Comedy In The Wife Of Bath's Tale

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The definition of comedy that follows: A play characterized by its humorous or satirical tone and its depiction of amusing people or incidents, in which the characters ultimately triumph over adversity, would be the best fit for the three tales that we read in the Canterbury Tales. All of them were laugh out loud funny at some points, and most of them ended in a character overcoming adversity. Both the Nun’s Priest Tale and the Wife of Bath’s Tale fulfill all aspects of the definition, but the Miller’s Tale lacks one characteristic which separates it from the rest of the tales.
The Nun’s Priest tale is definitely one that makes you laugh, so the fact that it is a comedy is not at all surprising. The thought of distressed hens described as “o woeful hens, louder your shrieks and higher than those of Roman matrons when the fire consumed their husbands…”(229), is quite comical. As the reader is reading the tale the aspect that is most apparent is the comicality of it all, but this obvious type of comedy is not the only aspect of comedy that this tale fulfills. The definition states that a comedy also ends in a character triumphing over adversity. …show more content…
The tale definitely contains a comical aspect, and some even argue that it is the funniest of the tales, but it lacks the overcoming of adversity. At the end, everyone loses. No one is left triumphant, but rather everyone suffers in one way or another. The scenes in which Nicholas was “branded on the bum”(106) and Absalon “kissed her nether eye”(106) are funny, but no one can argue that either of those two characters overcame an adversity. Since the tale however cannot be categorized as either tragic or tragicomic, the only solution is to designate a different definition of comedy to the Miller’s Tale. The definition that is most fitting would be as follows: A movie, play, or broadcast program intended to make an audience

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