost ...
— Stories of the Wagner Opera • H. A. Guerber

... a comic opera company through the wheat-belt—one way; he had led a burlesque troupe into Arizona and had traded it ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers

... the theater at Herculaneum, were found two equestrian statues of admirable workmanship, occupying the same place as the great bronze lamps did at Drury Lane. The smallest of the theaters is said to have been comic, tho I should doubt. From both you see, as you sit on the seats, a prospect of the most ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various

... the Inspirer than the Protector. The religion of the Greeks preserved and dignified the poetry it created; and the bard, "beloved by gods as men," became invested, as well with a sacred character as a popular fame. Beneath that cheerful and familiar mythology, even the comic genius sheltered its license, and found its subjects. Not only do the earliest of the comic dramatists seem to have sought in mythic fables their characters and plots, but, far before the DRAMA itself arose in any of the Grecian ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... came to condemn remained to applaud. The reputation of the composer went on increasing until he became the foremost name of musical Italy, for his fertility of production was remarkable; and he gave the theatres a brilliant succession of comic and serious works. In 1758 he produced at Rome his "Alessandro nell' Indie," whose success surpassed all that had preceded it, and two years later a still finer masterpiece, "La Buona Figluola," written to a text furnished by the poet Goldoni, ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris

... years he worked and studied, and accomplished great things musically, then the Elector of Bavaria invited him to write a comic opera for the Carnival, which invitation the boy joyfully accepted, and at once set to work on the none too easy task. He was now at home again, and his father and Nannerl listened eagerly to his themes, as bit by bit ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser

... are used mostly to provide a bass part for the harmony of the wood-wind group, but they are also sometimes employed (especially the bassoon) to depict comic or grotesque effects. ...
— Music Notation and Terminology • Karl W. Gehrkens

... Mercier thinks, (Nouveau Paris, iii. 22.) to some Procession de Roi de Bazoche; or say, Procession of King Crispin, with his Dukes of Sutor-mania and royal blazonry of Cordwainery. Except indeed that this is not comic; ah no, it is comico-tragic; with bound Couriers, and a Doom hanging over it; most fantastic, yet most miserably real. Miserablest flebile ludibrium of a Pickleherring Tragedy! It sweeps along there, in most ungorgeous pall, through many streets, in the dusty summer evening; gets itself ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... be so new—though I believe that Mr. Potter himself repudiates the notion that there can be anything new in the drama—that it was almost criminal to slight it. Nothing was made of it. It almost escaped attention. Instead, we got a crew of comic opera Scotchmen singing songs, and an absurd picture of Robert Burns, who was injected pell-mell into the "romance." ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various

... "Quite comic, isn't it, my dear? What foolish things mothers are, aren't they? Just as fond of ...
— Trapped by Malays - A Tale of Bayonet and Kris • George Manville Fenn

... our day, was as incongruous a figure as was the American at the Court of King Arthur; he was as unhappily out of the picture as would be Cyrano de Bergerac on the floor of the Board of Trade. Judged, as at the time he was judged, by writers of comic paragraphs, by presidents of railroads, by amateur "statesmen" at Washington, Harden-Hickey was a joke. To the vacant mind of the village idiot, Rip Van Winkle returning to Falling Water also was a joke. The people of our day had not the time to understand ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis

... smart new dress and hat, with a huge boa of ostrich feathers half covering her thin, bare neck. There was a glint of jewels about her as she moved. The man with the young, weak voice gazed at her admiringly, with a half-pitiful, half-comic air of pride in being seen ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... them keen and alert. As they had been dehumanized by war, so he rehumanized them by natural means. He had a farm, with flowers and vegetables, pigs, poultry, and queer beasts. A tame bear named Flanagan was the comic character of the camp. Colonel Campbell found a thousand qualities of character in this animal, and brought laughter back to gloomy boys by his description of them. He had names for many of his pets—the game-cocks and the mother-hens; and he taught the men to know each ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... Deirdre's death being immediately followed by a cheerful account of the relationships of the chief heroes of the Heroic Period; a still better example of this practice in the old Irish literature is the almost comic relief that is introduced at the most tragic part of the tale of the murder ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy

