← Section II (Elective): Studies in Drama and Theatre

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What is comedy of manners, and how does it use social codes and witty dialogue to satirise its societies?

Comedy of manners and Australian comedy as elective topics, including Restoration comedy, Oscar Wilde, Noel Coward, and the tradition of Australian comic playwriting

A focused answer to the HSC Drama elective dot points on Comedy of Manners and Australian Comedy. The Restoration tradition (Etherege, Wycherley, Congreve), the late nineteenth century (Wilde), the early twentieth century (Coward), and the Australian comic tradition from George Whaley through David Williamson, Jack Hibberd and Nakkiah Lui.

Generated by Claude OpusReviewed by Better Tuition Academy6 min answerUpdated 2026-05-20

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What this dot point is asking

This dot point covers two related electives that NESA has prescribed together or separately. Comedy of Manners as a historical tradition (Restoration to Wilde to Coward), and Australian Comedy as a contemporary national tradition with its own conventions. Strong answers can connect the two and discuss the development of comic playwriting.

The answer

What comedy of manners is

Comedy of manners is the form of comedy that satirises the codes and conventions of a particular social class. The form depends on witty dialogue, recognisable stock characters, and a closed social world whose codes the audience can see being honoured or broken. The pleasure is partly the verbal performance, partly the satirical content.

The tradition runs from English Restoration comedy in the late seventeenth century through Sheridan in the eighteenth century, Wilde in the late nineteenth century, Coward in the early twentieth century, and continues in various contemporary forms (Yasmina Reza, Nakkiah Lui, Joanna Murray-Smith).

Restoration comedy (1660 to around 1700)

The Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660 reopened the theatres (closed since 1642 under Puritan rule) and produced a burst of comic drama. The major figures:

George Etherege (around 1635 to 1692): The Man of Mode (1676), a satire of London Restoration manners with the fop Sir Fopling Flutter and the rake Dorimant. Etherege defined the comic register that the others followed.
William Wycherley (1640 to 1716): The Country Wife (1675). The most sexually direct of the Restoration comedies. Horner, a rake, pretends to be impotent to seduce married women without their husbands' suspicion. Margery, the country wife of the title, learns the codes of London society. The play is now sometimes considered too sexually frank for school performance.
William Congreve (1670 to 1729): The Way of the World (1700). The most formally elegant of the Restoration comedies. Mirabell and Millamant's "proviso scene" (Act IV) is the canonical conversation about the terms of marriage. The Way of the World is the conventional high point of Restoration comedy.
Aphra Behn (1640 to 1689): The first professional female English playwright. The Rover (1677) and other plays bring a female perspective to Restoration comedy.

Restoration comedy was written for a court audience and dealt frankly with sexual conduct, marriage and the social codes of the aristocracy. Its prose dialogue is witty, fast, and dense with paradox.

The eighteenth century

Comedy of manners persists in the eighteenth century but softens. Sentimental comedy displaces the harder Restoration form by mid-century. The major figures:

Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751 to 1816). The Rivals (1775), The School for Scandal (1777). Less sexually frank than the Restoration but witty in dialogue.
Oliver Goldsmith (1728 to 1774). She Stoops to Conquer (1773).

Oscar Wilde (1854 to 1900)

The late-Victorian high point of comedy of manners. Wilde wrote four society comedies in five years.

Lady Windermere's Fan (1892). A play about a wife's near affair and the woman with a past who saves her.
A Woman of No Importance (1893). A play about an illegitimate son and his unacknowledged father.
An Ideal Husband (1895). A play about a politician's compromise.
The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Wilde's comic masterpiece. Two young men in late-Victorian society maintain double lives (Bunburying). The play is built almost entirely from epigrams.

Wilde's comedies satirise the hypocrisy of late-Victorian sexual and class morals while remaining inside the social world they critique. The 1895 trial that destroyed Wilde's life intervened directly between the premiere of An Ideal Husband (January 1895) and Earnest (February 1895).

Noel Coward (1899 to 1973)

The early twentieth century continuation. Coward wrote across a long career. His comedies of manners include:

Hay Fever (1925). The Bliss family at home in a country house.
Private Lives (1930). Two divorced couples meet on adjacent hotel balconies on honeymoon with their new spouses.
Blithe Spirit (1941). A widower's seance summons his late wife's ghost.

Coward's wit is faster and more brittle than Wilde's; his world is the inter-war upper-middle-class English society.

