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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48105
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/48105
License name: CC BY-SA 4.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

To build on Galastel's point, bathos is not simply about the juxtaposition of tones. It is about the unworthiness of the emotion expressed to the event that has occurred. So if you present a serious event, the death of a child, say, and then follow it with the emotion appropriate to the loss of a tooth, that is bathos because the emotion is not worthy of the moment.

It is often unintentional. The writer is simply not capable of dealing with the event they have described and they say something cheap or vulgar when they should say something perceptive and profound. That something perceptive and profound may well be to have characters tell a joke. Telling jokes is part of how people handle grimm or stressful situations. (But, as we know, it is possible to tell the wrong joke, which is one of the worst social gaffes you can commit.) But as long as the joke that the writer inserts here is true to how humans would joke as such a time, the emotion implicit in the joke is worthy of the moment and so not bathetic.

But it can also be used satirically. Here the intention is to mock the seriousness with which the preceding event is taken. The insertion of an emotion unworthy of the moment is here used to suggest that the moment is not actually worthy of the emotion with which is it usually received.

The MCU may possibly have a bit of both. The conceit on which they are built is monstrously silly, after all. There is a lot of _wink wink_, _nudge nudge_ toward the audience to assure us that the writers, the producers, the actors, the directors, the guys who make the sandwiches on set, all know that this is monstrously silly. It would be completely unwatchable without that acknowledgment. (As opposed to almost entirely unwatchable, as it is in its current form.) It is a hard line to walk (see the problems with the DC films) and so it occasionally falls into unintentional bathos and sometimes engages in deliberate satiric bathos. The death of Tony Stark in End Game is ludicrously bathetic because it is manifestly arbitrary which blows kill and which do not in this universe. The death is inserted solely to suggest heroic sacrifice (and because Downey's contract is up) and we all know this. So we are asked to treat a piece of silly emotional manipulation as a great heroic/dramatic moment. It is bathetic in the worst way.

But there is nothing in what you are proposing to write that in inherently bathetic. As long as the jokes you insert express an emotion worthy of the moment, you will avoid bathos. But notice how I expressed that: it is not about the jokes being worthy of the moment, it is about the emotion that the jokes express being worthy of the moment. High emotion often expresses itself in jokes. Clueless and unworthy emotion often expresses it itself in different jokes. It is the worthiness of the emotional state revealed by the joke that is told that determines if the moment is bathetic or not.

Original score: 5