Twentieth-century Examples
The term comedy of menace, which British drama critic Irving Wardle based on the subtitle of The Lunatic View: A Comedy of Menace (1958), by David Campton, is a jocular play-on-words derived from the "comedy of manners" (menace being manners pronounced with a somewhat Judeo-English accent). Pinter's play ] has been described as a mid-twentieth-century "comedy of manners".
In Boston Marriage (1999), David Mamet chronicles a sexual relationship between two women, one of whom has her eye on yet another young woman (who never appears, but who is the target of a seduction scheme). Periodically, the two women make their serving woman the butt of haughty jokes, serving to point up the satire on class. Though displaying the verbal dexterity one associates with both the playwright and the genre, the patina of wit occasionally erupts into shocking crudity.
Other contemporary examples include Douglas Carter Beane's As Bees in Honey Drown, The Country Club and The Little Dog Laughed.
Read more about this topic: Comedy Of Manners
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