The Comedy of Perspective

Meeting your third Iago and other surprises.

Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner

The Third Iago

Mel Brooks defines tragedy as, “When I have a hangnail.” Comedy, he says, is, “When you fall off a cliff and die.” The joke is about our failure to measure the relative size of things. What’s personal, no matter how petty, is big to us. What’s happening to someone else, no matter how catastrophic, is relatively sm…