The emphasis of this graduate thesis was on comparing erudite comedies with smješnice (Croatian anonymous prose comedies that originate from the 17th century Dubrovnik area). Although these two types of comedies are frequently compared to each other for the similarities they share, because they both have their backbone in Italian comedy, our goal was to show the differences between them. Smješnice cannot be seen and evaluated as erudite comedies for several important reasons. The links between the two can be found in similar types of characters, motives of money and love, but also in the comic itself. What makes the difference between the two comedies is the composition itself. Erudite comedies consist of five acts, while in smješnice one can find only three acts. Basic characteristics of erudite comedy are the melodramatic recognitions, which cannot be found in smješnice. Apart from the representative erudite comedies written by Držić, this work offers as well an elaboration of Nalješković's VII. comedy – which might be called as the forerunner of the real erudite comedies. Smješnice are extremely interesting due to some external circumstances and unidentified authorship. Many theorists of literature have tried to link them to the comedy dell'arte and the erudite comedy, but the only thing to conclude is that smješnice are a special kind of comedy and that the only way of analyzing them is separately. Nevertheless, it is interesting to make a comparative comparison of two different types of comedies and to determine which literary legacy they both possess, and what differentiates one from another.