What if the thing we call comedy is, "stories about the attempt to make love work?" 

Not always true, there's a lot of cruelty and anger in comedy. But even if you try to place Lenny Bruce on the spectrum of love vs hate, I think he might come out closer to the love end than the hate end, if only because "I HAVE TO TELL YOU THIS RIGHT NOW" is not unlike Cassandra's attempt to save the kingdom. 

But cruelty-anger comedy is generally less successful, feels less truthful or valid than make-love-work comedy. 

I'm still thinking about Silver Linings Playbook, about the non-romantic relationships. That's what spurred this thought process. So, okay, let's grab an example of something generally considered a good comedy, Monty Python & The Holy Grail. 

How is this about the attempt to make love work? 

King Arthur wants to get the Grail in order to sanctify his kingdom, but keeps running into his kingdom's idiocy (filth/disease/pestilence/The French/sexual repression/confusing thought processes about government, inheritance and marriage/etc.), and ends up arrested by contemporary police. 

Which really makes MP&THG a huge tragedy, because it basically says, "if such an idealistic crusade were to happen in England today, the perpetrators would be vilified and arrested." Maybe they should: we see the police covering one of the bodies Arthur dispatched, and questioning a contemporary witness. Maybe they shouldn't: we saw what happened when the person was killed.  

So, one could argue that Arthur's constant modus operandi of "I am doing this for your own good (trying to get the Grail to sanctify the nation and save it from itself)" is repressive and indicative of British imperialism, and not love, or we can let the text be a text unto itself, and say that Arthur wants to share the sanctifying experience he had when the Lady of the Lake gave him the sword and made him King, with the entire nation. he's coming from a place of pure, spiritual love. 

This blasted into my head between my first and second cup of coffee.  I wish I could control the blast stream so that I could use it more productively, but it is what it is.