How holiday cards help us cope with a not-so-merry year, according to a professor of comedy

I am a theater historian who focuses on the history of comedy. Particularly, I’m interested in comedy as a mode of communication and how it uniquely conveys information.

Lately, I’ve been curious to see how recent holiday cards have dealt with the tensions of the year – and how greeting cards during other eras of struggle handled the holidays. From a cursory review, it’s clear other difficult times have revealed a similar instinct to acknowledge the incongruence of strife mixed with the season of joy. …

By Matthew McMahan, Comedic Arts, Emerson College, The Conversation