In a recent podcast with Conan O’Brien, the stand-up Bill Burr described how, when faced with the most horrible things in the news or in movies (assault, death, fire), he couldn’t help but laugh. In an aggrieved tone, he asked: Am I supposed to only moan and sob at the drumbeat of terrible events? Still, in a video clip of the conversation, Burr, not to mention O’Brien, looked uncomfortable with this confession. But what if he’s just saying out loud what many people experience and won’t admit to?
Humor isn’t just a coping mechanism. It’s so intricately woven into daily life that you can’t easily divorce it from tragic situations.
What if laughing at a boy getting his ear ripped off is not merely Grand Guignol comedy, but also a realistic response to an extreme situation, by a person, incidentally, whose job probably invites him to see murder and mayhem as mundane.
What great art tells us again and again is that laughter and crying are not that different, both releasing tension and easily bleeding into the other.
In “Breaking Bad,” Walter White, in a memorable moment of desperation inside the crawl space in his home, bursts out sobbing, which turns into disturbing cackles echoing through the house. At the end of the original “Texas Chain Saw Massacre,” the final girl, Sally Hardesty, flees a masked killer by crawling into the back of a pickup truck, where her tears and screams turn to jittery laughter.
Such a conflation of emotions goes back centuries, at least to Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus,” a preposterous horror-comedy of the Elizabethan era that makes “M3gan” look prim and tasteful. When its title character laughs after he’s sent the decapitated heads of his sons along with his own severed hand (Google it), did the ticket buyers at the Globe smirk? What about when Titus’s brother retorts, sensibly: “Why dost thou laugh? It fits not with this hour.” The response can be played madly, exhausted or something in between: “Why, I have not another tear to shed.”
