Life & Wisdom Quote by Dawn Powell

Powell treats history like a long-running stage show: the same stock characters cycling through new costumes, mistaking novelty for meaning. Her line hinges on a perversely theatrical logic. Life is tragic in outcome, she grants, but comic in structure because it is built from dependable roles: the dupe (wants to believe), the fox (knows better and exploits it), the straight (keeps the scene legible), all arranged like a burlesque routine where timing matters more than morality. That analogy is doing sly work. Burlesque is lowbrow, repetitive, and knowingly artificial; by likening “the human comedy” to skits, she implies our grand dramas are largely choreography, social scripting, and ego.

The subtext is a cool, unsentimental diagnosis of human nature: people don’t learn so much as re-perform. The tragic part isn’t just that suffering exists; it’s that the same susceptibilities keep getting reliably triggered - greed, vanity, hunger for status, fear of exclusion. Repetition turns catastrophe into farce because familiarity drains the shock, and because audiences (society) begin to recognize the setup even as participants insist it’s unprecedented.

Context matters: Powell wrote with an acid eye about American manners, ambition, and the little cruelties of social life, especially among the urban strivers and scene-makers of the early 20th century. Her wit is a defense against sentimentality. She’s not offering comfort; she’s offering pattern recognition. If you can name the parts - dupe, fox, straight - you can at least stop applauding the “new” routine as if it weren’t the same old joke told with a different punchline.