Bathos relies on creating a context of noble or lofty sentiment and then suddenly presenting incongruous and often low-brow or mundane information. Change of tone makes bathos effective as a comic tool. The reader or viewer is presented with a potentially reflective idea or feeling before the sentiment is destroyed by the mundane or even vulgar. While bathos began as a tool used mainly in the domain of literature, it can be applied to film, photography, painting and even the plastic arts, such as so-called "kitsch" items. Bathos is often an effective satirical tool.
Alexander Pope published his satirical essay, "Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry," in 1727 in response to the ancient Greek rhetoric teacher Longinus' treatise, "On the Sublime." Pope used Longinus' format to satirize contemporary poets and fight against what he termed "the dunces." In particular, Pope jabbed at his literary rivals, Leonard Welsted and Ambrose Philips, for what were essentially political and aesthetic differences. Pope described how a poet could best fail, rather than how a poet could inspire awe, as his predecessors and rivals aspired to do.
Pope's "Peri Bathous" is not the earliest example of bathic humor. John Dryden, in his 1685 "Albion and Albanius," described the the cave of Proteus aside the sea in grand, poetic language before ending the description with a reference to the everyday image of the "piers of Dover." The philosopher Kierkegaard, in his 1849 "The Sickness Unto Death," notes that losing the self, though unpleasant, is not as bad as losing "an arm, a leg, a dog or a wife."
Bathos is found in contemporary film, literature and television. A 1985 film, "Morons From Outer Space," used the tag line, "They came, they saw, they did a little shopping." In "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," created in the 1980s, Douglas Adams described a fleet of alien spaceships entering Earth's atmosphere as they "hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't."