If tragedy is about the fact that people are mortal, then comedy is about the fools we make of ourselves on the way to the grave. The traditional distinction between Tragedy and Comedy, however, has always been difficult, at best, to maintain, especially when any moment or statement, depending on context, has the potential to be funny. In fact, comedy has been able to perform a great deal of analytic work that typically was the domain of tragedy or drama, especially since the end of the First World War. The emergence in the twentieth century of a host of literary and cultural figures, from James Joyce to Samuel Beckett to Eugène Ionesco to Flannery O'Connor to Joseph Heller to Günter Grass to Gabriel García Márquez to Salman Rushdie to Don DeLillo to Martin Amis and many others, reminds us of the great traditions of comedic cultural critique often ceded to other expressive arts.