Comedy = Tragedy + Time

*Spoilers for "Little Miss Sunshine"*

Recently in class, we were watching the movie "Little Miss Sunshine", a movie starring Steve Carrel about a dysfunctional family traveling to get their daughter in a beauty competition. The whole movie relies mainly on mixing the elements of tragedy to compliment each other throughout the runtime, the comedy cuts the tension of the tragedy and the tragedy hits harder when it is preceded by comedy. This viewing got me thinking, can any horrible event be joked about with enough time.

The movie brilliantly waits just long enough to joke about tragic events that happen to the characters. The grandfather deals with drugs the whole movie and it's pretty obvious to the audience that he's going to die, so when the movie waits not even five minutes before the characters start comically trying to steal his body from the hospital. There are certain events, however, that are left alone. Dwayne is taking a vow of silence until he gets into the air force, it's played off jokingly and we have no reason to believe that he will break it. That's why he finds out he's colorblind and screams out profanities to the sky, it is never joked about for the rest of the movie, the writers don't want to compromise their powerful moments for a quick laugh. The movie doesn't draw a line as to what can and can't be joked about, the writers are just so good that they know when they don't have enough time and just leave moments be.

This whole movie relies heavily on the equation that comedy equals tragedy plus time, that no event is sacred, it just hasn't been enough time. Society seems to see this rule as being more of an equation for edgy, dark humor that's just joked about to shock people, but I disagree. We joke about the bubonic plague, the revolutionary way, Napoleon's invasion of Russia, all events where hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, died. Why is that okay? Because no one is alive from those times, so we aren't offending anyone. No one is gonna turn their nose up at a World War I joke, but it's "too soon" to make a joke about the holocaust.

So, what should you take away from this blog post? Have some perspective. Tragedies that happened within your, or your grandparents, lifespans are not uniquely terrible and are unable to be joked about, they just happened too soon. All the survivors of the Titanic have passed away, so making a joke about it isn't considered offensive, it's just good material now.