Garp’s view of comedy: laughter alongside tragedy and compassion

Garp’s view of comedy: laughter alongside tragedy and compassion is the conviction that comedy can take suffering seriously rather than make light of it. For Garp, laughter is a form of sympathy in a world where misfortune and foolishness do not cancel each other out: people may be sad even when their problems look comic, and the same event may appear tragic to one person and absurd to another.

Comedy and Seriousness

Garp’s second novel, Second Wind of the Cuckold, became a test of this aesthetic. He described it as a serious comedy about marriage that was also a sexual farce, while reviewers tried to extract a thesis from its treatment of sexual relationships. The novel showed partners wounding one another, feeling guilty, and often wanting further intimacy; reviewers alternately called this paradox brilliant and dumb. One found the book bitterly truthful but predicted that its bitterness would keep it from becoming more than a minor classic, while another suggested that refining away some bitterness might produce a purer truth.

Garp rejected the assumption that a work must choose between comedy and seriousness. He regarded people’s problems as often funny and the people experiencing them as nonetheless sad. In his view, the contradiction was truthful: comedy need not deny suffering, and solemnity does not automatically make an account profound. His later formulation that human sexuality makes even the most serious intentions farcical extended this principle to desire and marriage, where earnest plans can be unsettled by human behavior.

The novel’s poor sales made the disagreement personal. It sold a few thousand copies fewer than Procrastination, and although his editor, John Wolf, reassured him that second novels often performed less well, Garp felt for the first time that he had failed. Wolf tried to spare him a hostile review, then sent it with a note explaining that he had heard its author suffered a hormone imbalance. The reviewer dismissed the novel as a sexist work by the famous feminist Jenny Fields’s son. The attack sharpened Garp’s concern that his art had made him seem cruel, rather than sympathetic.

The Letter to Mrs. Poole

A letter from Mrs. Poole of Findlay, Ohio, struck Garp as a serious misunderstanding of his work. He felt that readers mistook comic writing for mockery and seriousness for solemnity. He also believed laughter was connected to sympathy, something people continually needed. Because he had been a humorless child and had not been religious, he reflected that he might take comedy more seriously than others did.

Garp answered Mrs. Poole with care, as though addressing someone in a potentially dangerous crisis. He acknowledged that people suffer, that many do not believe in God, and that they often struggle to raise their children well. He accepted that people in difficulty do not ordinarily find their own problems funny. His disagreement was with the notion that this ruled out comedy: people can think and feel at once, and the world can be tragic and comic together.

He explicitly disavowed laughing at people. He said that people were all he took seriously and that his response to how they behaved was sympathy, accompanied by laughter as consolation. He called laughter his religion, while admitting that this was a desperate kind of faith. The phrase makes comedy less a sign of detachment than a way of enduring human vulnerability without pretending that suffering can be neatly resolved.

The Bombay Wedding Story

To explain his position, Garp told Mrs. Poole a story set in Bombay, where many people starve while others celebrate a wedding. Guests arrive with elephants used for transportation. Some drinkers feed beer to one elephant from buckets; when they are ejected from the party, they ride away on the unsteady animal. It strikes an electric utility pole, and the guests riding it and the elephant are killed.

A starving man then approaches the scene. While the wedding guests mourn, he takes food and drink for his hungry family and laughs at the way the revelers and the elephant have died. The guests tolerate his poverty and theft more readily than his laughter at their dead companions. They drown him in one of the buckets used to give beer to the elephant, construing their act as justice.

The story sets different responses to the same disaster against one another. For the bereaved wedding guests, the deaths are tragic; for the starving man, the manner of the deaths can seem absurd beside the threat of starvation. His laughter does not erase the guests’ grief, just as their grief does not make his hunger disappear. Garp’s point is not that death is simply funny, but that suffering is distributed unevenly and that judgments about what may be laughed at are shaped by the observer’s position.

Garp also resists reducing the episode to a single moral lesson. The story can be read as a class conflict, but he prefers to see it as a comedy about a natural disaster: people attempting to take charge of a situation whose complexity exceeds them, amid conditions that are at once momentous and trivial. His final qualification—that the outcome could have been worse because an elephant was involved—returns the scene to comic scale without undoing its deaths. The humor rests on the disproportion between human efforts at control and the consequences they cannot master.

Audience, Misreading, and Compassion

Garp thanked Mrs. Poole for writing, even though she had criticized him, because he valued hearing from his audience. That response matters alongside his anxiety about being misunderstood: he does not treat criticism as proof that readers should be ignored. Instead, he tries to clarify the ethical intention of his comedy, distinguishing sympathy for people from approval of their actions and laughter from contempt.

Across his account of Second Wind of the Cuckold and the story in his letter, comedy depends on holding incompatible responses together. Sexual desire can make serious intentions farcical; a wedding’s celebration can coexist with hunger outside it; a death can be a tragedy to mourners and seem grotesquely absurd to someone facing starvation. Garp’s comic vision does not reconcile these differences into comfort. It asks readers to recognize how perspective shapes laughter while continuing to take human suffering seriously.