... 1740), English actor, "of great glee and much comic vivacity," was the original Clincher in Farquhar's Constant Couple (1699), Boniface in The Beaux' Stratagem (1707), and Sir Francis Courtall in Pavener's Artful Wife (1717). He played at all the London theatres of his time, and in the summer at a booth at Bartholomew Fair. He had three sons, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... I believe, too," he said, with comic relief. "I didn't know but I'd been trying to convert you without knowing it." They both laughed, and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... baskets. Then they picked flowers, hunted for wintergreen, and decked the horse and wagon with ferns and wreaths of laurel,—only simple country pleasures, it is true, but they at least had the charm of newness for two of the party. That evening they sang all sorts of songs, from gospel hymns to comic operas, and Blanch showed in so many ways that she admired her new-found friend that ...
— Uncle Terry - A Story of the Maine Coast • Charles Clark Munn

... fierce eyes glanced from one pale face to another along the miserable line of his captives. In a harsh, imperious voice he said something which brought Mansoor, the dragoman, to the front, with bent back and outstretched, supplicating palms. To his employers there had always seemed to be something comic in that flapping skirt and short cover-coat above it; but now, under the glare of the mid-day sun, with those faces gathered round them, it appeared rather to add a grotesque horror to the scene. The dragoman salaamed ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle

... must always be a laughable side, even to the grimmest events, the comic element was supplied in this case by our professors of languages, drawing, and so forth, who had not dared to go back into Paris after leaving it on the 28th, on account of the fighting. When they had made up their minds to return on the 29th, we persuaded those of them who wore ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville

... kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind—the humorous. I will talk mainly about that one. The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the ...
— Quotations from the Works of Mark Twain • David Widger

... you are but the half of Menander, Lover of diction pure, with the first have a place—and with reason. Would that vigor as well to your gentle writing were added. So your comic force would in equal glory have rivaled Even the Greeks themselves, though now you ignobly are vanquished. Truly I sorrow and grieve that you lack ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... in the Miracle Plays.—While the old drama generally confined itself to religious subjects, the comic element occasionally crept in, made its power felt, and disclosed a new path for future playwrights. In the Play of Noah's Flood, when the time for the flood has come, Noah's wife refuses to enter the ark ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... positively disgustin'. No artist iv our day has succeeded so well in showin' up th' maneness iv th' people he has mugged. We ondershtand that th' atrocious Higbie paid wan hundherd thousan' dollars f'r this comic valentine. It is worth th' money ...
— Observations by Mr. Dooley • Finley Peter Dunne

... magnificence of their surroundings. There is a type of butler employed in the comparatively modest homes of small country gentlemen who is practically a man and a brother; who hobnobs with the local tradesmen, sings a good comic song at the village inn, and in times of crisis will even turn to and work the pump when the ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... situation did not seem even comic, so ignorant was the world of its humors; yet Minister Adams sailed for England, May 1, 1861, with much the same outfit as Admiral Dupont would have enjoyed if the Government had sent him to attack Port Royal with ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... which drew into this circle all that possessed life and youth, was the wife. Beautiful one could by no means call her, but, enchanted by her natural loveliness, her mind, and her unaffectedness, you forgot this in a few moments. A rare facility in appreciating the comic of every-day life, and a good-humored originality in its representation, always afforded her rich material for conversation. It was as if Nature, in a moment of thoughtlessness, had formed an insipid countenance, but immediately ...
— O. T. - A Danish Romance • Hans Christian Andersen

... an Indian attack upon the emigrant train, and here "Rosalie" displayed the archest heroism and the pinkest and most distracting self-possession, in marked contrast to the giddy worldling who, having accompanied her apparently for comic purposes best known to himself, cowered abjectly under wagons, and was pulled ignominiously out of straw, until Red Dick swept out of the wings with a chosen band and a burst of revolvers and turned the tide of victory. Attired as a picturesque ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte

