24 Dec 2009, Posted by Asher Emmanuel in Articles,Drama, 2 Comments

Tragedy & Comedy

Tragedy is the genre that focuses exclusively on suffering and always ends badly. Comedy by contrast is lighthearted, fun, and always ends happily. Isn’t this the way we were trained to identify and distinguish the two? What if tragedy and comedy were joined at the hip? What if the things we think to be true about the dramatic genres were actually upside down? My dear friend, Dr. Louis A. Ruprecht, wrote a pity essay on just how upside we tend to misconstrue these dramatic categories. For further reading check out Tragedy & Comedy by Walter Kerr (a classic that demands multiple readings).

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