I’ve never set out to make fun of tragedy. That would be cruel — and I’m far too emotionally fragile to withstand the karma. But I’ve noticed something over the years: the line between “traumatic” and “hilarious” is surprisingly thin… and often drawn in hindsight.
There’s this quote — I don’t remember who said it, probably someone wearing a turtleneck — that goes: “Tragedy is just comedy plus time.” And the older I get, the more I realise how true that is.
Take, for example, the time I forgot to pull up the handbrake. It wasn’t a huge tragedy. No one died. But in the moment, it felt catastrophic. I watched — helpless, horrified, possibly holding a Tesco bag for life — as my car rolled gently but deliberately into the garage door. A slow-motion disaster. A visual metaphor for my life at the time.
I was livid. At myself. At the car. At gravity.
And yet, months later, that same moment became a comedy anecdote. “Remember when I turned my own garage into a drive-thru?” we joke now, as if it wasn’t the day I nearly cried into a packet of crisps.
This keeps happening. The worst days eventually become the best stories. The job interview I flopped. The wedding speech I panicked through. The moment one of my kids loudly told the barber, “Daddy doesn’t work, he just stares at his laptop and drinks coffee all day.” At the time: humiliation. In hindsight: absolute gold.
I think comedy, for me, has always been a way to take back control. Life throws a lot at us — some of it light, some of it incredibly heavy — and being able to laugh, even later, is a form of resilience. It doesn’t erase the pain, but it reframes it. Like, yes, I messed up. But at least I can turn it into material.
And maybe that’s what I love most about comedy: its ability to hold two things at once. The ridiculous and the real. The pain and the punchline. That moment where you stop crying and start laughing — not because what happened wasn’t serious, but because you survived it.
So no, I don’t laugh at tragedy.
I just wait until it’s funny.