... and Drusus, then Germanicus, and then Agrippina herself. In this descendant of hers the spirit of the great-grandmother finally reappeared, for it had been eclipsed by the fatal and terrible struggle between Tiberius and Agrippina, by the madness of Caligula, and the comic scandals of the first part of the reign of Claudius. All this served to bring back into the state a little of that authoritative vigor which the nobility in the time of its splendor had considered the highest ideal of government. Tacitus says of her ...
— The Women of the Caesars • Guglielmo Ferrero

... conies out in its connection with laughter and the sense of the comic, of which it may be said to constitute the physical basis. While we are not here concerned with laughter and the comic sense,—a subject which has lately attracted considerable attention,—it may be instructive to point out that there is more than an analogy between laughter and the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... studied the gargoyles round the roof, and, in spite of defacements, made out most of them—here a grinning demon with a struggling human being in its clutch—there an odd beast, part human, part pig, clothed in a kind of jacket, playing a harp—dozens of comic, hideous, heterogeneous figures ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... this lady? Had she lived in the days of Juvenal, it might have been supposed that he had her in his eye, when he drew, in his sixth satire, the picture of the "greatest of all plagues"—had her existence been cast in the time of the prince of French comic writers, she would undoubtedly have been presumed to be the prototype of the heroine in one of his most exquisite comedies; we need hardly say, therefore, that she is, in the words ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various

... artists with costly stones, such as lapis lazuli and malachite, crystals, blood-stone, jasper, agates and chalcedony, to represent fruit-pieces and magnificent groups of game or of musical instruments; while the pilasters were decorated with masks of the tragic and comic Muses, torches, thyrsi wreathed with ivy and vine, and pan-pipes. These were wrought in silver and gold, and set with costly marbles, and they stood out from the marble background like metal work on a leather shield, or the rich ornamentation ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... charming manner. Dorfling put Schrotter on his right hand, and Wilhelm and Paul on his left; near Schrotter was Barinskoi and a friend of Dorfling's, named Mayboorn. This man was, like Dorfling, a Rhinelander, he combined a successful career as a writer of comic verses with a confirmed pessimism. When he had written one of his merriest couplets, he would stop his work and sigh with Dorfling over the tragedy of life. The papers treated his farces as rubbish, but the public adored ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau

... in the comic newspapers and dime novels," said Geoffrey Templestowe when he recovered from his amusement, while Lionel, utterly overcome with his sister's vocabulary, choked and strangled, and ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge

... comic. Romer's mother, who was going to a dinner-party in the same street, could not forgo the pleasure of calling unexpectedly on them at half-past seven, vaguely hoping that it might be inconvenient to them, and that she would catch them ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson

... theatre are devoured by the Siamese with insatiable appetite, and the popular preference is awarded to those intellectual contests in which the tragic and comic poets compete for the prize. The laughter or the tears of the sympathetic groundlings are accepted as the expression of an infallible criticism, and by their verdict the play is crowned or damned. The common people, such is their passion for the drama, get whole tragedies ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens

... face, was called up by the remembrance of the admiration which his daughter had evidently called forth. Harry watched the smile, and in his heart called the new partner "lucky," and "cute," and looked at Charlie's discontented face with a comic astonishment that would have excited some grave astonishment to their host, if by any chance he had looked up to see. Though why Charlie should look discontented about it, Harry could not ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson

... to any known type, and like nothing but ourselves. 'Nearly every Englishman,' says an excellent and by no means unfriendly observer, George Sand, 'nearly every Englishman, however good-looking he may be, has always something singular about him which easily comes to seem comic;—a sort of typical awkwardness (gaucherie typique) in his looks or appearance, which hardly ever wears out.' I say this strangeness is accounted for by the English nature being mixed as we have seen, while the Latin ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold

... close of the dance and chorus, Chan retired into the tea garden, and drank so many cups of the national beverage, with such comic gestures, that the spectators were almost sorry when the opening of the opposite window drew all eyes in that direction. At the lattice appeared a lovely being; for this potato had been pared, and on the white surface were painted pretty pink cheeks, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various

... arch-chief died in jail. I see him now, going through the gloomy portals of the Tombs, whither, as a newspaper reporter, I had gone with him, his stubborn head held high as ever. I asked myself more than once, at the time when the vile prison was torn down, whether the comic clamor to have the ugly old gates preserved and set up in Central Park had anything to do with the memory of the "martyred" thief, or whether it was in joyful celebration of the fact that others had escaped. His name is even now one to conjure with in the Sixth ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis

