Why the Tragicomic Feels Like the Most Honest Aesthetic Now

If it is true that every historical era gives rise to the aesthetic sensibility most perfectly calibrated to its moral and spiritual essence, one wonders what truth is revealed by the fact that all of a sudden, the tragicomic is back.

This cockroach of forms—adaptive, resilient, unkillable—was named by the Roman dramatist Plautus in the second century BC, enjoyed its heyday in 17th-century Renaissance theater, and was revived in the 20th century to describe a slurry of existential despair and absurd farce that confronted the shards of meaning left in the wake of the camps and the gas chambers.

But World War II was a lot of world ago. So the question is why and how our moment of—pick your poison—late capitalism, permanent emergency, the death of the Anthropocene—has turned to an old form to describe the oxymoronic simultaneity of pathos and bathos, horror and the risible. 

For we are certainly living through something. The lunatics are running the asylum. They have told us so themselves—both that they are running the asylum and that they are the lunatics. No more need for critical unmasking or reading between the lines. Memes become policy: lawmaking through GIFs. And absolutely everyone saw this coming. Witness the political schadenfreude of Reddit’s r/LeopardsAteMyFace (tagline: “‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”) 

Not sure whether to laugh or cry? Perhaps that is the hallmark of our age.

THERE WAS SOMETHING in the air all last year. New York’s Hudson Theatre put on a wildly successful Jamie Lloyd-directed revival of Waiting for Godot, with Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter bringing slacker sincerity to the famous play—Bill & Ted do Beckett. The work, which is subtitled “A tragicomedy in two acts,” has served as exemplar of the form since its 1953 premiere. It features: erection jokes; the pratfalls of failed hangings; a constant need to piss; friendship’s irritations; the fact that nothing requires, explains, or justifies our existence; absurd daily chores of dress and food; running gags—Vladimir: “Well? Shall we go?” Estragon: “Yes, let’s go.” (They do not move.). This version had air guitar. Trousers fall down; a savior never appears. Reaching out hands to help the suffering, Didi and Gogo go down themselves—all mankind a wriggling heap. 

Across the Atlantic, for Lottery (2025), Martine Gutierrez took her extreme self-fashioning to a staged shoot at Paris Photo, giving audience members complete control over pose, expression, framing. (An exhibition of selected photographs from the performance followed earlier this year at New York’s Ryan Lee gallery.) The event was halted after an hour due to fears about her safety, which distressingly encapsulates a tension that the trans Mayan artist has navigated for years. Opulent fantasies of femininity molded to the drive of platform capitalism are crude, grotesque, and silly (see her enormous melon-breasted centerfold in 2019’s Body En Thrall or her “Plastics” series from 2020), while twinned with brutal hatred toward and real risks for those very same fetishized subjects.

“Dirty & Disorderly: Contemporary Artists on Disgust” at MASS MoCA in Massachusetts this past winter included Anna Ting Möller’s limp sculptural forms that seem simultaneously alive and dead, desiccated and damp, balletic and butchered. A mere inventory of the material comprising In Tandem (2025) produces whiplash: “Kombucha, chicken wire, plaster clay, epoxy, epoxy clay, plastic tube, nylon thread, ribbon, metal, water, Arduino hardware, latex/acrylic tubes, mist nostrils.” What is in tandem here is the exuberantly generative possibility of life itself (SCOBY, water) alongside the very synthetic polymers that are literally wrecking life on an individual and systemic level. If ever there was an occasion for the upside-down smile emoji….

Or consider the paintings of the diaper-clad demonic-cherubic figures of Trump, Musk, Putin et al. in “Apocalypse Now,” Illma Gore’s solo exhibition last fall at Imaginart in Barcelona. Gore is best known for Make America Great Again, her 2016 naked portrait of Trump with the paunch and solemnity of the great men of art history, adding, crucially, the tiniest of compensatory micropenises. Her recent work revives a dreamy Renaissance style to show its absurd incompatibility with the raging, petulant menaces in whom the world’s power is concentrated. It’s Michelangelo’s Last Judgment for a dead God world. These putti are just pathetic.

BUT WHAT IS the tragicomic? A fixed style? An unfixed tendency? A literary genre first and foremost, its application to visual art is already a translation.

