tragicomic
1
7.3
- adjective
- /trædʒɪˈkɑːmɪk/
- The tragicomic play had moments of deep sorrow intertwined with laugh-out-loud humor.
Examples
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He wrote displaced and "modernized" melodramas with tragicomic effects that chronicled Rio de Janeiro family life from the 1940s to the 1960s.
Academic text (1998) -
If the imagination functions within stories to remind us of the tragicomic aspects of experience (as Silko suggests), then stories—those we hear about others and those we remember—can act as agents of change.
Academic text (1997) -
The effect is tragicomic, expressing a deep crisis of moral values.
Academic text (1998) -
We recall her tragicomic love affairs.
Fiction book (1995) -
This I won't talk about any more because it's not unique to any community; everywhere, there are tragicomic aspects to each individual fate.
Fiction book (2000) -
We do know that, after three years, it has only just now sanctioned its first Internet user, who, in tragicomic fashion, almost certainly did not share files.
Blog text (2) -
It was this tragicomic character that gave the keynote speech at the sprawling This Is Tomorrow exhibition.
Academic text (2000) -
She embodies the absurd and thereby might more viscerally communicate the tragicomic sentiment particular to wartime Dada.
Academic text (2014) -
But even the newsreels that celebrate his success (" He can't throw a boomerang, but this blackbird knows his song") foretell the tragicomic nature of his roller-coaster life.
Academic text (1995) -
The ceremonial meeting between the kibbutz members and the Bedouin elders is a tragicomic scene of miscommunication, cross purposes, and parodic exaggerations (23-26).
Academic text (2001)
Synonyms
1
8.8
Having both sad and funny parts at the same time
How Tragic
Surface Forms
Morphology
Etymology
The word tragicomic comes from joining tragic ('sad') and comic ('funny'). Think of a play that makes you laugh and cry at the same time, and you have the idea of tragicomic, which means something that is both 'sad' and 'funny'.