Spoudaiogeloion

The mixture of serious and comical elements stylistically, from the Greek "spoudaion", "serious", and "geloion", "comical". The combination first appears in Aristophanes's "Frogs".

Plato made extensive use of this tone in his "Gorgias", "Euthydemus", "Republic", and "Laws", and it is thematic in Xenophon's "Symposium" and the fourth book of his "Memorabilia".

The serio-comic style became a rhetorical mainstay of the Cynics, and the Romans gave it its own genre in the form of satire, contributed to most notably by the poets Horace and Juvenal.