Well OK, it’s a little more complicated than that, but intense suffering is as much a staple of great comedy as great drama. Comedy thrives on serious conflict, and conflict results in pain. But how do you invite an audience to laugh at your pain? Your pain; that’s the key. First you make it authentic, and very, very personal, so the foundation of the work is the same as if you’re playing Hamlet. And then, it depends on the right attitude, the right rhythm, and hopefully some great, witty dialogue to ride on both.

In Midnight Run, Charles Grodin, hurt and frustrated with Robert DeNiro’s callous treatment, and indulging his own impulse to psychoanalyze, pointedly offers: “You know, you only have two emotions: silence and rage.” DeNiro, fuming, snaps back: “I’ve got two words for you. Shut the fuck up.”

These are some of my very favorite comedy performances in no particular order. Some of the very best, funniest moments in each happen when the character is in the most pain, caught between a rock and a really hard place, struggling in vain for deliverance:

1.  Bette Davis, All About Eve

2.  Cary Grant, Arsenic and Old Lace

3.  Diane Weist, Hannah and Her Sisters, Bullets Over Broadway

4.  Madeline Kahn, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Paper Moon

5.  Dustin Hoffman, Tootsie, The Graduate

6.  Gene Wilder and Cloris Leachman, Young Frankenstein

7.  Gary Shandling, The Larry Sanders Show

8.  Jim Carrey, Liar, Liar

9.  Judy Holiday, Born Yesterday

10. Dick Van Dyke, The Dick Van Dyke Show

11. Vivian Vance, I Love Lucy

12. Jackie Gleason, The Honeymooners

13. Diane Keaton, Manhattan, Annie Hall

14. Maggie Smith, A Room With A View, California Suite

15. Jennifer Tilly, Bullets Over Broadway

16. Penelope Cruz, Vicki Christina Barcelona

17. Margaret Rutheford, The Importance of Being Earnest, The V.I.P.s

18. Claudette Colbert, It Happened One Night

19. Shirley MacLaine and Jack Nicholson, Terms of Endearment

20. Leslie Ann Warren, Victor/Victoria 

Note on 11: Watch Vivian Vance in the episode of I Love Lucy where Lucy picks a birthday present for her because Fred isn’t up to the task, and gets her a pair of diamond-patterned hostess pants instead of the toaster Ethel badly, badly wanted. Thinking Fred picked out the hideous garment, her crushing disappointment quickly turns to incredulity, then to outrage, and then to absolute intolerance in a truly flawless bit of comic acting. Ms. Vance often makes Ms. Ball look like a hack, because everything she does is not only perfectly precise, but also honest, and organic. Unlike Lucy, she never makes faces to go for the cheap laugh.

[Oh! And by the way, I can’t believe I left James Gandolfini and Edie Falco in The Sopranos off my list of great drama performances. Continuing off the subject a moment: Here are a few Hideous Full of Shit Fakers, or My Very Least Favorite Actors Ever: 1.Julie Andrews 2.Kevin Kline 3.Kathleen Turner 4.Christopher Plummer 5.Helen Hayes 6. Kenneth Brannaugh]

Why do you have to break your own heart to be a great comic actor? Charlie Chaplin started the ball rolling. In order to get an audience to laugh at you, you have to make yourself truly vulnerable, which invariably means an acceptance of pain and loss. We almost certainly know the happy ending is coming (we’ve seen the previews), so we can laugh at the very same things that would not be in the least funny if death or disfiguration were the outcome instead of (99 times out of 100) love and marriage.

In addition to breaking your heart, you have to be willing to look like the fool as well. It’s impossible to play comedy without a willingness to reveal all the human foibles that we may want to try and hide from ourselves and others in our lives: vanity, selfishness, inappropriate lust, parsimony, greed, jealousy, arrogance —the list goes on and on and on (and on). Comedy especially requires a look at all the little, embarrassing, unattractive insecurities that really make us tick.

But again, as in drama, the audience is impressed by our bravery as actors, our willingness to reveal ourselves as the terribly flawed creatures we really are, risking humiliation while we seek to illuminate want and need, all the while having not just the audacity but the courage to ask for laughter as a kind of forgiveness for all of us, for being human.