: Re: How do you prevent whiplash when transitioning between comedy and tragedy? I constantly see reviews of people criticizing how it feels like "whiplash" when going from something like a death scene

@Connie138

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Whiplash is a physical injury caused by your body moving in one direction then very suddenly switching to another. To a degree that can only come from something like a severe car accident.

The emotional equivalent of whiplash comes from a lack of transition between heading one direction then turning off to head in another.

I would guess that going from comedy to tragedy isn't that big a deal. People understand that, in real life, tragic things can happen without warning. Laughing your guts out at a comedy club when the roof caves in.

The real problem is moving from tragedy to comedy. Or even lightheartedness. It feels wrong. Like the awful thing that just happened wasn't important. Joking in the midst of tragedy is different. That's black humor or just lightening the load. It's moving back to ordinary life that feels wrong to do too quickly.

So don't go too fast. Respect grief and the characters going through it. Give people time to heal.

In extreme cases, writers may follow the death of a major character with a time jump. In the TV show Jane the Virgin, they had a 2 year jump. Why? Because the show is fundamentally a comedy. There are murders and deaths of minor characters but they didn't take as much time to work through. In this case, a character very close to the MC died and we would have spent 2 seasons of the show doing nothing but watching her cope had they not jumped forward. Even so, her grief was still there, just not in the foreground most of the time.

At the very least, give the situation a chapter break. Or, as Rasdashan suggests, add in a neutral intervening scene. You can also play off the fact that some characters either don't know or really don't care about the tragedy. But some characters will.

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