a) Premise

The tragic is connoted by its archetypes; the comic by the social context in which it develops. The tragic poses the problem of meaning as a component of the moral reasons of life; the comic overturns the possibility of establishing the meaning of any problem. The tragic is given before becoming historic; the comic celebrates the Apocalypse of this becoming. Thus, while the tragic can be translated from one culture to another merely by interpreting the iconology inherent in its dramatic categories, or using the creative imagination, the comic requires the knowledge of models with respect to which the author carries out his work of recurring distortion (parody), poetic reversal (mask) and unaffected decontextualization (irony). We will examine these three elements in different socio-cultural contexts, using the three key categories of the comic strategy: puns, agudeza, wit.