comedy of manners

plural comedies of manners

1. A comic work that satirizes the manners and affectations of a social class, often represented by stock characters.

   “The great millennial novelist”—the mantle has been thrust, by Boomers and Gen Xers alike, upon the Irish writer Sally Rooney, whose two carefully observed and gentle comedies of manners both appeared before her twenty-eighth birthday.

   2019 April 18, Madeleine Schwartz, “How Should a Millennial Be?”, in The New York Review, →ISSN