TO LAUGH AND CRY

The complementary principle of comedy and tragedy

"A triviality is a statement whose opposite is false. However, a great truth is a statement whose opposite may well be another great truth." – Niels Bohr

This is obvious stuff, but often sadly neglected, especially outside mainstream drama, which of course is always painstakingly aware if they are trying to make a comedy or a tragedy. In my opinion any work of drama is either a comedy or a tragedy. At the bottom-line, that is. Because of course it might mix comedy and tragedy in any number of ways. It might seem like a tragedy, but in reality be a comedy. Or the other way around. In other words there is a lot of fun to be had in playing around with these two fundamentally different perspectives on the human condition. But in terms of the basic design of a drama, at the end of the day it is either-or. You can’t have it both ways. Or not at all.

When I’m coaching, consulting or teaching, if this is not clear, then it is always my first question to the director/writer. Is this a comedy or a tragedy? And of course most of the time it is initially a difficult question to answer (since I had to ask it). My next question will then be something like: “Will the protagonist get what he/she needs in the end?” or “Does it end in some kind of harmony or in despair”. Some people object a lot to this idea. “I am just writing a story about real people - I want it to be real, not some sort of comedy or tragedy”. Fine, but first of all, you a creating a drama, you are not creating reality (unless by chance you happen to be God), and by creating a drama, you are choosing a perspective, a reflection of reality, and the two fundamental ones concerning human reality are the comedic and tragic. All the other genres are essentially based on these two major ones. Melodrama is a kind of tragedy with some well-hidden comedy in the mix. Pure horror is a kind of grotesque tragedy. Fantasy and fairy-tales are mainly comedies as they end in harmony. Naturalism is most often some kind of tragedy. Farce is comedy in up-tempo with a razor sharp focus on the follies of our self-conceptions. Realism seems mostly to be tragedies, but has been known to spot the humorous side of real life. Teenage-silly-movies are slapstick comedies with extreme focus on sex and bodily functions. And so on.

The comedic perspective is characterized by seeing the human experience from a certain distance. It believes that none of us are so special that any kind of suffering or pain is to be taken too seriously. You are just one out of many – a number in an endless row of numbers. It makes fun of those who think they are above the rest. It sides with the little man. It believes a lot in earthly things, like sex, food, money and the body (including bodily fluids and excrement) – that these things are natural and good for us, and it readily pokes fun at any taboo regarding these, but on the other hand if any one is obsessed with them, it is also ready to bring them down to the general laughter of the rest of us – although then often with a softer landing than the one granted the high and mighty. In general the comedy doesn’t believe in very hard landings – people has to get up again and go on with their lives – because this is the ultimate credo of the comedy: Life goes on.

The tragic perspective is completely opposite. For the tragedy, each and every one of us is something unique. Tragedy demands compassion and total identification with it’s subject. It sees the human condition as a striving for the higher goals, be they justice, the truth, passion, love, immortality or whatever ideal you might have. But tragedy is a tricky bedfellow, because there’s always a price to pay for the higher aspirations. When a tragedy is closer to and tempered by comedy, then the price might be a partial sacrifice – the hero achieves his goal, but will always be marred by the sacrifice he had to pay. Or in the case of the pure tragedy, the hero must utterly fall. Oedipus is the example per se. The guy is like the greatest hero of his time. He has answered the riddle of the Sphinx (a metaphor for understanding the human condition), he has become king of Thebes, which is now smitten by a plague send by the Gods. Oedipus is a man of action and determined to save his kingdom, but eventually discovers that he is the cause of the plague, as he unbeknownst to himself has broken the taboos of the Gods by killing his father and bedding his mother. There is no way out for the poor fellow, he has to rip out his own eyes and live in torment. What we see here in the pure tragedy is what I call the blind spot. The hero is by all measures almost perfect. We can admire and identify, but there is a blind spot, a hidden truth about the hero that despite all his heroic qualities will lead to his undoing. There is no mercy in the pure tragedy – because whoever stands tall, must fall.

And here we come full circle with the comedy, as this almost sounds like something a comedy would do. The only difference being that in comedy the fall is never so hard, that life can’t go on, whereas in tragedy life as it has been known is destroyed. Now I claim this to be the complementary principle of comedy and tragedy because the two perspectives basically counter each other. One says we nothing special. The other says we are. They can’t both be right. But it works like yin and yang (if you like Eastern philosophy) where the two basic forces of the universe a mutual exclusive but in their center contains each other or like the paradox of quantum physics (if you like science) where your choice of perspective determines if you are observing a particle or a wave – something not possible as it is supposed to be either-or. And here we are with our drama – it is either a tragedy or a comedy in terms of creating it, playing it and describing it, but of course behind the outer forms they are the same, feed of each other in an eternal dialectic.

So when you go about creating your drama, you cannot escape choosing a perspective – like the scientist cannot avoid making a choice when observing the sub-atomic waves/particles – like each of us has to be either male or female, even though we contain the opposite qualities – and not only should you – at least at some point – do this knowingly, but also enjoy the kind of almost musical sense of tonal sensitivity this choice will open up for you. The choice you make never exclude the other perspective, it just means that if you choose comedy, then it has to begin with some kind of comedic harmony and also end likewise. In between that beginning and end, you can cross the line as many times as you want. Going with the tragedy, you must strike a tone of despair, loss, death or however you want to put it, in your opening, then – if you want – you can lead on with all kinds of temptations of hope, but then reaching the end, let that initial note of gloom bear the full fruit in it’s inevitable cruel logic – matching the degree of tragedy you are playing at. Let me say this in another way: To miss out on the interplay of comedy and tragedy is like missing out on the joy of sex. And like sex, its something you will never get tired of fooling around with, once you have gotten the hang of it.