Is My Play Idea Comedy or Drama?

Professor, is my idea comedy or drama? 

This may seem like an odd question, but, more often than you'd think, I’m asked by my playwriting students if a play idea they want to work on ought to be written as a comedy or a drama. 

Well, you can deal with almost any issue or storyline as either a comedy or drama.  Take, for instance, the story of a man’s startling discovery that his old-maid aunts have poisoned a dozen or so lonely old men, and had their bodies buried in the basement of their home.  Mass murder hardly seems a likely subject for humor; drama would appear to be the right genre for this material.  Yet the preceding is the storyline of one of the funniest stage comedies ever written, Arsenic and Old Lace by Joseph Kesselring. 

My comfort zone as a playwright is somewhere in between drama and comedy, but closer to drama than comedy.  To date, though I fancy myself as having a robust sense of humor, I’ve not been able to write an out-and-out comedy.  Because I tend to see life as a mixture of dramatic situations and humorous moments (hardly a philosophical breakthrough), when I’ve tried to write a pure comedy, the play inevitably ends up drifting back into the sphere that comes naturally to me — the drama with humor, or dramedy as the hybrid is sometimes called. 

 

The choice between comedic or dramatic treatment of an idea rests in good measure on your slant on the story.  Is your exploration of the idea primarily serious in nature, or do you see it as mostly ironic and humorous? 

As indicated above, another important factor is your particular gift as a writer.  Do you have an inclination toward envisioning and creating dramatic situations, or do you have an unrelenting sense of humor and the knack for writing witty lines?  In the final analysis, the subject matter, along with your writing skills and propensity will take you in one direction or the other.