I recently rewatched Four Weddings and a Funeral<\/i>, and found it even more delightfully hilarious than I had remembered. So I recommended it to a friend, who had never seen it.<\/p>\n
He reported that he found it very hard to watch. By about ten minutes into it, he was cringing in embarrassment for the main character.<\/p>\n
Of course this was a classic case of Mel Brooks’ dictum: “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”<\/p>\n
I was seeing the main character’s plight through the prism of comedy. Somehow I was able to separate myself from the acute embarrassment he felt as he went from mishap to mishap.<\/p>\n
My friend, on the other hand, was experiencing something closer to tragedy. He identified with the character so completely that he directly felt the character’s pain.<\/p>\n
Of course it doesn’t need to be strictly one or the other. Some situations manage to be both ridiculously funny and unbearably tragic all at the same time.<\/p>\n
Then again, I don’t feel like discussing national politics today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I recently rewatched Four Weddings and a Funeral, and found it even more delightfully hilarious than I had remembered. So I recommended it to a friend, who had never seen it. He reported that he found it very hard to watch. By about ten minutes into it, he was cringing in embarrassment for the main … Continue reading “Four Weddings and a Discussion”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21463"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21463"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21464,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21463\/revisions\/21464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}