What is comedy ?

I saw a Woody Allen documentary the other day where Alan Alda explained what comedy is; comedy is tragedy plus time. Like the shooting of Lincoln, you couldn’t make fun of it at the time, but now you can make as many jokes as you want, and nobody gets offended.

A couple of weeks ago there was a very tragic school shooting in Finland, again. This is madness which I can’t handle so I try to make fun of it. Someone in my French class began talking about it, me being a Finn, and I said “Don’t worry, I would never do something like that, I am 100 % pacifist. If I wasn’t, I had shot my mother-in-law for a long time ago”.

Well, my study mates didn’t think this was funny. Apparently what Alan Alda meant was that there should go more than two days between the tragedy and the joke.