Short answers, pulled from the story.
Dean Rubin traces the word "comedy" to the Classical Greek kōmōidía, a compound of kômos meaning "revel" and ōidḗ meaning "singing" or "ode". It passed through Latin comoedia and Italian commedia before entering English, shifting meaning at each stage.
Aristotle defined comedy as an imitation of men worse than the average, specifically insofar as they are ridiculous. He divided comedy into three subgenres: farce, romantic comedy, and satire, and placed it as the genre most divorced from true mimesis of life.
The figure who became Mr. Punch made his first recorded appearance in England in 1662. He derives from the Neapolitan stock character Pulcinella of the 16th-century Italian commedia dell'arte.
Fred Karno was an English music hall comedian and theatre impresario who developed a form of sketch comedy without dialogue in the 1890s. Both Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel worked for his company. Film producer Hal Roach credited Karno as the man who originated slapstick comedy.
Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917) is an inverted urinal placed in an art exhibition and signed "R. Mutt". It became one of the most famous examples of the found object movement and is also considered a joke, relying on the inversion of the item's function and its incongruous presence in an art context.
Medieval Islamic philosophers including Abu Bishr, Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes translated Aristotle's Poetics and reinterpreted comedy as simply the "art of reprehension". They disassociated it from Greek dramatic representation and linked it instead to Arabic satirical poetry called hija, making no reference to happy endings.