Meaning
A person, remark or event that lightens a tense, serious or grim situation; in drama and narrative it names the humorous character or passage inserted into a serious work to ease the strain. Outside the arts it describes any welcome moment of levity amid stress or gloom, and in British English it also evokes the famous charity of the same name. Neutral register; in Britain the charity association can add a fund-raising, Red Nose Day overtone. Regional use: General English (theatrical origin).
Origin
The practice of easing a serious play with comedy is ancient, but classical theory resisted it: Greek tragedy kept the genres apart, releasing tension only in the satyr play that closed a day of tragedies, and Philip Sidney, following Horace, attacked mixed drama in English. The practice flourished anyway in the Elizabethans - Marlowe's low comic scenes in Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare's gravediggers and the Porter in Macbeth - long before anyone coined a name for it. The English phrase is first recorded in 1783, in the writing of Thomas Davies, an Irish-born actor, theatre manager and Shakespeare scholar, which points to its birth in eighteenth-century theatrical criticism rather than in the playhouse itself. The wider figurative use, any lightening of a grim situation, grew out of that critical term, and the British charity Comic Relief, founded in 1985, borrowed the phrase wholesale.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a bit of comic relief
- comic-relief character
- for comic relief
- provide comic relief
Usage Examples
- During the twelve-hour negotiation, the intern's coffee disaster provided some much-needed comic relief.
- The documentary's grim second half is offset by the twins, pure comic relief whenever they appear.
- Amid weeks of flood coverage, the cat stranded on a floating sofa became comic relief for the whole city.