To laugh or not to laugh? That is the question.

We usually think of comedy and tragedy as opposites, but perhaps we should consider them as two sides of the same coin. As Morreall (1999: 21) suggests,“[t]he most basic belief [which the comic and the tragic visions of life] share is that life is full of incongruities, discrepancies between the way things ought to be and the way they are. The difference between the two visions of life is more in their attitudes than in any beliefs about matters of fact.” They involve different and usually opposite ways of evaluating the same human condition. In other words, comedy and tragedy are built on incongruities assessed and framed to generate positive and negative emotions, respectively. Furthermore, comic/humorous and tragic/serious elements may co-occur in the same text, even if the text is primarily intended as funny. In such cases, texts become a blend of humorous utterances/parts and serious or even tragic ones – the latter constitute what Attardo (2001: 89) calls serious relief in humorous texts.