English and Arabic comedy

الملخص EN

In recent years, comedy has been used as a powerful tool in reflecting a better objective of society, especially by detecting social, psychological, religious and political problems in a humorous way.

Furthermore, nowadays comedy is so popular and it has many characteristics that differ from one society to another, yet there are some characteristics that may be considered in somehow as fixed characteristics which as a result can be considered as basic components of any comic work.

The present study aims to show these characteristics and also to show how English comedy differs from Arabic comedy.

Another purpose is to show how comedy can be considered as a mirror of Arabic society through different historical periods.

The present study concludes that Arabic writers kept using the same characteristics and components and types of English comedy simply because the modern sense of comedy was adopted from western world and it was not an original Arabic literary genre.