Will Eisner on Humor vs. Tragedy

YRONWODE: ...I want to know what you see as the cutting edge between humor and tragedy and I want to know why you seek that balance, why you carry it to those extremes. On one page innocent victims may be littering the landscape and on another page you may be parodying a singing commercial. You take it from extremes of really gut-wrenching despair on the one hand and then you turn around and just yuk it up.
EISNER: Aren't those two things really the very essence of life? Really between extreme tragedy and extreme humor what is there? I suppose I never think about it that way until I'm interviewed, I've never really sat down and analyzed it, but think satire is a form of rage, an expression perhaps of anger. There is kindly humor and there is bitter humor. There's kindly tragedy and there's bitter tragedy. There is a relationship between the two in my mind -I can't keep them separate. Every time I do a very tragic scene, I can see humorous scene within the same frame and it can be converted. A man walking down the street and falling into manhole can be very tragic thing -- or it could be very funny. So much depends on what else is involved. I see humor as an incongruity. There are lots of definitions of what humor is- some think it's man's inhumanity to man, some think people laugh because they're glad it isn't happening to them, some people laugh because of happiness, or kindness, or even fear -- but I see humor as a kind of incongruity.