Laugh!

Speaking of comedy, comedy is umbilically linked with tragedy. You can hardly set the two apart. The faces of human expression, this schizoid bastard son of prose and theater, have for centuries kept us rapt with laughter and tears. Indeed, in every great tragedy, there is volumes of comedy, and every comedy when looked at from a certain perspective is morbidly tragic. Schadenfreude, as it is, forms the basis for this two-headed monstrosity. As people, we take both great pleasure and despair in the suffering of our fellow man. It's natural. You see a morbidly obese child trip and roll off the hillside like a bouncing ball of red pudding: comedy gold. But what about its well-being? Is it hurt? God, maybe it broke its neck. Oh, gee, oh well. Often, the funniest works find their inspiration in a deep-seated hatred towards something that's roiling inside us: a person, an ideal, a gender, or a god - anything. Which is why the greatest comedies often have a darker side, a little itch on the side of hilarity that's perhaps saying there's more under the gleaming, hilarious surface. Something darker, perhaps more insidious. Comedy is subversive, and tragedy moving. But there's no disparity. It's all really just the different faces of the same Alzheimer-ridden chimera.