... better about the American Negro than any other person during the present century. She has given laboriously and minutely wrought pictures of plantation life. She has held up to the gaze of the world portraitures comic and serio-comic, which for the gorgeousness and awfulness of their drapery will perish only with the language in which they ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams

... Parnassus came over the brow of the hill, and I saw the river in the distance once more. How different all this was from my girlhood visions of romance. That has been characteristic of my life all along—it has been full of homely, workaday happenings, and often rather comic in spite of my best resolves to be highbrow and serious. All the same I was something near to tears as I thought of the tragic wreck at Willdon and the grief-laden hearts that must be mourning. I ...
— Parnassus on Wheels • Christopher Morley

... him. "Do it again," said he, "and let us see who will tire first." He kept her on his knee some time while he and she drank tea. He was now like a buck indeed. All the company were much entertained to find him so easy and pleasant. To me it was highly comic to see the grave philosopher—the Rambler—toying with a Highland beauty! But what could he do? He must have been surly, and weak too, had he not behaved as he did. He would have been laughed at, and not more respected, though ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald

... invitingly in its crotch; away high up upon its straight and graceful stem, birds of magnificent plumage are flitting from tree to tree, making the grove vocal with their notes; monkeys, mischievous, but not considered dangerous, dance overhead upon the boughs, and with comic antics provoke a smile. With gentle breezes wafting perfumes such as Gouraud never was gladdened with in his most happy ambrosial dreams, and glimpses of the blue sky, seen partially through the waving foliage, ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay

... you tell him from me that his father is a wretch. Is there a wife? I think someone said there was—well, she probably doesn't know all I know." The old woman pulled down her mouth in comic disapproval. ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten

... Maison Rustique, and the English Gervase Markkam. Poor Richard's Almanack gives it twice, as "the foot of a master is the best manure" and "the eye of a master will do more work than both his hands." It is perennial in its appeal. The present editor saw it recently in the German comic paper Fliegende Blaetter. But the jest is much older than Cato. It appears in Aeschylus, Persae, 171 and Xenophon employs it in ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato

... general most truly delightful. I could read the Beggar's Bush from morning to night. How sylvan and sunshiny it is! The Little French Lawyer is excellent. Lawrit is conceived and executed from first to last in genuine comic humour. Monsieur Thomas is also capital. I have no doubt whatever that the first act and the first scene of the second act of the Two Noble Kinsmen are Shakspeare's. Beaumont and Fletcher's plots ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge

... here. In it Gally, following Casaubon,[2] theorizes that the character evolved out of Greek Old Comedy. The Augustans saw a close connection between drama and character-writing. Congreve (Dedication to The Way of the World, 1700) thought that the comic dramatist Menander formed his characters on "the observations of Theophrastus, of whom he was a disciple," and Budgell, who termed Theophrastus the father of modern comedy, believed that if some of Theophrastus's ...
— A Critical Essay on Characteristic-Writings - From his translation of The Moral Characters of Theophrastus (1725) • Henry Gally

... for everything he chose to say was well said. A familiar story, grave or gay, when clothed with his words, and accentuated by his expressive gestures and the mobility of his countenance, had all the charm of novelty; while a comic anecdote from his lips sparkled with wit, born of his own keen sense of humor. I found in him that most rare combination of a powerful personality united to a ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting

... seated on his shoulder, was so elated with the gladsome sights and sounds, that she clasped her chubby arms round 'Passon's' neck and kissed him with a fervour that was as fresh and delightful as it was irresistibly comic. ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... the mental state of the hundreds of persons who kill themselves every year upon what would seem to be absurdly inadequate provocation—of the man, for example, who commits suicide because his wife declines to get out his clean underclothes, or the woman who takes poison because she has received a comic valentine? In its religious aspect, why is the tendency to suicide greatest among Protestant Christians and least among Mohammedans and Jews? In its racial aspect, why is the suicide rate of Japan eight times that of Portugal, and the rate of American whites eight or ten ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various

