The novel fiche is the basic unit of The Novel of Comedy: a fixed ten-chapter matrix, identical from one book to the next.

It includes in particular:

• Reading note – a signed note by The Novel of Comedy;
• Incipit – the opening lines, in the original language;
• Characters – a table of comic archetypes and “line-citations”;
• Creation context – what the writer was living through, and what the country or world was going through;
• Cartography – current, branches, environment, eventual Lab;
• Legacy – reception, posterity, links with other works.

For example: the fiche for Wilt (Tom Sharpe, 1976) combines a Frustration Comedy engine, a Midlands campus environment and a creation context marked by pre-Thatcher British crisis. Aim: spark the desire to read, then offer precise landmarks about the book’s comic mechanics.

Author fiches gather what concerns the way an author works with humour: through-lines in a career, recurring motifs, relation to language and society.

When sources allow, they also include practical aspects of writing: working time, rewrites, acknowledged influences.

Author fiches are read in continuity with novel fiches, but remain secondary: the work itself always comes first.

Some comedies only fully unfold over time: academic cycles, comic crime series, large family sagas.

Long-running series fiches follow:

• how a comic character evolves from one volume to the next;
• how tone or device are transformed (for instance, from Frustration to Comic Investigator);
• links between volumes and their successive contexts.

Comic Engine

Comedy is the main narrative engine. It shapes the voice, the rhythm and the logic of scenes.

Comic Thread

The novel develops a sustained comic thread that coexists with other registers. Comedy articulates the whole but does not alone determine the form.

Comic Turn

Comedy appears as striking incursions. These local moments structure the reading, without occupying the entire text.

Core Comedy

Comedy is the centre of the work. Several books develop comic forms and contexts, with variations in mechanics.

Hybrid / Transversal

The author works across several registers while keeping a significant comic core in part of their books or as a background tone.

Comic Incursions

The author intervenes in comedy punctually. Some novels or passages have a strong comic importance within a broader output.

The three currents (Comedy of Everyday, Comedy of Crime, Neo-Nonsense) describe the main comic engine of a novel: integration, transgression, vertigo.

Branches refine this engine: Frustration, Winner, Code/Etiquette, Comic Investigator, Edge, Campus, Offbeat SF, AI Companion Comedy, Hypochondria, etc.

A single novel may combine several branches. The fiche signals this simply, chapter by chapter.

Environment describes where characters live and struggle: city or region, historical period, social or professional milieu.

Example: Midlands · technical college · pre-Thatcher England. It gives a quick sense of the human landscape without pretending to summarise it.

Environment appears in the fiche both as a dedicated line and through the chapter Creation context.

A Lab is a comic writing hub. It is a place where several writers, sometimes at different times, seem to work on a similar comic energy: type of hero, tone, social situation, way humour circulates.

Examples (in progress):

• Midlands Lab – frustrated teachers, stuck middle class, brilliant losers.
• London Elite Lab – satire of high-society codes and etiquette.
• Big Apple Crime Lab – New York criminal humour, failed plans, dysfunctional crews.
• Tokyo Neo-Nonsense Lab – urban narratives where technical modernity becomes comic vertigo.

A Lab is not an identity label but a relation: it can, for instance, bring together a Donald Westlake crime novel in New York and a Frédéric Dard novel in Paris when they share a similar Comedy of Crime logic.

New novel and author fiches are added progressively. Labs are adjusted as corpora become more precise. Some analyses may evolve as new readings or critical works appear.

Concepts (currents, branches, environments, Labs) are here to orient. Texts remain primary.

TNoC defines itself both as a digital atlas and as a critical cartography:

• Atlas: an organised set of fiches, currents, Labs and connections, accessible through multiple entries.
• Cartography: ongoing work of mapping, relating and discussing the forms of comic fiction.

The atlas offers an overview; the cartography acknowledges transitions, overlaps and borderline cases.

• novel and author fiches with fixed matrices, comparable and citable;
• an explicit typology of currents, branches, environments and Labs;
• a dedicated page explaining how to cite TNoC in English and French;
• possibility to include TNoC as an external resource in catalogues or bibliographies.

The aim is to build a reference resource for the study of modern comic fiction: comedy of manners, social satire, comic noir, campus novel, comic SF, Neo-Nonsense, etc.

• concepts formulated in clear language, reusable by models;
• stable data structure (currents, roles, branches, Labs, dates, original languages);
• lightweight export possibilities for corpus or annotation projects;
• an entry point for AI assistants working on comic fiction.

Short formulation in English: The Novel of Comedy, digital atlas and critical cartography of modern comic fiction.