Twentieth-century continuations

Comedy of manners persists in various forms across the twentieth century. The Tom Stoppard plays (Arcadia, 1993, in part), the work of Alan Ayckbourn (Absurd Person Singular, 1973), the Yasmina Reza plays (Art, 1994; God of Carnage, 2006) extend the form. The boundary between comedy of manners and contemporary domestic comedy is porous.

The Australian comic tradition

Australian comedy is a related but distinct elective. It includes the vernacular comic tradition that runs from the late nineteenth century music hall through the New Wave to contemporary work.

Steele Rudd (1868 to 1935): Dad and Dave stories adapted as stage and radio comedy.
Ray Lawler: Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955) is not a pure comedy but has comic conventions.
The New Wave (1968 to 1981): David Williamson, Jack Hibberd, Alex Buzo and others built a vernacular comic theatre. Hibberd's Dimboola (1969) is a participatory wedding-reception comedy. Williamson's Don's Party (1971) is a comic political play. The Club (1977) is comic and institutional.
Steve J. Spears: The Elocution of Benjamin Franklin (1976). A camp comic monologue.
Andrew Bovell: Speaking in Tongues (1996), Things I Know to Be True (2016). Bovell's plays use comic register inside larger structures.
Nakkiah Lui (born 1991): Black is the New White (2017). The most Wildean of the contemporary Australian comic playwrights. A wealthy Aboriginal Australian family at Christmas, an interracial relationship, sustained witty dialogue. The play is in the comedy of manners tradition while being explicitly Indigenous Australian.
Tommy Murphy, Joanna Murray-Smith, Hannie Rayson, and others: Continue the comic-domestic tradition.

How the comedy of manners and Australian comedy are examined

Section II essays typically ask candidates to discuss the conventions of the form, analyse one or more specific plays, or evaluate the tradition's development. Strong essays move between historical context and detailed scene analysis.

Common question patterns:

"How does comedy of manners satirise its society?"
"Discuss the development of comedy of manners from Wilde to the present."
"How has the Australian comic tradition contributed to contemporary theatre?"

Strong responses cite at least two plays and engage with the comic technique as well as the social content.

Common exam traps

Treating Wilde as a one-play playwright: The Importance of Being Earnest is the masterpiece, but Lady Windermere's Fan, An Ideal Husband and A Woman of No Importance are also part of the tradition.
Confusing comedy of manners with farce: Farce relies on physical comedy and escalating action. Comedy of manners relies on witty dialogue and social codes. They overlap but are not the same.
Treating the Australian comic tradition as a continuation of the English one: The traditions interact, but Australian comedy has its own roots in vernacular speech, music hall and the New Wave.
Forgetting Black is the New White: Nakkiah Lui's play is one of the most successful contemporary comedies of manners in the country. Its Indigenous Australian setting adds a dimension the English tradition does not have.

Past exam questions, worked

Real questions from past NESA papers on this dot point, with our answer explainer.

Practice (NESA)8 marksHow does comedy of manners use social codes to satirise its societies, and how has the tradition evolved?

Show worked answer →

An 8-mark "how" needs three or four conventions with named plays.

Witty dialogue as the central technique: Comedy of manners depends on the epigram, the witty rejoinder, the artificial wit. Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) is constructed almost entirely from epigrams ("the truth is rarely pure and never simple"; "I never travel without my diary"). The pleasure of the form is the verbal performance itself.
A closed social world with strict codes: Restoration comedy (the 1660s to 1700) operates inside the world of the court and the aristocracy: who calls on whom, who is in love with whom, who is cuckolded. Wilde's late-Victorian world operates inside an upper-class English drawing room. The plays make the codes visible through the consequences of breaking them.
Stock characters that develop the social types: The rake, the cuckold, the witty heroine, the country booby (Restoration). The dandy, the spinster, the ingenue, the gorgon mother (Wilde and Coward). The Australian larrikin, the union official, the political wife, the Anglo journalist (in the Australian comic tradition).
Plot turning on misunderstandings, disguises and revelations: Hidden identities, secret letters, mistaken meetings. The plot exists to test the characters' wit and social standing.
Critique of the society through laughter: The form is funny but the critique is real. Wilde's plays satirise the hypocrisy of late-Victorian sexual morals; Williamson's comedies (Don's Party, 1971; The Club, 1977) satirise contemporary Australian middle-class hypocrisies. The audience laughs at itself.

Markers reward named plays, named conventions, and the satire-as-critique connection.