In his preface to his comic novel "Joseph Andrews," Henry Fielding writes of comic writing, burlesque writing, and serious writing.

In burlesque writing, the writer exaggerates some part of a character or situation to make it completely unrealisitic, an amusing monster.

The comic writer, in contrast, must, more than any other kind of writer, be true to reality "since it may not be always so easy for a serious poet to meet with the great and the admirable, but life everywhere furnishes an accurate observer with the ridiculous."