What is comical, as we saw, is a personality who makes his own actions contradictory and so brings them to nothing, while remaining tranquil and self assured in the process. Therefore comedy has for its starting-point what tragedy may end with, namely an absolutely reconciled and cheerful heart. . . . The comical therefore plays its part more often in people with lower views, tied to the real world and the present, i.e. among men who are what they are once and for all, who cannot be or will anything different, and, though incapable of any genuine ���pathos,��� have not the least doubt about what they are or what they are doing. But at the same time they reveal themselves as having something higher in them because they are not seriously tied to the finite world with which they are engaged but are raised above it and remain firm in themselves and secure in the face of failure and loss. It is to this absolute freedom of spirit which is utterly consoled in advance in every human undertaking, to this world of private serenity that Aristophanes conducts us. If you have not read him, you can scarcely realize how men can take things so easily.

Hegel, Lectures on the Fine Arts