Tuesday, May 14, 2019, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EDT

CYNTHIA WILLETT, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy

“The Comic in the Midst of Tragedy’s Grief with Tig Notaro, Hannah Gadsby, and Others”

The function of the comic in the midst of tragedy isn’t clear. Is it simply comic relief that wounded nations, communities, or individuals seek? Is it simply Nietzschean moments of joyful forgetting and perhaps a measure of transcendence from grief? Mark Twain emphasized the latter when he wrote “the secret source of humor itself is not joy, but sorrow,” a view sometimes phrased as “comedy is tragedy plus time.” It’s assumed we need emotional distance in order to mock or transcend the tragic. But there might be another way that humor can help us deal with suffering, a way Cynthia Willett sees as apparent in our increasingly inclusive comic scene where humorists address audiences struggling to make sense of a volatile world. She will share insights she and her sister Julie have developed in a book due out in the fall, Uproarious: How Feminist and Other Subversive Comics Speak Truth.