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My first thought here is of Woody Allen's definition of comedy as "tragedy plus time": all we need is a little distance on what seems tragically inevitable to see that it's...

not.

And now I'm also noting the connections to the concurrent discussion on From Evolving Systems to World Literature and back again about whether we might more profitably think of literature, writ large (not to mention the the world, writ large; or ourselves, written however!) as tragic or comedic. In entry #45, Wai Chee Dimock observed,

"A tragic account of this would say that the outcome is inevitable, fully scripted. A comic account would say that things could have gone the other way, that it was no more than fortune -- or luck -- that produces this particular outcome... it's a potentially reversible narrative, one that allows for a 'backward propagation' ... to a prior state of amplitude and fluidity"--

though, then, in entry #47, she adds "a word of caution: while it's tempting to think that such a world is 'comic' (and that comedy itself is the most capacious of genres, encompassing tragedy and subordinating it), there's no guarantee that this is indeed the case...."