Comedy - A Fragment

Comedy is essential to life - perhaps more essential than art. One will find with any cursory glance at the world that the most brutish, inhumane and unempathic are, whatever their differences, united by an almost inhuman lack of humour.

Comedy is our only way of dealing with such evil as evolution has set no precedent for. It is the only recompense in a blasted world - quite simply it is the tonic which sustains life. Without it, it would be immoral to continue. Comedy is rooted in tragedy - that is its paradox. Just as Byron wrote that,

Sorrow is knowledge: they who know the most
Must mourn the deepest o’er the fatal truth,

So too do those with the most humour understand life's tragedy best - if subconsciously or not. In them is a knowledge and an empathy, a solemnity and reverence for the woe of others, which cannot but manifest itself in wit. They adopt an ironic view of life because cold honesty would be suicide. Comedy is the only force which might slam the book shut, which might restore the contents of Pandora's box.

Paradoxes are by their nature insoluble, and so we live our lives by them. They are the perfect elixir in a world so nonsensical and improbable that our senses cannot fully assay it. They allow us to indulge in the construction of infallible truth, which is in fact unwavering falsity. They allow us to exercise our need to define, to explain, whilst being loose enough that our parochial minds can graft them to a chimerical sphere. They have such an allure because they allow us to tread a line between eternity and desolation, and in this small sense to become transcendent. They are neither vagaries nor edicts, yet something stronger than either, something which strikes us most cleanly through the soul. They have in them the shattering blast of perdition and the soft whisper of a zephyr.

I find it fascinating that one of the prime generators of comedy is the absurd - this cannot be unrelated to absurdism in a philosophical sense. The absurd is hilarious because it is unresolved - it defies our rationality, which we find in some way to be the greatest transgression of all. The bizarre is something we subconsciously descry in the world. This, I am certain, is why so many jokes are made of the most appalling things. The internet is awash with jokes pertaining to Nazism and the Holocaust, neither of which should be remotely funny to the empathic being; it is that they corrupt our view of the world to such an extent that they are laughed off, indeed must be laughed off, for comedy is our only way of dealing with such unique horrors. The intangible grimness of such events is simply beyond our faculties, and cannot be processed in a human way. The laughter produced by such morbid jokes is always nervous - it is the isolation and banishment of something we are powerless to alter, for powerlessness is something that the self-conscious creature cannot brook, something which defies progress and civilisation in one deft move. Comedy is the release valve of the soul. This also explains our ridiculous need to make jokes of the recently dead - our only mode of grief in a godless world.