Comedic Coping: Dealing with Family Conflict Imagine you trip and fall down the stairs. Do you immediately get up and run away as if nothing happened, blame something for your fall, or do you laugh at yourself, recognizing your fault? As mentioned by Steve Almond in his essay “Funny is the New Deep,” “the comic impulse is what allows us to recognize our sins (personal, cultural, historical) and thereby make moral progress” (Almond 94). This is applied not only in our own lives, but also in literature. For instance, Sister experiences this kind of coping mechanism through comedy in Eudora Welty’s short story “Why I Live at the P.O.” In this narrative, the reader gets a sense of how family conflict causes great pain through Welty’s use of comedy
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“But oh, I like it here. It’s ideal, as I’ve been saying. You see, I’ve got everything cater-cornered, the way I like it. Hear the radio? All the war news. Radio, sewing machine, book ends, ironing board and the great big piano lamp – peace, that’s what I like. Butter-bean vines planted all along the front where the strings are” (Welty). This instance uses the comedic strategies of hyperbole as well as repetition. This is a form of hyperbole because she is exaggerating how well everything is going for her living at the P.O., even though the reader can infer that this is false and Sister is only trying to convince herself that she likes it there. She thinks that this single room is preferable to the large house she lived in before because her family is not around to make the atmosphere more hostile. However, even with the great family conflict, she is starting to feel that she misses them, but she doesn’t want to admit this because the separation is of Sister’s own doing. This instance also utilizes repetition because she repeatedly mentions how she does like it, as if she’s reminding herself that she does, and also repeatedly mentions the radio, adding to the comedic affect. This also relates back to Almond’s “Funny is the New Deep” because it also shows Sister’s pain through a comedic …show more content…
Sister uses comedy in these ways to cope with the pain of being alienated from her family, as well as the pain of knowing she caused the alienation, to deal with the truth and hopefully make progress in the situation through this recognition. So hopefully, through recognizing that comedy can help us through the pain, the next time you fall down the stairs, you’ll pick yourself back up and
“But oh, I like it here. It’s ideal, as I’ve been saying. You see, I’ve got everything cater-cornered, the way I like it. Hear the radio? All the war news. Radio, sewing machine, book ends, ironing board and the great big piano lamp – peace, that’s what I like. Butter-bean vines planted all along the front where the strings are” (Welty). This instance uses the comedic strategies of hyperbole as well as repetition. This is a form of hyperbole because she is exaggerating how well everything is going for her living at the P.O., even though the reader can infer that this is false and Sister is only trying to convince herself that she likes it there. She thinks that this single room is preferable to the large house she lived in before because her family is not around to make the atmosphere more hostile. However, even with the great family conflict, she is starting to feel that she misses them, but she doesn’t want to admit this because the separation is of Sister’s own doing. This instance also utilizes repetition because she repeatedly mentions how she does like it, as if she’s reminding herself that she does, and also repeatedly mentions the radio, adding to the comedic affect. This also relates back to Almond’s “Funny is the New Deep” because it also shows Sister’s pain through a comedic …show more content…
Sister uses comedy in these ways to cope with the pain of being alienated from her family, as well as the pain of knowing she caused the alienation, to deal with the truth and hopefully make progress in the situation through this recognition. So hopefully, through recognizing that comedy can help us through the pain, the next time you fall down the stairs, you’ll pick yourself back up and