My personal taste may be more like yours than either of us thinks.

I like comedy better than drama for the most part, because I prefer to laugh. Also, good comedy is damn difficult to do, and I can appreciate the craft involved.

Tragedies have a place in my heart, though. I heard Hamlet and Macbeth read to me repeatedly before I could read myself, because my grandfather enjoyed them. So a story in which everyone dies in the end didn't seem at all weird or depressing to me. It's rather like real life: everyone in that drama dies too.

Have you ever seen Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra? (I really liked the miniseries with Joan Hackett, but the movie with Rosalind Russell is good too. The trouble is, I look at Russell and see Auntie Mame, besides the fact the the movie doesn't present the trilogy of plays.) Talk about depressing! Yet, if you go back to the Orestia, it's a fascinating exercise in what modern thought does to a story about ancient justice and vengeance. The same twisty-turny stuff goes for Jean Anouilh's Antigone: Sophocles for existentialists. The Greeks wouldn't recognize it, but it acts as a lesson in courage for modern folk.