... comic about them theer goanners," said the old man at last. "I've seed swarms of grasshoppers an' big mobs of kangaroos, but dang me if ever I seed a flock ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson

... Deal on the 23rd July, and by slow stages was conducted with every mark of respect to London. His passage through the city was associated with an episode of a decidedly comic character if we are to believe the chronicler. A story is told(1085) that the night before Campeggio entered London, Wolsey sent him twelve mules with (empty) coffers, in order to give a semblance of wealth to the legate ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe

... too little time for recovery. All her sympathy was for her poor Uncle Sandro who, in the meantime, was sitting in jail! Yet the thought of his situation in some way struck her as ludicrous—almost like comic opera. ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post

... earlier writers. I certainly cannot give a sufficient reason why the society of Johnson and Reynolds, full of shrewd common sense, enjoying humour, and with a literary social tradition, should not have found other writers capable of holding up the comic mirror. I am upon the verge of a discussion which seems to be endless, the causes of the decay of the British stage. I must give it a wide berth, and only note that, as a fact, Sheridan took to politics, and his mantle fell on no worthy successor. The next craze (for which he was partly responsible) ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen

... school, by rambling into the country on the festivals of the saints, and now and then by acting plays; notably, that famous one which Rabelais wrote for them in 1531: "The moral comedy of the man who had a dumb wife;" which "joyous patelinage" remains unto this day in the shape of a well-known comic song. That comedy young Rondelet must have seen acted. The son of a druggist, spicer, and grocer—the three trades were then combined—in Montpellier, and born in 1507, he had been destined for the cloister, being a sickly lad. His uncle, one of the ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley

... white, quantity and quality, shiver of ecstasy and shudder of horror, vomiting and swallowing, inspiration and expiration, fate and reason, great and small, extent and intent, joke and earnest, tragic and comic, and fifty other {296} contrasts figure in these pages in the same monotonous way. The mind saw how each term belonged to its contrast through a knife-edge moment of transition which it effected, and which, ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James

... population almost entirely native New-Yorkers in moderate circumstances. A village, then, with its shops and school-houses and churches; it is as provincial in its way as the Lonelyville of the comic weeklies. The grocery is the village club, at least for the respectable part of the male population, the men who would not be seen in a corner saloon. There were half a dozen of the regulars now ...
— The Gates of Chance • Van Tassel Sutphen

... and his story belong more or less to the tragic muse, and this subject is, perhaps, rather more the property of the comic: for great poets are rare, and really it is the smaller genius we have always with us that is likely to suffer most from those 'immunities'; still more the talent that would fain bear the greater name, and most of all the misguided industry which ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne

... comes in the apprehension of yet another Promethean analogy: have I confounded male and female, and incurred the penalty? Or no— when will resemblances end?—have I, rather, cheated my hearers by serving them up bones wrapped in fat, comic laughter in philosophic solemnity? As for stealing—for Prometheus is the thief's patron too— I defy you there; that is the one fault you cannot find with me: from whom should I have stolen? if any one has dealt before me in such forced unions and hybrids, I have never made ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata

... contempt, there seems little reason to doubt that closer knowledge of one another will but increase the mutual sympathy and esteem of the Briton and the American. The former will find that Brother Jonathan is not so exuberantly and perpetually starred-and-striped as the comic cartoonist would have us believe; and the American will find that John Bull does not always wear top-boots or invariably wield a whip. Things that from a distance seem preposterous and even revolting will often assume a very different guise when seen in their native environment and judged by their ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead

... Majesty's," was built in 1821; under Mr. Buckstone's management, comedy and farce were chiefly performed. The "Adelphi Theatre," in the Strand, near Southampton Street, was rebuilt in 1858, when it had for a quarter of a century been celebrated for melodramas, and for the attractiveness of its comic actors. The "Lyceum Theatre," or "English Opera House," at the corner of Wellington Street, Strand, was built in 1834 as an English opera-house, but its fortunes were fluctuating, and the performances not of a definite kind. This ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun

