Comedy: The Stuff of Tragedy
There comes a time when the heaping up of calamities brings on uncontrollable nervous laughter—when, after a final blow from fate, we decide to treat it all as a joke.
Jean-Dominique Bauby • The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death
I wonder if all jokes boil down to the same pattern that eventually gets layered and complexified by veteran comedians. A joke is made by creating a frame with an embedded assumption, and then using a punchline to break the frame and reveal an implied truth. There are two layers of subtext, the assumption (the undertone), and the post-punchline
... See moreWhen comedy’s good, it’s breaking something open. It can tread into territory that’s scary to say out loud. And my own experience of trauma has been that it breaks things open, too. It upends expectations of what is acceptable. One residual effect can be acquiring the new ability to perceive another set of possibilities, because one must.
On creating work beyond your own direct experience
What's This, A Door?
substack.com
On the whole, she felt, life was more comedy than tragedy. Nearly everything that happened had its comic element, not too well buried, either. Sooner or later one could find something to laugh at in almost every situation. That was what, in the last analysis, could keep folks from going mad. The truth was, if you got a good Tragedy out of a
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