Hitchcock uses comedy and terror the same way. So that's why I think I do it. The speech makes the audience laugh, but then you hit hard with an emotionally devastating scene. Bit's drunk and can't defend herself. A double seduction, Li'l Bit and the audience.
Comedy is complicity.
If you make an audience laugh . . . Not only your friends, but also in alliance with the play world. They're on the side of the play now because they laughed. European critics often say American drama does not achieve greatness because our playwrights, obsessed by petty family melodramas, never look through the living room window to see the larger world and the problems outside. The Greeks dealt with the family.