I Laughed, I Cried: The Sticky Wicket of Onscreen Tragicomedy

The mask of tragedy, without its partner, is nothing more than a crudely drawn caricature of the human face. And vise versa.

            Misfortune is fecund terrain for laughs, and tragedy thirsts for levity where it can get it. Consequently, comedy is often most effective when it plays off of something an audience relates to as unpleasant or even miserable. Any point on the spectrum of human emotion is incomplete without top notes of one and bass notes of the other. So “art” must take this into consideration in its quest to accurately imitate “life”. Of course, like anything habitually attempted by the art world, it is done to varying degrees of success.

            The “dark comedy”, “comedy-drama”, “dramedy”, “tragicomedy” or however you want to hybridize it, is a popular genre in TV and movies. Every awards show season brings a new crop of projects seeking to tickle our funny bone with one hand while tugging at our heartstrings with the other. So why is it such a sticky wicket pulling it off? When done well, the two blend and heighten each other’s effect. When done poorly, they cancel each other out.

            When it comes to doing tragicomedy well, the principle is pretty straightforward: it’s an accurate mirroring of a familiar phenomenon. Those in the grips of tragedy – the sick, the grieving, the oppressed, repressed, and depressed – need a good laugh more than anyone. And the laugh (though it may be irreverent, even insensitive) goes farther, like the difference between turning on a lamp in a sunlit room and lighting a match in a cave. Bringing successful comedy into a sad situation rounds out the human element, adding nuance and making the whole situation more relatable.            

            50/50 is the story of a young man coping with a cancer diagnosis. It does not shy away from the realities of the disease. It is written by Will Reiser, based on his own experience. Adam (played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) undergoes chemotherapy, confronts his mortality, watches his personal and professional life suffer, and looks sick (not Hollywood sick, but actual sick). When he breaks down on the eve of a life-threatening surgery, it is heart wrenching.  Yet when it comes to the overall tone, director Jonathan Levine eschews maudlin cliché and goes for laughs. Not punchlines or yuks, but full bodied moments of naturally occurring levity.

             When Adam receives the diagnosis, he protests that he can’t possibly have cancer because, among other things, he recycles. When his mother (Angelica Huston) hears the news, she immediately goes to the kitchen to make him some green tea because she read somewhere that it reduces cancer risk. These moments are funny because they show the silliness and irrationality engendered by unexpected misfortune. The brain retreats to a place of foolishness when the news is too big and too bad to handle. It’s devastating, and the whole theater laughs.

            Not all films can keep their balance on this tonal tightrope. Many of the more ham-fisted attempts at tragicomedy sell themselves with terms like “fearless”, “irreverent”, “unapologetic”, “unflinching”, which is really just a sneering safeguard. Implying that those of us who don’t like it simply don’t get it, or are too square, or too naïve, or too weak-stomached to appreciate what they’re going for. This kind of premature critical prophylactic is an indication that what they produced doesn’t have two legs to stand on and they know it.

            Perhaps some black humor is so black that nothing can, should penetrate it, but I think that a really deft comic can glean guffaws from just about any subject matter. There are cases when it feels like the “dramedy” approach is used as an excuse to produce something that is neither affecting nor funny.  It’s like the viewer is led into a pitch-black room, and assured that she’s in the midst of something really amazing. Eventually her eyes adjust to the darkness and she realizes that there’s nothing in there. In these situations, comedy is not only expected to be funny, but also redemptive. It is neither.   

            When a filmmaker sets out to make a “dark comedy”, or “dramedy”, or “tragicomedy”, then the project is almost doomed to veer too far one way or the other, eventually plummeting into something either offensive or insipid or both. When a filmmaker sets out to tell an honest story about people (with all the dimension and complexity that every human innately possesses) then the action mirrors true life and the perfect balance of tragedy and comedy strikes itself.