• Pfhorrest
    4.6k
    Inspired by today's Existential Comic, The Philosophy of Humor

    I hold that drama, by which I mean an umbrella category encompassing both comedy and tragedy, is a sort of mirror image of beauty. The common factor to comedy and tragedy, and what I hold makes drama like a mirror image of beauty, is that while beauty is about experiences of something seeming in some way right (as put forth in my last thread), comedy and tragedy are both experiences of something seeming in some way wrong.

    The distinguishing difference between comedy and tragedy is how they approach that wrongness: comedy approaches it frivolously, with levity, making light of whatever is wrong; while tragedy approaches it seriously, with gravity, taking the wrong thing to be a weighty matter. This wrongness can be of either a descriptive or prescriptive kind, just like the rightness of beauty can be.

    I think this is best illustrated in the wide varieties of comedy, ranging from slapstick (where people experiencing physical violence is treated lightly instead of as a matter of grievous injury) and roasts or other jokes explicitly at someone's expense (that are treated as an acceptable transgressions of social norms), which are both making light of prescriptively bad things; to jokes that hinge on setting up and then subverting expectations (where something that was thought to true turns out to be false), including postmodern comedy that violates medium conventions such as breaking the fourth wall, and even things like puns where the wrongness is just the use of the wrong word in place of the expected one.

    All comedy hinges on something being, in some way or another, wrong, and yet treated as not a big deal. Tragedy, on the other hand, depicts something being in some way wrong, and makes a big deal out of it being wrong. Both of them are, for that wrongness that they depend on, in some way un-beautiful. Yet both can nevertheless be, in the end, beautiful in their own way. Comedy, in making light of bad things, shows them as not so bad, and so correspondingly good, at least relatively speaking, and thereby beautiful in a way. And tragedy, in treating bad things as weighty matters, can speak hard truths about bad experiences that people can really have, and so, for that truth, also be beautiful in a way.
  • Noble Dust
    7.8k


    I don't disagree, but I think beauty as a concept does in fact include things like comedy and tragedy. If anything, beauty is often best expressed via extremes like these. I posted this song in a different thread recently, but it illustrates what I mean. The song falls squarely in the tragedy category. "Hurt" was originally written by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, who had a storied history of drug and alcohol abuse during the early days of his skyrocket to stardom; he wrote the song at a very young age, as a typical "woe is me" dark ballad of sorts; I'll post the original first. There's no question that the lyrics are honest, but the music suggests a sort of reveling in the pain. Something redolent of youth, to be sure. It's absolutely a song of self-absorbed pity; something I would argue is not beautiful.



    8 years later, Johnny Cash covered the song on his last album, shortly before his death. The same song takes on an entirely different meaning. Self-absorbed pity becomes real regret, and yet beauty triumphs. The depth of the human experience is explored; this is essentially what beauty is; the human experience brought from the depths into reality. There's an anecdote of Trent hearing Johnny's cover for the first time, and divulging into tears. I don't mention this as an emotional argument...it illustrates what I'm describing.

  • Pfhorrest
    4.6k
    I broadly agree, I think, which is why I wrote before that drama (comedy+tragedy) is “sort of mirror image of beauty”: you can still see something via its reflection in a mirror, but it’s sort of turned around. Given my view in that earlier thread about the nature of beauty, that beauty is about something seeming “right” (either good or true), comedy and tragedy, both depending on something seeming “wrong” (bad or false), are, as I said before, “in some way un-beautiful. Yet both can nevertheless be, in the end, beautiful in their own way.”

    Because this mirror of beauty, a reversal of it, indirectly shows what is “right”, in a different way: “Comedy, in making light of bad things, shows them as not so bad, and so correspondingly good, at least relatively speaking, and thereby beautiful in a way. And tragedy, in treating bad things as weighty matters, can speak hard truths about bad experiences that people can really have, and so, for that truth, also be beautiful in a way.”

    I agree that Cash’s cover of Hurt is beautiful in that tragic way.
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