Watching a tragedy can make us weep against our will, whereas a good comedy can send us into fits of uncontrollable laughter. Causing these intense emotional experiences seems to be what is distinctive about the two genres. From its earliest incarnation, tragedy has also been seen as communicating deep and important truths about human nature, and many figures in the history of philosophy, including Aristotle, Hegel and Kierkegaard, have constructed theories of tragedy that attempt to articulate the nature of this tragic wisdom. In common parlance, a ‘tragedy’ is a sad or heartbreaking event, like the accidental death of a youth or a natural disaster, but the genre of tragedy – which often depicts sad or heartbreaking events – is thought to communicate something to its audience about human life – its fragility, for example, or its meaninglessness. Comedy, by contrast, is often seen as mere amusement, and we are not inclined to think that we are learning anything significant while laughing at the foolishness of a stage figure, at the pretensions of a politician or at the punch line of a joke.