Umberto Eco's brilliant and successful novel The Name of the Rose is about the discovery of a concealed manuscript, Aristotle's Poetics II regarding the nature of comedy, and the controversy and murderous intrigue it provokes in a medieval monastery centuries ago. This novel allows Eco to raise within a narrative format the theoretical issue of the role of comedy and laughter in our culture. His marvelous achievement has provoked in turn its own controversy regarding the ambiguous nature of his conclusions. Karl-Josef Kuschel has grave reservations concerning the apparently nihilistic perspective of William of Baskerville, the Franciscan detective who seems to speak for Eco in this book. Kuschel does not believe Eco's vision is thus compatible with a Christian understanding of comedy, since Kuschel regards postmodernism itself as antithetical to Christianity. I will try to resolve this dispute by explaining how comedy is not only intrinsic to the nature of postmodernism but to the Christian vision of life as well. However, to achieve this end will first require an examination of another current debate which runs parallel to our own: the controversy over whether Christianity is at all compatible with the tragic vision of life and whether either the Christian or tragic perspective can speak credibly to our postmodern, post-Holocaust world of today. In this essay, I will first examine the nature of postmodernism in terms of its awareness that the experience of failure is intrinsic to the human condition. Secondly, I will explore the rhetorical strategies for coping with failure which David Payne, Karen Horney, and Northrop Frye have described. Thirdly, I will study Eco's account of laughter as a creative rhetorical response to our sense of limitation vis-a-vis Kuschel's Christian critique of his stance. Fourthly, I will investigate the current discussion regarding the nature of tragedy vis-avis the Christian vision of life and postHolocaust literature. Finally, I will argue from all of the above that, not only are tragedy and comedy compatible with Christianity, but that postmodernism itself cannot be understood properly except as a function of both tragedy and comedy. Indeed, I will argue that it is only through the forms of the tragic and comic that the Holocaust can be dealt with intellectually in any credible way at all. Postmodernism: Coping with Failure We live in a culture today which seems, for better or worse, to be best described as postmodern in orientation. In almost every field of cultural activity, critics comment upon the predominance of a mindset. There are as many ways to define this cultural movement as there are critics. Indeed, there are even those who would argue that postmodernism is best defined as that philosophy which necessarily resists being defined at all. For the purposes of this essay only, I would like to describe postmodernism in terms of its relationship to those movements that have preceded it. I have described elsewhere in a highly technical fashion the paradoxical relationship between postmodernism and modernism.' Here, I would simply like to define postmodernism as the recognition of the necessary failure of the aims of prior movements. Indeed, it is this perception that we are living in an age within which we are forced to come to terms with the fact of failure which has made postmodernism so distressing for many. Moreover, whether it also contains a formula for coping with failure is precisely the critical question we must ask of postmodemism. Before dealing with this issue, however, let me first summarize many of the failures which postmodernism asks us to understand as being necessarily part of the human condition. It goes without saying that our century has seen many spectacular examples of the human propensity for evil. That we have failed miserably in countering our rage for war, genocide, and violence as well as our indifference to the plight of the poor and marginalized makes us responsible for many of the social problems which face us today. …