What are some conventions of the Comedy of Manners genre and what is their effect?

A Comedy of Manners, also called a Restoration Comedy, is a play concerned with satirizing high class society and its misplaced values.  'Manners' refers to the way in which everyday duties are performed, conditions of society, or a way of speaking.  It implies a polite and well-bred behavior.

Comedy of Manners involves a sophisticated wit and talent in the writing of the script.  Thus, it is a convention of the genre to have minimal physical action and  heavy use of dialogue. In this sense it is both intellectual and very much the opposite of slapstick, which requires little skill with the script and is largely a physical form of comedy.  

Furthermore, most plays of the genre were carefully constructed to satirize the very people watching them.  This was usually the middle to upper classes in society, who were normally the only people wealthy enough in the first place to afford going to the theatre.  Thus, another convention of the genre is the existence of 'stock characters' which were exaggerated stereotypes of upper class men and women (eg. in every Comedy of Manners play there is a 'fop' character who is vain, silly and only concerned with their appearance). The satire tends to focus on this vanity, desire to gossip and hypocrisy in order to undermine the superiority of the upper class.