Daily Inspiration Quote by Angela Carter

Comedy here isn’t a genre so much as a moral alibi. Angela Carter’s line draws blood by admitting what polite culture prefers to euphemize: laughter often depends on distance. Tragedy, up close, demands care, responsibility, maybe even change. Shift it onto “other people” and it becomes entertainment, a story with the sharp edges sanded down by safety. The joke lands because the audience isn’t the one bleeding.

Carter’s intent is less to define comedy than to expose its economics: who gets to be the subject, who gets to be the spectator, and what power that vantage confers. The subtext is pointedly social. Comedy can be empathy’s failure, a way to turn someone else’s misfortune into a communal bonding ritual. “Other people” isn’t abstract; it’s a reminder that class, gender, and outsiderness decide whose pain reads as “material.” That’s a Carter move: she’s always alert to how narratives domesticate violence, especially when the victim is already expected to absorb it.

Context matters. Writing in a late-20th-century Britain steeped in political turbulence and a media culture hungry for spectacle, Carter understood how quickly suffering becomes consumable. Her fiction remixes fairy tales and gothic tropes to show the machinery behind “natural” stories; this aphorism does the same in miniature. It’s a warning disguised as wit: if comedy requires tragedy at arm’s length, the punchline is also a measure of our complicity.