comedy doesn't have to float free

Wallace Heim responds to Nicholas Lezard's suggestion in the Guardian that Ian McEwan's novel "Solar" is hampered because you can't have a comedy about climate change:

It's curious that Nicholas Lezard (pic) thinks comedy floats free of the world. Comedy, classically, is quotidian. It is all about the everyday, the bumbling, ridiculous, faltering, sometimes obscene manifestations of the everyday, ordinary world. It is classical tragedy that is freer of the ordinary world. That's not to say in the intervening centuries the comedic and the tragic haven't changed, intertwined and adapted to each other and new situations, as they might again now. Maybe it is that the dark laughs in Solar are out of place, an old type of comedy that can't grasp the situation.