[Comedies] are never 'intersubjecive'. Although comedy, as opposed to tragedy, is above all a dialogical genre (whereas it would be difficult to have a real tragedy without a few great monologues), the type of comic characters we are discussing is fundamentally 'monological'.

What is at stake is not merely a parody of tragic monologues, though this aspect also exists, and often plays its part in comedy. The crucial point is that these heroes are extracted, by their passion, from the world of the normal intersubjective communication – they are quite content, one could say, to converse solely with their 'it/id'. Yet they remain a part of this same world, which will not leave them in peace.

This configuration brings about a specific comic genre of 'dialogical monologue' in which the characters, technically in dialogue with othes, are in fact absorbed in a dialogue with themselves, or with their 'it'. The comedy of such dialogues does not come from witty and clever exchanges between two subjects, or from local misunderstandings that make (comic) sense on another level of dialogue, but from the fact that the character is not really present in the dialogue he is engaged in.

Alenka Zupancic, The Odd One In: On Comedy