According to Aristotle, character is one of the more important things necessary to a good piece of dramatic literature. Of course, that was for tragedy: so what about comedy? Aristotle says we see three comic character archetypes, the buffoon, the ironic man and the braggart.

To get at the overall impression for comedy, we looked at both ancient theatre and modern film; from Aristophanes to Chaplin, Menander to It Happened One Night, Plautus to Road to Morocco, and Terence to Moonstruck. The following questions helped us to focus our discussion of character in comedy.

What type of characters populate comedies?

What type of character tends to be the comic hero? the blocking figure?

To what extent are characters flat/stereotypical or rounded?