Comedy drama

Comedy drama, also called dramedy, is a style of television and movies when there are similar amounts of both humor and seriousness. 

History
Theatre
Traditional theatre was separated from its earliest days into comedy and tragedy. Authors such as Anton Chekov and George Bernard Shaw famously blurred the line between comedy and drama.

Early television
In live theatre the difference between comedy and tragedy became less and less significant, in mass media, comedy and drama were clearly separated. Comedies, especially, were meant to only have jokes and not any serious content.

By the early 1960s, television had started to present half-hour long "comedy" series, or one hour long "dramas." Half-hour series were mostly situation comedy or family comedy. One hour dramas could have detective series, westerns and science fiction.

Recent drama-comedy on television
A drama-comedy today is usually an hour-long dramatic series with funny jokes such as Moonlighting, Northern Exposure, Auf Wiedersehen, Pet, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Eureka, Life on Mars, House, Desperate Housewives, Charmed, Popular, Skins, Monk, Psych, Gilmore Girls, The O.C., Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Ally McBeal, Ugly Betty, Brothers & Sisters, Grey's Anatomy or ''Boston Legal".

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