The dramatic comedy or dramedy combines the lightness of humor with the weight of tragedy. This marriage between the contingency of comic accidents and the permanence of a dramatic fate results in a dark humor. While the characters are grappling with a purely comedic situation, they each reveal, through their way of dealing with it, the irreducible fractures that characterise and constrain them. While comedy generally has a happy ending, in dramatic comedy, the characters are predestined, like in tragedy, although their fate is less calamitous. As for contemporary french theatre, notable masters of dramatic comedy include the duo Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri (with works such as “Family Resemblances” or “Kitchen and Dependencies”), Yasmina Réza (“Art” or “God of Carnage”), and Nathalie Sarraute (“For Yes, for No”).
