This chapter offers a selective overview of western thought on comedy and philosophy since classical times. It leaves aside formal elements like humor, laughter provocation, and other features with which it has been associated across time and culture, to concentrate on philosophical perspectives regarding a genre spawned theoretically by Aristotle’s Poetics. The chapter includes reference to comedy’s conventional status as junior partner and moral foil to tragedy. Comedy, especially in its classical lineage, has been regarded with suspicion by the orthodoxy because of its association with ridicule, laughter, and character traits that are frowned upon if not reviled in respectable society. Later philosophers locate comedy’s animating spirit in the individual, as a sort of living vitality personified. Some recent thought releases comedy from tragedy’s gravitational pull along these more spiritual, expressly human lines.