In the face of difficult definition, one generates lists. My idiosyncratic miscellany of the contemporary tragicomic would run: Tala Madani’s “Shit Moms” series (2019–); Patricia Lockwood’s viral 2013 poem “Rape Joke”; Sarah Kane, especially in her violent, impossible stage directions (in her 1998 play Cleansed: “the rats carry Carl’s feet away”); Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster (2015); Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s 2016–18 Fleabag; Jos de Gruyter and Harald Thys’s mix of the awkward and traumatic; choreographer Crystal Pite’s 2016 The Statement. 

In: the work of theater maker Dries Verhoeven, who represents the Netherlands in this year’s Venice Biennale (see: Everything Must Go, his 2025 living installation in which antic pig-masked grocery store shoplifting crystallizes a capitalist paradox that demands both grotesque consumption and unlivable precarity). In: Jordan Wolfson’s Colored sculpture (2016), an enormous, demonic-eyed, freckle-faced animatronic boy suspended from the ceiling by heavy chains, its joints contorting in ridiculous spasms and lurches, occasionally stilled in a celestial pause only to smash, repeatedly, into the floor. 

In: the sculptures of “The Vernal Age of Miry Mirrors” (2022), in which Michele Gabriele makes abstract forms bear out social anxiety and the anguish of self-surveillance. In: the kitsch pathos of Peter Land repeatedly falling off a stool in his low-res Pink Space (1995); also: his continuous-loop tumble in The Staircase (1998); also: the single arm emerging from a pile of bricks in the sculpture Springtime (2010); also: his drunken naked dancing video Peter Land d. 5 maj 1994. In: basically anything Peter Land.

Out: Ruben Östlund’s 2022 Triangle of Sadness and Romain Gavras’s 2025 Sacrifice, both too winkingly misanthropic; cynicism lacks the requisite vulnerability. Out: the headless burlap beings of Magdalena Abakanowicz’s 4 Seated Figures, 2022 (gorgeous, but too much vulnerability). Out: Iiu Susiraja’s surreal self-portraits (too confrontationally abject). In: the singing sphincters in John Greyson’s 1993 Zero Patience (the fact of an AIDS musical at the moment of its peak crisis being equally elegiac and insane). Out: Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (2019) and its art-world trolling (but in: the dead slumped squirrel of his 1996 Bidibidobidiboo).

TRAGICOMEDY IS A PORTMONTEAU that enlivens the ancient split between Greece’s weeping and laughing philosophers. “To Heraclitus, all our activities seemed wretched, to Democritus sheer folly,” says Seneca, the Roman stoic. Your call: Howl with grief or howl with glee. Rubens got their opposing temperaments spot-on in a double portrait from 1603.

But the tragicomic adds a difference to this difference by producing an intimacy between gravity and levity. Their pairing begs the question of whether misery and mirth alternate, blend, or coexist. Modern accounts are indebted to Nietzsche’s radical rewriting of tragedy itself: In place of the resolutions of Aristotelian catharsis, Nietzsche emphasized disharmony, dissonance. Accordingly, playwright Eugène Ionesco insisted that in tragicomedy the two elements of tragedy and comedy “do not coalesce” but “show each other up, criticize and deny one another.” They are reciprocal, interdependent, mutual consequences of each other. Tragicomedy plays games, producing a viewer who is unsure how to react. 

While tragedy is dialectical—each triumph of the hero brings him nearer to his inevitable death (think: Oedipus; Macbeth; Walter White)—tragicomedy refuses to resolve the tension between a character’s efforts and a world that trivializes, undermines, or frustrates them. As opposed to tragedy’s narrative arc of historical fate, tragicomedy unfolds in an infinite present. 

And yet: Tremulous hope persists. This is neither nihilism nor fatalism. In a canonical 1966 account, Karl Guthke wrote that the figures in a tragicomedy are “exposed to the challenge of ultimate and total meaninglessness, without, however, necessarily falling prey to it.” Numerous critics since have therefore argued that it grapples with something fundamental: the comedy of existence, the tragedy of finitude. Ionesco spoke of “our tragicomic human condition.” Beckett, of the “risus purus,” the “laugh laughing at the laugh … at that which is unhappy.”

Never has there been a less Hegelian aesthetic. Its content is its form. Its form is its affect. Ambivalence is not a bug but a feature. Tragicomedy is the ultimate both/and.

