This essay analyses Elizabeth Bowen’s comedy. It first focuses on the influence of English and Irish comic traditions on Bowen’s humour, especially her debts to Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth. It then considers the historical and theoretical contexts that inform her comic fiction, written in the shadow of two world wars and a period of conflict and immense change in Ireland, and in the wake of important developments in the theory of humour itself, including interventions by Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud. Bowen’s humour forms an intrinsic part of how she situates herself within literary traditions, and how she engages with themes of class and social tension, cross-cultural encounter and conflict. Bowen’s self-reflexive, ironic style employs modes such as comedy of manners, dark humour, gothic parody, mechanical humour, and satire.