The Serious Comedy & The Reverse

THE PLAYWRITING SEMINARS > STRUCTURE > STYLE > SERIO-COMEDIES

'All along my characters [in AS IS] cracked jokes, which I tried to suppress. People were in the process of expiring, and here I was laughing. I mean, this was supposed to be a serious play. . . . I was having dinner with my friend who was a hospice worker at St. Vincent's Hospital in Greenwich Village, in the heart of New York's gay community, when it finally dawned on me that maybe humor was a key to my play. She said, We tell a lot of jokes in my line of work. . . . I permitted the play to be funny.'

-- William Hoffman

Humor is a great way to heighten the impact of serious issues. Even life-and-death issues. Laughter has gotten a bad rap from too many years of sit-coms on the tube. That's probably where the guilt comes from: Laughter = Being Frivolous. But it certainly doesn't in the theatre.

In the good old days, everything was much simpler for Playwrights. You wrote a Farce if people ran into doors, a Comedy if they waved handkerchiefs, a Drama if somebody unimportant died, and a Tragedy if royalty crashed. The idea of mixing comedy with serious subject matter was beyond comprehension if it went beyond the gravedigger chucking skulls for a few minutes in HAMLET. It's a lot more interesting now.

This sort of thing used to be justified by folks who never had to hold an audience as "Comic Relief." After all, Old Bill wouldn't stoop to cheapening HAMLET by . . .

Contemporary playwrights have just taken this mixing of styles a thousand miles further down the road. It's the way of the world and how they hear the world. So what they write are two ends of the same keyboard . . .

• Comedies with Serious Themes
  Wendy Wasserstein, William Hoffman, Tom Stoppard, Beth Henley . . .

• Serious Plays with Humor
  David Mamet, Marsha Norman, Tony Kushner, Velina Hasu Houston . . .