Recently I was watching one of my favourite Woody Allen movies ‘Melinda & Melinda’. In short, the movie is about human life and claims that life is a comedy and also a tragedy, it just depends which way you look at it. Of course, I agree with that one hundred percent, so I have to give you a few examples. The first thing is really simple. A man is walking in the street and suddenly, without reason, he just falls down. When we see that happen, for example in a ‘Hidden Camera’ TV programme, this situation can be really funny and we see the funny side. But if the person who has fallen over is someone close to you, or even worse, you are this person, then for sure, it’s a tragedy. This may be a rather poor example, but it makes us start thinking about this problem. I wonder if you ever had a life situation which was tragedy and after a while it became a comedy. I have had plenty of such experiences. First of all, the death of pets and later unhappy teenage crushes. Also, there were the minor emergencies which turned out not to be so serious. The whole of our life is full of tragedies, but if we start looking at them from a different vantage, some of them can be really funny. Speaking of pets, I have to confess that in my childhood, I killed three pet hamsters. The first ate a piece of lego. The second couldn’t breathe during the night, while spending a night in a real bed, under a real pillow. The third one expired after he could no longer endure the smell of chemicals used to clean an aquarium (his home). I am now laughing about these episodes, but at the time they were huge tragedies. Speaking of small everyday tragedies, I must tell you about what happened today. It was like a nightmare. I couldn’t find my little key for work. This, for me, was like a scene from a film tragedy. After I finished looking for it in the real places where it should be, I even tried checking the fridge, the dryer and also the iron (because there is a little hole in the iron for water and I thought that maybe it was there). I was walking to work in a very despondent mood, thinking I would have to leave my belongings outside my locker. The comedy came later. This crazy key was hanging on my chest all the time and when I went back home my boyfriend saw the whole mess that I left and asked in a terrified voice if we had been burgled. In conclusion, I have to say that whether an incident is tragic or comic depends on two things, timing and location. Timing because everybody knows that when you are talking about the past, you use rose-tinted glasses. By location, I mean where you are in this situation. But for sure, our lives depends on our way of thinking about these things, what for us is a big tragedy is not necessarily a tragedy for everyone else and this is what makes different people cry for different reasons. Some people cry because it’s a comedy, others because it’s a tragedy. One thing is for sure, life is a drama. Some people writing comedy, others writing drama, and people like me writing about killing hamsters!
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