That we laugh and cry for the same things

When King Francis I received news of the death of Monseigneur the Dauphin, his elder son, the blow was so great that he was unable, for some hours, to speak or to weep. He sat in a kind of suspension. Then a nobleman approached him and, by way of consolation, began to praise the Dauphin’s qualities and to detail what the kingdom had lost. The king, who could not weep, began to laugh — a strange, helpless, almost frantic laughter that alarmed everyone who witnessed it. The grief was real. So, in its way, was the laughter. Both were the same grief, arriving through different doors.

I do not think this is simply confusion or breakdown, though it looks like both. I think it reveals something accurate about the structure of strong feeling: that at sufficient intensity, the emotions lose their distinctness and run into one another. The machinery that produces tears and the machinery that produces laughter are closer together than we suppose. They respond to the same trigger — the sudden sharp perception of the gap between what we had expected and what has arrived — and what determines which way the valve opens is something so small, so accidental, that it defies analysis.

“We weep for the same reason we laugh: because reality has surprised us. The difference between tragedy and comedy is not in the event but in the posture from which we receive it — and we cannot always choose our posture.”

I have noticed this in myself at funerals. There is a particular kind of laughter that rises at the worst moments — at the graveside, at the reading of the will, in the silence after the last rites — that is not disrespect, not callousness, but something the body does when the emotion is too large to move in the expected direction. The laugh escapes before the mind can censor it. And what it escapes into is, in those moments, indistinguishable from a sob.

This is, I think, why comedy and tragedy have always been twin arts, and why the greatest writers — ancient and modern — have tended to keep them together rather than apart. The division between what makes us laugh and what makes us cry is a division we impose afterward, in recollection, when we have had time to sort our feelings into their proper drawers. At the moment of impact, there are no drawers. There is only the shock, and what the body does with it.