drawing-room comedy
Americannoun
Etymology
Origin of drawing-room comedy
First recorded in 1880–85
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
It’s a pleasurably discombobulating experience, sometimes playing like mordant drawing-room comedy and sometimes flirting with expressionist nightmare, as when Welles’ dark silhouette looms over a bedridden Mank and his mummified leg.
From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 6, 2020
It’s a cross between a drawing-room comedy and a Hobbesian parlor game, such as Assassin or Secret Hitler.
From The New Yorker ● Oct. 14, 2019
The play’s dialogue and dramaturgy, however, are straight out of drawing-room comedy: Amusing zingers abound, and there’s an old-fashioned quality to the carefully crafted pattern of revelation, repercussion and tension.
From Washington Post ● Nov. 20, 2018
It’s got funny moments, and moments of drawing-room comedy, everything really.
From New York Times ● Jan. 14, 2015
His talk was all of literature and art and the vanities; the light drawing-room comedy on the edge of farce was his kingdom; there he ruled as a sovereign.
From Oscar Wilde, His Life and Confessions Volume 2 by Frank Harris
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
