Are You Living in a Comedy or a Tragedy?

There are two kinds of people, people who come up with arbitrary splits that are supposed to tell you something that's not totally inane, and people who think these "two kinds of people" lines are trite, simplistic, and annoying.

BUT.

There are also two kinds of people, I heard recently, and for once I tended to agree: people who think they're living in a tragedy, and people who think they're living in a comedy.

I'm definitely the latter. In the moment, of course, I'm as liable to get frustrated, or melodramatic, or just plain sad about the awful things--death and casual cruelty and the bus being really, REALLY late--but when you look at it from a bird's-eye view, doesn't the whole thing just seem like a loopy Tom Stoppard play?

The way I see it, there's nothing--truly nothing, and yes, I'm including very hot-button issues under this umbrella, like for instance the big-r-as-in-"R__ is never funny"--that you can't make funny. It takes some time, both to gain perspective and because raw flesh isn't tough enough to stand up to the razor-slice of a cutting joke. But if you ask me, the general absurdity of human existence (because cosmically speaking, just about everything we DO is absurd) means that even our pain can be mined for humor.


Of course for the hot-button issues, the joke has to be really GOOD. It has to get at something most people can't see and won't say before it clears the bar of being worth telling. You also have to consider the "too soon" factor. See: above analogy about raw flesh and razor blades that I like and don't want to try to improve upon here.

But arbitrary lines in the sand--it's okay to joke about this religion, but not that one, and this trauma but never, EVER that--don't make sense to me. Pain isn't relative; hurt is just hurt. Saying one hurt is trivial enough to joke about and another is far too important to EVER joke about just doesn't make any sense. I say this as someone who has had objectively a very easy life, and also objectively some very capital-letter hurts.

I'd also argue that as far as processing the truly-horrible goes, humor works BETTER than tragedy. It chips away at the big weighty, inky AWFULNESS of pain. It puts terrible stuff into a safe space, briefly. It's much more fun than crying, and gives you an ab workout instead of puffy bag-eyes. What's not to love?

Of course I have a very dark sense of humor. I tend to enjoy the things that make many people--including smart people that I like--cringe and change the channel or turn the page or leave the room.

I think that simply comes back to how I see the world and my place in it. In the end, I'm going to be a forgotten pile of dust. In the history of mankind, to say nothing of the history of the mostly-unknown universe, my trials and pains and triumphs and joys matter very, VERY little. If we're rounding to the nearest integer, they count for 0. So how, exactly, am I going to ascribe the weight of tragedy to any of them?

I'm biased, of course. But I think the folks who see it like me have a leg up. I'm not saying the world isn't tragic. It absolutely is, pretty much all the time.

I'm saying all that tragedy can produce something greater than just pain.

What about you? What side are you on?