Dealing With Tragedy Through Comedy
As a fan of stand-up comedy, I was excited to listen to an album by Tig Notaro, who I hadn’t listened to before. Throughout her album LIVE, Notaro explores the relationship between tragedy and comedy, as she talks about the terrible things that had happened to her over the previous four months, and remarked that “It’s weird because with humor, the equation is Tragedy + Time = Comedy. I am just at tragedy right now.”
This article from the New Yorker about Notaro’s set by Andrew Marantz sums up my emotions while listening to the set. Although there aren’t many laugh-out-loud jokes, Notaro’s intimate “diary entry,” as Marantz says, allows the audience to connect with her in a more personal, yet still somehow humorous way. Through her masterful timing and blunt mannerisms, she confuses the emotions of the audience, who don’t know how to respond. She even responds to a visibly upset woman, asking if she would be OK, although the woman in the audience has no personal relationship with Notaro. This interaction shows the power of our empathetic nature as humans, as we care more about others than we think.
Throughout Notaro’s album, I couldn’t help but draw connections to Bo Burnham, one of my favorite comedians. Burnham masterfully creates musical comedy that is frivolous at its surface, yet incredibly thought-provoking as you dive into the lyrics. Burnham isn’t afraid to tackle his role as a comedian, as he does in his song “Sad,” from his Netflix special what. (By the way, if you haven’t seen either of his Netflix specials, you really should; Bo is incredibly witty and hilarious.)
In “Sad,” Burnham sings about depressingly ironic incidents such as “a diabetic kid trick or treating” and “a homeless man named Rich.” During the bridge, he transitions to why we can find humor in those things, observing that the audience hasn’t felt sad during his melancholy song. Burnham goes on to sarcastically say that “being a comedian isn’t being an insensitive prick capitalizing on the most animalistic impulses of the public; it’s being a hero.” I found this really interesting in the way Burnham speaks against the idea of comedy overriding the feelings we encounter following tragedy.
Like Notaro, Burnham points out our empathetic tendencies as humans, singing, “tragedy will be exclusively joked about, because my empathy is bumming me out.” So, I think there is a common underlying message shared by these two performances: laughter isn’t a bad way to deal with tragedy. However, comedy can’t be used as a means of replacing tragedy, although I have admittedly done that in the past. Instead, those opposing emotions are healthy when expressed reciprocally and moderately, so that we can deal with tragedy while not being sociopathic, as Burnham says.
