The speaker of "Comedy" has just come out of a theatre, and the poem is the little shrug she gives on the way out. A curtain has fallen, a program is about to be thrown away, and what remains is an afternoon or evening that can be tallied up in a single sentence. On the surface it is a throwaway remark about a night at the theatre. But the title is a quiet warning that something more is going on, and the more closely one reads, the more the casual tone starts to look like a performance of its own.
Start with the opening, "And there it is." The phrase sounds like something said after a long wait, as though the speaker has been expecting this ending, or at least is not surprised by it. Then comes the repetition: "another curtain down, / another program." Twice the word "another" is used, and it turns a single evening into one in a long series. This is not a special occasion but a habit, a thing that happens again and again and is filed away just as often. The program, an object meant to hold the memory of the night, is described as something "just to throw away." The word "just" does a lot of work here. It strips the souvenir of any meaning before the speaker has even left the building.
The turn arrives with "But, never mind." Anyone who has said this to themselves knows what it usually covers: a small disappointment being talked out of existence. What the speaker offers as consolation is oddly thin: "I've had my trip to town." The reward is not the play itself but the outing, the effort of getting there. Her evening is measured by travel, not by what she saw. The last two lines then add a final twist of irony, since "any critic would have loved / the play." Notice that she does not say she loved it. She hands the verdict to an imagined professional, someone whose job is to judge from a distance. The line can be read two ways: as a polite concession that the play was well made, or as a sly hint that it was exactly the sort of polished, hollow thing critics admire while the person in the seat feels nothing. The poem leaves the choice open, and that ambiguity is its main pleasure.
The form supports this mood of understatement. The lines are short and mostly plain, built from everyday words, and the rhythm moves in a loose, speech-like way instead of a strict meter. There is a light rhyme between "down" and "town" and a fainter echo between "away" and "play," so the poem closes with a sound that feels neat and finished, just as a stage performance does. That tidy closing rhyme is itself a little ironic: the poem imitates the very neatness of the play it seems to be quietly doubting. The short lines also leave white space around each remark, as if the speaker pauses after every small admission.
The title is the key to everything. A comedy is meant to end happily and to make us laugh, yet nothing here is laughed at or even enjoyed. The comedy may be the play, but it may also be the speaker's own evening, or the habit of dressing up one's emptiness as a pleasant outing. Judging by the poem's tone, the humor, if there is any, is dry and self-directed.
What makes the poem worth reading is how much it holds in so little space. It shows how people cover over letdown with polite phrases, and how easily an experience can become something to be reported on rather than felt. In eight short lines it captures a very ordinary human move: saying "never mind" when we mean that something mattered less than we hoped.