Comédie larmoyante (French for "tearful comedy") was a type of French drama from the 18th century. This sentimental comedy often ended with sad events being resolved through reconciliation and emotional scenes. Even when plays in this genre ended unhappily, they showed that the characters who suffered had achieved a "moral triumph."

Thomas Heywood's play A Woman Kilde with Kindnesse (acted in 1603; printed in 1607) is considered an early example of this genre.

In Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée's Mélanide, the genre was fully developed. Comedy no longer aimed to make people laugh but instead to make them cry. This change involved blending the differences between tragedy and comedy in French literature. Earlier hints of this shift appeared in the work of Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux, and La Chaussée's plays naturally led to the domestic dramas written by Denis Diderot and Michel-Jean Sedaine.

Louis-Sébastien Mercier saw himself as a supporter of this genre.

By mixing comedy and tragedy, comédie larmoyante created the foundation for a later genre called drame bourgeois, a realistic form of comedy introduced by Diderot's Le Fils naturel (published in 1757, performed in 1771).

Examples of comédie larmoyante appear in both French and Italian opera, where it inspired the genre of opera semiseria. These include works such as André Grétry's Lucile, Nicolas Dalayrac's Nina, ou La folle par amour, Pasquale Anfossi's La vera costanza (1776), and Joseph Haydn's work of the same name (1779).