he article focuses on comedy at the beginning of the 20th century and argues that this was a period marked by comedy’s proximity to and intertwining with the complexity of social change and of a historical moment shaped, especially through the experience of the world wars, by horror and trauma. The author notes the mass emergence of dramatic forms in which both comic and tragic elements are intertwined, as well as the use of numerous stylistic devices of classical comedy in the works of avant-garde authors. Based on examples of dramatic avant-garde texts by Alfred Jarry, Guillaume Apollinaire and Alexander Vvedensky, the article analyses new stylistic tendencies and shifts in the perception of comedy as a literary genre. Alain Badiou characterises the 20th century as the century of the “passion for the real”, which at first glance has no comic dimension. How does the “passion for the real” fit with comedy and the phenomena of the comic, which – in contrast to the real – are located precisely in the realm of appearance, illusion and doubling and, with their location in the area of appearances, are far removed from the real? Or, in other words, does the passion for the real have comic dimensions? The selected examples testify that comedy defies the passion for the real with irony, the grotesque, absurdism and alienation as theorised and practised by Bertolt Brecht, but that, in the process, it loses the integrity of its structure and steps off its literary pedestal. Instead, individual comedy elements intrude into all genres and especially into performative eventness, understood here through Erika Fischer-Lichte’s The Transformative Power of Performance and through postmodernist poetics, as defined in dramatic terms by Hans-Thies Lehmann in Postdramatic Theatre, with which comedy has been inextricably linked throughout the 20th century and up to the present day.
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