Comedy-drama, sometimes portmanteaually called dramedy, is a style of television and movies in which there is an equal balance of humor and serious content. The usual practice, particularly in commercial entertainment, is to strongly favor either humorous or emotionally weighty material, but many films and television shows have found success blending the two disparate genres.

Traditional theatre was divided from its earliest days into comedy and tragedy, terms which primarily indicated whether the story had a happy ending. The term "drama" was used to describe all the action of a play. In the early 1800s, as theatrical writing became more subtle and plays were less likely to end with multiple deaths, the term "drama" began to be used to describe plays that were more sober, with "comedy" meaning plays that were funny rather than plays which ended happily. Since then the terms have remained relatively subjective. Authors such as Anton Chekov and George Bernard Shaw famously blurred the line between comedy and drama.

The advent of radio drama, cinema, and particularly television created greater pressure in marketing to clearly define a product as either comedy or drama. Though in live theatre the difference became less and less significant, in mass media, comedy and drama were clearly divided. Comedies, especially, were expected to maintain a consistently light tone and not challenge the viewer by introducing more serious content.

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