Bleak Revenge Comedy...

In my inbox this morning:

Twelfth Night is a rather bleak revenge comedy (as its season-pair, Hamlet, is a rather funny revenge tragedy), and one would think that to make it funnier one should ramp down the bleakness, and ramp up the

comedy, while to make it bleaker one should do the opposite.

But neither way works at all.

You have to ramp up both together, and then the funnier it gets, the bleaker it becomes, and vice-versa. This is true of most of Shax's work...