For we are spinach in teeth and weak prostates, sex grunts and gas and things that die. We are also care and sacrifice, yearning and art. We are not suicide—not today at least. 

IN 2026, VIEWERS are spoiled for choice by a range of exhibitions that take on tragicomedy’s formal and political potential. The group show “GAG” will be on view from October 2026 to April 2027 at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, exploiting the titular term’s triple meaning: a joke, a retch, and a blockage of speech. Exploring the simultaneity of humor and trauma, it includes several photographic and video works by artists mentioned above—Gutierrez and Madani—while also pushing the concept in new directions.

Namely, while classic tragicomedy places comedic figures in a tragic setting—pitting being against situation—newer navigations turn to intermedia to navigate both/and-ness. In this vein, “GAG” includes Peggy Ahwesh’s five-channel video installation Lessons of War (2014), which takes YouTube-sourced animated videos and reedits them into short episodes about Gaza in the summer of 2014. The stilted graphics of video game aesthetics promise the low-stakes entertainment of the cartoonish; the dated episodes that structure the video recall that in 50 days of hostilities, over 2,200 Palestinians were killed, including hundreds of children. Animation provides the comedy; editing, the tragedy. Their formal encounter indexes the absurd truth of modern warfare: that a child’s corpse might be treated like gameplay.

Lucas Blalock likewise finds tragicomic potential in photography itself, inverting Photoshop as a mere tool of postproduction to foreground it as generative and creative, leaving visible traces of labor in ugly edits and unrefined refinements. The image qua image thereby becomes uncanny, slapstick, a bit ridiculous, a bit horrific—independent of its content. Not that content doesn’t matter. Blalock, whose thumb was crushed on a ride at Disney World when he was 10, only to be surgically replaced with his big toe, has something to say about the pitiable fragility of the body. Tragedy may have fate, but comedy owns the accident. “GAG” exhibits some of the kinetic sculptures that comprise his “Film-Objects” (2020–) series in which aluminum-mounted prints rotate on motorized turntables. It is the proto-cinematic remix that is monstrous here—a playful optical toy at one glance, a brutal dissection of flesh at another. 

Confirming this speculation that the modern tragicomic involves de- and reconstructing old forms, from March to August, FACT Liverpool presents “They’ve Got Your Eyes” by the Scottish artist Rachel Maclean. The exhibition centers on a film created with generative AI trained on an archive that includes fairy folklore and the Victorian mania for invention. Maclean’s work traffics in deep fakes and glitch aesthetics, rainbow cuteness and the tropes of pulp—but these are set against violent dystopias and a world of cruelties borne, especially, by women (see her 2018 video Make Me Up as an example). The result is a disturbing chiasmus: the whimsy of malevolence, the malevolence of whimsy. A larger tragedy is that in our slop pop culture we constantly consent to both.

It is fitting that so many acolytes of the contemporary tragicomic are the girls, the gays, and the theys. The tree of critique must be refreshed with new blood. Who better to diagnose the absurdity of the moment than those most targeted by it? 

From April to September, the Fondazione MAXXI in Rome, in collaboration with the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, takes this to its logical conclusion in “Tragicomica: Perspectives on Italian Art from the Mid-20th Century to Today.” Although the catalog insists on a general “anti-tragic component” to the history of Italian art, cinema, and literature, the exhibition highlights the affordances of a particularly feminist irony-tinged rage from the likes of Elena Bellantoni and Chiara Fumai. This is for the good. Indeed, Paola Pivi’s Untitled (Donkey), 2003, is the work that advertises the exhibition on MAXXI’s website—and while the image of a gentle donkey on a boat in Venice is visually delicious with its redescription of light as minor variations in blue, it is also a distillation of the structure of being-out-of-place. Is that delightful, is it amusing? Because it also describes the quintessence of total abandonment.

Pivi is a master of having it both ways. Witness her 2021 installation 25,000 Covid Jokes (It’s Not a Joke). This monumental archive of printed-out jokes and internet-sourced memes gives us everything at once: the world-affecting chaos of the virus, the anxiety and the paranoia. Others’ unhinged ignorance can be fun. Those jokes walked in streets, though: They cost lives. The World Health Organization gives the reported Covid death count at an unthinkable seven million people. Yet we are all one click away from finding real people who believe that count to be zero. You can’t make this up; and the wager of so many contemporary artists is that you also can’t make sense of this without a robust model of contradiction. 

