Burlesque

Burlesque (from the Italian burlesco, ‘joke’). Genre of comic poetry, prose, or drama whose artistic effect is achieved by the mixing of elevated and ‘low’ jocular elements. Works in which serious themes were treated in humorous, vulgar language were very common in Ukrainian literature of the late 18th and early 19th century. Ivan Kotliarevsky's Eneïda (Aeneid) and the works of many of his epigones were written in this style.