A tragicomedy is a play, film, or story that is sad and funny at the same time. Not sad in one part and funny in another — the two live together, so you may laugh at something that is also genuinely painful.

As a term in drama it has a long history: plays that begin in danger and end happily, or that put clowns into a serious story. Shakespeare's late plays are often called tragicomedies. In modern use it covers any film where you laugh and then feel bad for laughing, and much of the best writing about ordinary family life falls here.

The word also escapes the theatre. People use it for real events: "the whole election was a tragicomedy", "our trip turned into a tragicomedy of missed trains". Here it means the situation was a disaster, but a disaster so absurd that you had to laugh.

One thing worth telling students: this is a real and respected category, not a failure to choose. Some writers think it is truer to life than either pure form, because real trouble usually arrives with something ridiculous attached.

Note the spelling — tragicomedy, with one C. The i and the co have been squeezed together; the tidy-looking "tragicocomedy" was the Latin form and is not English.