That covers New York, the UK, and Italy. But can the tragicomic travel? For 20 years now, it has been common to opine that irony is the luxury of affluent societies. Is tragicomedy likewise the purview of those who are comfortably removed from the world’s worst horrors? Witness for the defense: the extravagantly color-drenched paintings of Congolese artist Chéri Samba, in which bodies are pinned in vises, unfurled in strips of flesh, gratuitously and gloriously remade within a context of material miseries, devastating insecurity, and decades of war. Or consider Tarzan and Arab Nasser’s 2025 Once Upon a Time in Gaza, which Le Monde dubbed “une tragi-comédie palestinienne.” The film, which won best director in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes, scrambles archetypical elements of absurdist comedy, the thriller, and the Western to articulate what the newspaper called the “humor of despair.” We know the subaltern speak; we know they do weep; surely they also jest.

MUCH INK HAS been and will be spilt distinguishing tragicomedy from rival aesthetics such as satire. But today its most relevant sister mode is that of camp. For the tragicomic is camp in reverse. In Susan Sontag’s classic formulation, camp is failed seriousness, while the tragicomic is a seriousness of failure. What fails? Bodies; projects; efforts; ideals. The playfulness of camp elevates style in the service of an “aesthetic experience of the world.” The tragicomic, by contrast, elevates mixed affect as an ethical experience of a senseless world. If, as Sontag has it, camp “sees everything in quotation marks,” the tragicomic sees everything in split screen: two simultaneous aspects, equally in play, never to synthesize.

Nor is the tragicomic irony, which requires distance for a gap to emerge—that between an intended and a literal meaning. Etymologically, the Greek eironeia means a pretense of ignorance: It begins in deceit. Irony is thus the amulet of thought, which is why it is favored by philosophers from Socrates to Kierkegaard to Derrida. Dr. Strangelove is didactic irony, not tragicomedy. Irony involves incongruity, while tragicomedy is about possible congruity—not mutual erasure but the capacity for the tragic and comic to coexist. Irony is a defense. Tragicomedy is an assault on surety.

In place of purifying catharsis, tragicomedy traffics in unresolved tension. In December 2025, I saw the Reeves-Winter Godot. When it came to an end, what I felt was not purgation but tenderness: Raw, I felt resolutely open to feeling. This aesthetic is neither cynical nor revolutionary, but it is also not numbing. I felt tender precisely because Beckett has not given up on the world and nor can we, not so long as we are in it.

The tragicomic thus does not align with what posthumanist theorist Rosi Braidotti calls “too-much-ness,” when “fatigue, fear, and despair overlap and accumulate to produce a feeling of utter impotence,” atrophying “our ability to take in and on the world that we are in, simply because it hurts too much.” Rather, tragicomedy resolutely takes the world on precisely because it takes the world in. It sees the possibility of comedy’s anarchic potential and refuses the easy abstraction of despair or passivity of resignation. Comedy humiliates tragedy—it brings tragic decision back to the ground, to reality in all its un-great forms. A philosophy of anti-idealism, tragicomedy squares with life lived as it is. For this reason, it is a supremely human aesthetic. 

Accordingly, its most perfect articulation did not appear last year in a gallery at all, but in the pages of Vanity Fair magazine. Christopher Anderson’s by now infamous photographs of Donald Trump’s inner circle are a master class in tragicomedy’s formal qualities and subversive potential. The artist’s handling of subtly tilted angles, lighting for exaggerated texture, and pointed juxtapositions in the mise-en-scène creates a series that presents two simultaneous truths. There is the harrowing fact of the cruelty, vanity, and autolatry of the makers of decisions that have produced uncountable global harms and the concurrent fact of the slackened spilling gut, the tacky fixtures and fabrics, the injection scars and wrinkle-settled mascara. The cheapness of a people for whom other peoples’ lives are cheap. 

This is the tragedy of amoral power and the comedy of obliviousness, the horror of real blood on real hands and the farce of the ham-fingered regard with which those hands, caught in the starkness of an unfawning light, congratulate themselves for their successful indifference to suffering. Evil is no longer banal; nowadays it’s bumbling. These people are ridiculous; these people are ruinous. 

A portrait of our era: idiotic, laughable, and so fucking sad.