Bathos is a story-telling technique that follows serious ideas with the commonplace or ludicrous. The juxtaposition of these ideas creates humor. It has its origins in poetry, where lofty prose would be followed with an anticlimax of sorts. It later evolved to cover any instance where the serious is mixed with the surreal or commonplace in order to provide humor. Bathos can be both intentionally invoked or unintentionally present. It most often appears intentionally in comedic works or those with a comedic undertone, although not always. Unintentional bathos is described on this site as Narm.