Relocating To Elfland

Daniel Boorstin, in The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination, describes the classical distinction between comedy and tragedy:

“By mid-fifth century B.C., Tragedy and Comedy each had staked out different realms. Tragedy recaptured the ancient and the remote, gods and heroes. The spectator could see an enlarged version of himself struggling with grand issues of time and destiny. . . . Tragedy was a vision of events at a great distance in time (usually too in space) from the spectator.

“Comedy held up a mirror to the present. If Tragedy conjured up the unseen, Comedy rescued the familiar from the cliché. Comedy intensified daily experience, dramatizing the garrulous old man, the boastful soldier, the vain courtesan, the rude conceited youth, who all were so commonplace that they had ceased to be interesting. But Comedy made them laughable.” (Boorstin, Creators, p. 214)

Perhaps tragedy and comedy are reverse images of each other. When we look at man through the microscope, blowing him up so he is larger than life, we want to laugh at him. Enlarged beyond his ordinary size, he cannot be taken seriously. But when we look at man through the telescope, placing him on the epic stage of all things, we want to weep, for what is he on such a scale? And we ache for ourselves in him. It is when we see man for what he is, in his created proportions and relations, that we are humbled with hope and not despair, and laugh with joy instead of ridicule. “What is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that You care for him? Yet You have made him a little lower than the heavenly beings and crowned him with glory and honor.”