Human Comedy, The

American  

noun

1. French La Comédie Humaine.  a collected edition of tales and novels in 17 volumes (1842–48) by Honoré de Balzac.

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The Human Comedy Cultural  

1. A series of novels by Honoré de Balzac. A forerunner of naturalism, The Human Comedy (or, La Comédie humaine, published in the 1830s and 1940s) portrays the complexity of French society.

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Example Sentences

"And this stuff is not going to matter anyway, as we know. So there's no sense even contemplating it, you know? All you want to do is the obvious. Just get it right, and the rest is the human comedy: the evaluations, the lists, the crappy articles, the insults, the praise."

From Los Angeles Times

Even as it addresses the cultural legacies that are Ireland’s alone, “DruidMurphy” illuminates the universal human comedy, the drive to endure in the face of the unendurable and the eternal conflicts between nourishing hope and paralyzing fear.

From New York Times

As for Conrad the literary craftsman, opposing him for the moment to Conrad the showman of the human comedy, the quality that all who write about him seem chiefly to mark in him is his scorn of conventional form, his tendency to approach his story from two directions at once, his frequent involvement in apparently inextricable snarls of narrative, sub-narrative and sub-sub-narrative.

From Project Gutenberg

And there is one figure, a comically tragic figure, a figure in which is revealed all that is profoundly tragic in the human comedy, the figure of Our Lord Don Quixote, the Spanish Christ, who resumes and includes in himself the immortal soul of my people.

From Project Gutenberg

He hated the human comedy, the social farce.

From Project Gutenberg