What's the difference between amusing and comical?

Amusing


Definition:

  • (p. pr. & vb. n.) of Amuse
  • (a.) Giving amusement; diverting; as, an amusing story.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) It was amusing: he's still working away and this picture of him is hanging in a gallery somewhere.
  • (2) Joaquin Rodriguez Oliver is amusing himself by trying to take a puff of a cigar in his saddle.
  • (3) Students have been amused by the amount of public response to this action.
  • (4) But she is determined to reassert her authority and appears not to have been amused by the remark.
  • (5) In La Shish, the beloved local halal restaurant where Wanda Beydoun has worked a minimum wage managing job for 16 years, these stereotypes are a source of amusement.
  • (6) In a tent for those recovering, a talkative man wearing a heavy gold chain played up to amused doctors during the lunch break.
  • (7) Israeli media reports said the rocket came down near an amusement park in sand dunes on the edge of the city.
  • (8) He tells an amusing story of how exhilarated, if stunned, he was by completing three skeleton runs at Lillehammer.
  • (9) Tech entrepreneurs will keep expanding into increasingly diverse niches, so it will be amusing to try and pick out the most obscure market being disrupted in 2014.
  • (10) King notes with some amusement that he has been around so long that kids who read and loved him in the 1970s now run publishing houses and newspapers; he is revered, these days, as a grand old man of American letters.
  • (11) She added that the superstore would have pulled business from the local high street and brought big lorries and heavy traffic to the site which sits next to Dreamland, Margate’s derelict amusement park which is being revived.
  • (12) But my amusement should be a problem for movement conservatism.
  • (13) Facebook Twitter Pinterest We are most amused … The Windsors, starring Harry Enfield and Hadyn Gwynne, centre.
  • (14) In Brussels, the reaction was more bemusement than amusement.
  • (15) It’s something that has always baffled and amused me about my grandmother.
  • (16) It amuses me that he calls his new material "songs" when they are so unsingable.
  • (17) The joke, the uncontainable amusement, the gleeful satisfaction, was that most rational people had thought that he was too disabled to walk 26 miles, that he was too sick.
  • (18) The tribunal ruled: "The comment having been made, other people in the room, including other supervisors, laughing and finding it amusing, was inevitably conduct that any gay police officer would reasonably consider … degrading."
  • (19) "The part in the film is small, I thought it would be amusing.
  • (20) Now tell us this, Robbie, when you collected your MBE from the queen, did you exchange amusing chitchat with the woman who most of us only ever encounter on stamps?

Comical


Definition:

  • (a.) Relating to comedy.
  • (a.) Exciting mirth; droll; laughable; as, a comical story.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Because such a possibility seems so remote as to be comic.
  • (2) NGOs and foundations • Comic Relief Announced new funding of £1m at the conference.
  • (3) After heading for Rome with his long-term partner, Howard Auster, he returned to fiction with a bestselling novel, Julian, based on the life of a late Roman emperor; a political novel, Washington DC, based on his own family; and Myra Breckinridge, a subversive satire that examined contradictions of gender and sexuality with enough comic brio to become a worldwide bestseller.
  • (4) The trip raised millions for Comic Relief but prompted some uncharitable headlines after it emerged in July that Parfitt had billed the taxpayer £541.83 for "specialist clothing" – and a further £26.20 for the cost of picking it up in a cab.
  • (5) In October, Amazon announces a digital partnership with DC Comics, prompting Barnes & Noble to remove its comic books from its shelves.
  • (6) "The only thing missing for true greatness however has been that comical touch that comes each time England figure out a new way to completely discombobulate themselves as they crash out.
  • (7) Comic writing can be a brutal, unforgiving business, yet it can produce great and multi-layered prose, combining comedy, pathos and satire.
  • (8) Through small and large acts of deprivation and destruction we follow the process: the removal of hope, of dignity, of luxury, of necessity, of self; the reduction of a man to a hoarder of grey slabs of bread and the scrapings of a soup bowl (wonderfully told all this, with a novelist's gift for detail and sometimes very nearly comic surprise), to the confinement of a narrow bed – in which there is "not even any room to be afraid" – with a stranger who doesn't speak your language, to the cruel illogicality of hating a fellow victim of oppression more than you hate the oppressor himself – one torment following another, and even the bleak comfort of thinking you might have touched rock bottom denied you as, when the most immediate cause of a particular stress comes to an end, "you are grievously amazed to see that another one lies behind; and in reality a whole series of others".
  • (9) In 2000 the comic strip Mother Goose and Grimm showed an owl in a tree calling "Whom" and a raccoon on the ground replying "Show-off!"
  • (10) That's in 1888; by 1890 the tone is of comic resignation (there is much comedy in these pages) as Edmond realises that he has devoted the whole of his life "to a special sort of literature: the sort that brings one trouble".
  • (11) He will continue to work part time for BBC radio on leadership development and take on an advisory role with Comic Relief.
  • (12) iPhone Shifter: Interactive Graphic Novel (Free) What was that about interesting things in the world of digital comics?
  • (13) Ian Livingstone is not all that keen on being photographed near the life-sized model of Lara Croft in his study – even though he was largely responsible for launching her on the world nearly 20 years ago, and the heroine of the Tomb Raider video games, comics and films helped to make his fortune.
  • (14) Trump’s tragic Nam story is captured in the film Apocalypse Ow.” On Late Night with Seth Meyers, the comic examined the timing of Trump’s Nordstrom tweet, noting that it came just 21 minutes after he was supposed to be in his daily intelligence briefing.
  • (15) "I'm not going to suddenly stop admiring his unique comic talent because I've switched teams," Allen told the Guardian.
  • (16) Between festivals, Hardee played cameo roles in TV comedies such as Blackadder and The Comic Strip, and ran his own comedy club, the Tunnel, which he had opened at the southern end of the Blackwall Tunnel in 1984; it acquired a fearsome reputation as a graveyard for aspiring standups.
  • (17) The ex-comic ruled out giving a crucial confidence vote in parliament to a centre-left government and reiterated that the M5S's new legion of deputies and senators would vote on laws on a case-by-case basis.
  • (18) There have always been geeks and fans here, it’s just now they call it Comic-Con.
  • (19) Zack Snyder's comic-book reimagining, which opens in the UK and US this Friday, is being tipped for an impressive box office haul.
  • (20) His comic adventures are too many to relate, but it may be said that they culminate in a café of 'singing waiters' where, after a wealth of comic 'business' with the tray, he shows his disdain for articulate speech by singing a vividly explicit song in gibberish.