"Give me a choice and I'll take A Midsummer Night's Dream over Hamlet every time. Any fool with steady hands and a working set of lungs can build up a house of cards and then blow it down, but it takes a genius to make people laugh."
Said Stephen King.
Then there's this super-concise, possibly perfect aphorism: "Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel." That's the playwright Racine, who should be from Wisconsin, but he was French. And though that quote feels related to King's, I think it's quite different. King is talking about works of art and how hard it might be to crank them out, as he does in great volume. Racine is talking about how any given person might view life itself.
September 28, 2013
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16 comments:
Oh, whoa!
It's Saturday Professor. Saturday morning to be exact. No thinking until tonight. But, truth be told, I prefer comedies, especially the Shakeman's rom-coms.
If you don't want to be dismissed as either unthinking or unfeeling, you'd better let everyone know that you regard life as a black comedy.
It's not Racine it is from Horace Walpole and has long been one of my favorite quotes. It is from a letter written to Anne, Countess of Ossory in 1776. CF Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Walpole
The way people interact within life's tragic curve balls is a show of strength and sensitivity. And those same characters can do very funny things as well.
A good example is Olivia Hamilton's airplane ride in Steinbeck's East of Eden, which was one book full of characters suffering Biblical Tragedies. Also Cannery Row's cast of characters as funny as they get while living out their hard luck stories.
I never once laughed while reading any Stephen King novels.
I couldn't come up with a poll answer. I feel like it required too much thinking. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
:Dying is easy, comedy is hard."
It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry
Don't ask me, I found Charlie Brown's Great Pumpkin a heartbreaking tragedy.
I would like to see Hamlet performed as a bloody comedy, Quentin Tarantino could pull that off. Or as Stephen King style horror, Hamlet as Carrie. What if you had to argue that Claudius was innocent?
I laughed when I read jr565 saying, "I never once laughed while reading any Stephen King novels." That formulation confesses to reading at least three Stephen King novels.
Eventually Peckinpah started ending his movies with a character laughing out of sheer force of habit. He thought life was a comedy but he'd forgotten the punchline.
@Amexpat - good one. Wish I had thought of it.
I leverage Althouse for my thinking but not my feeling. Althouse-feeling sometimes make me feel frustrated with Althouse.
"I leverage Althouse for my thinking but not my feeling. Althouse-feeling sometimes make me feel frustrated with Althouse."
Yeah, but that's feeling. Think about it.
Any person who can't do both (think and feel) is either damaged or deficient (or both).
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