An abrupt descent from the lofty to the trivial, producing a comic or embarrassing anticlimax. Often happens when grandeur is pursued too hard and collapses under its own seriousness. Where pathos stirs genuine feeling, bathos spoils emotion through misjudged elevation.

From Greek bathos “depth.” In English the term is famously sharpened by Alexander Pope’s satirical treatise Peri Bathous (1727), which mocked the art of sinking in poetry. “Depth,” in the joke, becomes a plunge.