Comedy has always been one of my favorite things. Whether it is rolling on the floor with several friends while watching Zoolander or Anchorman or simply an abrupt, uncalled-for comment around the Thanksgiving dinner table with grandma, comedy has always played a huge role in my life. In fact, whenever my family gets together there seems to be a lot of comedy floating around in the air. We always try to lighten the mood. There is never a moment too serious or too dense to be broken up by the lightheartedness of comedy.
Naturally, when my 12th grade AP English teacher told me that, by the Ancient Greek definition, a tragedy was simply when the hero of the story died and a comedy was simply when the hero of the story lived, I was dumbfounded. For me, a comedy is much more. A comedy is effective if and only if the reader/listener/viewer gets a kick out of the story and emerges more lighthearted than when he or she started. I judge a comedy strictly on the way it makes me smile or laugh. When I am in a bad mood, I throw on a funny movie or read a chipper book and by the end of it, I inevitably feel better and more optimistic about the world around me.
My definition of a comedy is very simple and straight forward–a story is a comedy if and only if the consumer feels better at the end than they felt at the beginning.