Q: Why did Cranmer fare better in his last hours than Charles I?
A: Because a hot steak is preferable to a cold chop. (p. 9)
* A denser, better executed — no pun intended — conundrum than many of the ones we’ve looked at so far, trading on two different readings of the word “fare.” Most interesting to the modern scholar, however, is the extremely cavalier attitude toward public executions.
It’s hard to find much funny about Archbishop Cranmer being burned at the stake by Mary I, or Charles I having his head chopped off with a guillotine by Cromwell, but this in itself demonstrates several important lessons about humor. First, the mathematical axiom that “comedy equals tragedy plus time,” which was finally conclusively proven by Princeton mathematician Andrew Wiles in 1993. We also see that adding distance to the equation – like, for instance, the entire width of the Atlantic Ocean — actually accelerates the process.
What is not often discussed, though, is that the equation is a trigonometric function, which, when mapped, plots a sinusoidal curve. (Specifically, a damping curve, like the one below.) After an initial spike into sadness, a tragedy slowly becomes funnier and funnier until reaching a peak approximately 60 years after the fact. Once peaked, however, the tragic event slowly returns to the norm, and then becomes tragic again before swinging back, in ever tighter waves. Eventually, the tragedy is forgotten altogether, and therefore no longer funny or tragic.
Fig. 84 – Which is, itself, sort of tragic
The two tragic events alluded two in the joke above must have reached a rare overlapping peak on the comedy side of the continuum around the time Conundrums was published, but despite the clever wordplay, those peaks were very shallow. Neither was particularly funny anymore. Today, the passage of time has rendered both referents completely humorless.
