Context
Chrononhotonthologos occupies a central position in the development of English nonsense verse. Carey's word play appears to exist for its own sake, and the sounds of words are one source of amusement. Additionally, like other nonsense verse, the writing plays with and parodies a well identified genre of high seriousness. The nonsense achieves part of its humor by fulfilling the structural and phonetic requirements of an extant form, but substituting silly syllables for meaningful ones, thereby allowing the listener or reader to enjoy the suggestion that the usual words are empty placeholders (e.g. when Jonathan Swift's King of Lilliput has a royal title ending in "Ully Mully Goo," the nonsense sounds and weighs the same as the titles of real kings and, implicitly, is just as meaningful). Later authors, like Edward Lear, would cite Carey as a precursor.
The play is also one of the first examples of a parodic opera. Although The Dragon of Wantley would be more fully an opera, Chrononhotonthologos is a spectacular that is also an exaggeration of spectaculars. There had been farce spectacles before. In the era of the competing playhouses and the Restoration spectacular, the playhouses that had no capacity for special effects put on farces of the plays they could not stage. However, those plays had concentrated more specifically on effects than on the total experience of bombast, unmotivated dance, pompous music, and special effects, and Carey's play attacks not a specific rival, but an entire genre.
Finally, in the context of Augustan drama, Carey's play is one of the ones that led to the Licensing Act of 1737, when the theaters would be subject to official censorship. After the successes of Tom Thumb and Chrononhotonthologos, theaters staged increasingly vicious attacks on the ministry. These satires were progressively more dangerously near an attack on the crown.
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