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

“Should a man of seventy still be involved in the carnal aspect of the human comedy?” the professor David Kepesh asks in Philip Roth’s 2001 novel, “The Dying Animal.”

From The New Yorker

And so, being fully complicit in the human comedy, the last thing I’m going to mock is the mistakes that others make in the rush to bed, or why they do so.

From Salon

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