Bathos

Bathos is a literary term describing an abrupt shift in mood from the elevated to the trivial, creating an anticlimax that can be humorous or disappointing.

The word comes from the Greek bathos meaning depth, a term adopted into English literary criticism in the 18th century to critique attempts at noble sentiment that collapse into bathos.

Bathos can be deliberate or inadvertent. Deliberate bathos is used in comedy or satire by following a lofty sentiment with a banal image, while inadvertent bathos results from inconsistent tone, cliché diction, or overblown rhetoric that fails to sustain the ascent.

Common mechanisms include a sudden change of register, an elevated metaphor followed by a trivial fact, or a solemn scene punctured by an incongruous joke. In some cases writers exploit bathos for parody or to expose pretension.

Bathos is distinct from pathos, which aims to provoke sincere emotion, and from genuine climactic height; it is chiefly discussed as a flaw or as a device of humor or irony. It appears in poetry, prose, drama, and film.

Notable critics use the term to analyze how tonal mismatches undermine seriousness and function as satire or as a stylistic weakness.