Comedy is the least considered aspect of modernist theatre – commonly framed as formally conservative and crowd-pleasing, leading towards harmony and continuity rather than rupture. However, comedy’s distinguishing features ally it to core modernist techniques and concerns: metatheatrical self-consciousness, disjunctions, disruptions, repetitions, and anarchic pleasures. Comic structures from farce and the comedy of manners to jokes, sketches, knockabout, and punchlines are central to a wide range of modernist plays. From Ibsen and Chekhov onward, the tragicomic mode is a common keynote of modernist theatre with the balance between comedy and tragedy dependent on the choices of the performer or the sensibilities of the viewer. Far from being inherently conventional, comedy can be viewed as modernist in its impulse to satirise and destabilise. Comedy is perhaps where the distinction between modernist and simply modern, between oppositional avant-garde and popular mainstream, is least identifiable and most intriguing.