random thoughts about entertainment and literature:

comedy & tragedy are closer than we think

why do people love The Office? it’s funny, duh. but its jokes (like Dilbert’s) are funny because they come against a grimly ironic backdrop of corporate anonymity, futility, boredom, and dissatisfaction. it first of all presents relatable pain.

what’s so great about Heath Ledger’s Joker? unstable genius, and dark humor. sure, serious and evil villains can be scary. but a villain like Scar, who hisses a sarcastic “long live the king”, is terrifying. Even Darth Vader has moments of irony.

see the fact is, funny people have to be smart or at least quick-thinking. a serious villain might be your equal; but a funny villain just might outwit you.

In Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado, Fortunato wears a jester’s motley and Montresor’s last spoken line is sarcasm.

while we’re on clowns, there’s a reason we have so many films like It, Joker, Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, Alice in Wonderland. All these things have a Gothic, sour, twisted whimsy. The same man who wrote The Importance of Being Earnest also wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Zombies are sort of a variant on the clown idea, in that the person loses or masks their selfhood under something stronger (a virus, versus the whim of the audience)

this “sad clown” is an archetypal if not ancient idea, going back to medieval punch shows. i guess it and its modern descendants personify self-perceptions we may have sometimes, such as ugliness, stupidity, lack of status.
For such a reason, we may even want Joker to win.

why is the movie Shrek popular? Megamind? Despicable Me?
Everyone is afraid that they are the villain to one extent or another.

Intentionally off-putting performers like Andy Kaufmann, Eric Andre, Miranda Sings have this same role of potraying our fears and negative self-image

Conversely, it makes sense why slasher movies are expected to be kind of funny. Mechanically, they need comic relief, sure, but the point is to help get our fears out of our head and put them on a screen where we can get a look at them—maybe even laugh at them a little.

And that is one of the big goals of art anyway—to distill certain aspects of experience, so that all other experience is made more vivid by contrast.

So not only can we cheer on Jim as he needles Dwight, we can appreciate our own real-world victories and pleasures a little more.