"Any comic is a tragic soul. Comedy is one of the things that allows one to survive. Particularly if one has been in the process of separating off the emotions, it's one place you can process them"
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Tharp’s line lands like a backstage confession: the joke isn’t the opposite of pain, it’s the choreography that keeps pain from owning the whole stage. Coming from a dancer - someone trained to translate feeling into controlled motion - her claim that “any comic is a tragic soul” reframes comedy as disciplined labor, not spontaneous lightness. The subtext is that performance is often a workaround for people who can’t or won’t do vulnerability straight.
“Comedy is one of the things that allows one to survive” isn’t romanticizing suffering; it’s describing a coping technology. Comedy compresses chaos into timing, turns humiliation into a beat you can hit on purpose. That’s why it “works”: it converts the uncontrollable (grief, shame, fear) into something with form, and form creates the illusion - sometimes the reality - of control. In dance terms, the punchline is a landing. You practice it until your body stops shaking.
The most revealing phrase is “separating off the emotions.” Tharp isn’t talking about being naturally numb; she’s talking about a learned partition, the emotional compartmentalization that high-achieving performers often adopt to keep functioning. Comedy becomes the sanctioned room where the locked-away material can be handled without collapsing the rest of the self. You can smuggle sincerity in under laughter.
Context matters: Tharp’s world prizes precision and stamina, and her own work has long blended rigor with play. She’s pointing at a broader performing-arts truth: the funny mask isn’t denial. It’s a method of processing that lets you stay onstage.
“Comedy is one of the things that allows one to survive” isn’t romanticizing suffering; it’s describing a coping technology. Comedy compresses chaos into timing, turns humiliation into a beat you can hit on purpose. That’s why it “works”: it converts the uncontrollable (grief, shame, fear) into something with form, and form creates the illusion - sometimes the reality - of control. In dance terms, the punchline is a landing. You practice it until your body stops shaking.
The most revealing phrase is “separating off the emotions.” Tharp isn’t talking about being naturally numb; she’s talking about a learned partition, the emotional compartmentalization that high-achieving performers often adopt to keep functioning. Comedy becomes the sanctioned room where the locked-away material can be handled without collapsing the rest of the self. You can smuggle sincerity in under laughter.
Context matters: Tharp’s world prizes precision and stamina, and her own work has long blended rigor with play. She’s pointing at a broader performing-arts truth: the funny mask isn’t denial. It’s a method of processing that lets you stay onstage.
Quote Details
| Topic | Funny |
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