... is a community of citizens; but if the mode of government should alter, and become of another sort, it would seem a necessary consequence that the city is not the same; as we regard the tragic chorus as different from the comic, though it may probably consist of the same performers: thus every other community or composition is said to be different if the species of composition is different; as in music the same hands produce different harmony, as the Doric ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle

... that peculiar manner of an illuminated comic perception: for the moment he was all falcon; and he surprised himself more than Clara, who was not in the mood to take surprises. It was the sight of her which had animated him to strike his game; he was down ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... his torment was the "trapper-boys," and other youngsters with whom he came into contact. He was a newcomer, and so they hazed him; moreover, he had an inferior job—there seemed to their minds to be something humiliating and comic about the task of tending mules. These urchins came from a score of nations of Southern Europe and Asia; there were flat-faced Tartars and swarthy Greeks and shrewd-eyed little Japanese. They spoke a compromise language, consisting mainly of English curse ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair

... judges, and been sent on to serve his little time. Adown highways unnumbered he had sawed wood, when necessary; received handouts, worn hand-me-downs; furnished infinite material for the wags of the comic press. Long he had slept under hedges and in ricks, carried his Lares in a bandana kerchief, been forcibly bathed at free lodging-houses in icy winters. Dogs had chased him, and his fellow man: he had been bitten by the one and smitten by the other. Ill-fame and obloquy had followed ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... year 1000 the church is well-nigh shut against the peasant through the difference between his language and hers. By 1100 her services became quite unintelligible. Of the mysteries played at the church-doors, he has retained chiefly the comic side, the ox and the ass, &c. On these he makes Christmas carols, which grow ever more and more burlesque, forming ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet

... the honour of speaking to his secretary, who, if the fact deserve to be recorded, was an abbe named Fleuriel. This personage, who was an extraordinary specimen of impertinence and self-conceit, would have been an admirable study for a comic poet. He had all the dignity belonging to the great secretary of a great Minister, and, with an air of indifference, he told me that the Count was not there; but M. de Blacas was ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... no monopoly of patriotic enthusiasm and good faith. Englishmen return thanks to Providence for not being born anything but an Englishman, in churches and ale-houses as well as in comic operas. The Frenchman cherishes and proclaims the idea that France is the most civilized modern country and satisfies best the needs of a man of high social intelligence. The Russian, whose political and social estate does not seem enviable to his foreign contemporaries, ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly

... to his academic contemporaries and friends. He was a tall, burly man, with a strong black head and black eyes under bushy brows, combined with an infantile mouth and chin, long and happily caricatured in all the comic papers. But in his D.C.L. gown he made a very fine appearance; assembled Oxford was proud of him as one of the most successful of her sons; and his progress toward the dais ...
— Lady Connie • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... "It's rather comic, isn't it?" Mr. Softly Bishop acquiesced. "I wonder why Oswald Morfey has abandoned his famous stock for ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett

... edge of the mesa, and there below shone the small, scattered lights of the town. The graphophone was playing in the saloon. Its music—some raucous, comic song—insulted ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt



Words linked to "Comic" :   gagman, merry andrew, funny, benny, comedy, William Claude Dukenfield, joker, comic opera, Sir Harry MacLennan Lauder, W. C. Fields, Arthur Stanley Jefferson Laurel, Herbert Marx, Oliver Hardy, risible, Buster Keaton, Durante, Arthur Marx, Jimmy Durante, Moore, humourous, Marx, Chico, laurel, performing artist, hill, comedienne, Julius Marx, hope, Charlie Chaplin, Caesar, Alfred Hawthorne, laughable, comic strip, Zeppo, drama, martin, Jack Benny, comical, comic book, Benjamin Kubelsky, mirthful, Nathan Birnbaum, amusing, Bob Hope, Joseph Francis Keaton, hardy, buffoon, Harry Lauder, comedian, Benny Hill, Dudley Stuart John Moore, Burns, Harpo, Groucho, Keaton, Stan Laurel, goof, lauder, humorous, clown, standup comedian, Leslie Townes Hope, goofball, Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin, jokester, performer, Sid Caesar, Leonard Marx, Sidney Caesar, Fields, Chaplin



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