The same gravedigger voices another rhetorical question when his accomplice confirms that Ophelia is to be given a Christian burial: “How can that be, unless she drowned herself in her own defense?” Similarly, this humorous remark makes use of another contradiction. Suicide is considered a sin by the Christian religion, which by rights should bar Ophelia from a Christian burial, unless of course she was acting “in her own defense”, a phrase playing off the idea that to commit murder in one's own defense is not strictly considered a criminal act under medieval Danish law. This conflation of legal and theological definitions of unlawfulness marks the scene's first step from the consecrated to the satirical.
But why would this have been regarded as humorous rather than offensive by Shakespeare's contemporary audience, which incidentally was composed of people from all levels of society, given that the gravedigger is a menial laborer who is obviously mocking the death of a woman from the higher echelons of society? While it seems obvious that the “groundlings”, those who occupied “the cheapest seats” in the theater, would have likely taken little offense, perhaps even finding cause for laughter in this brief glimpse of superiority over higher society, it is puzzling to speculate on how the elite members of the audience were affected. Perhaps the answer to this question can be found by analyzing the gravedigger's archetype more closely. While Lewis Hyde submits that “tricksters like to erase and violate the line between dirty and clean; take a god on high and debase them with earthly dirt.” By these definitions, the gravedigger can be classed as a type of trickster; after all, due to the nature of his occupation he literally deals with “earthly dirt” and is steeped in the world of the dead, but he is also capable of communicating with the living, for example during his conversations with his accomplice and later Hamlet. Furthermore, in only a few short lines he has already laughed in the face of death, as it were, a subject that is still taboo for many people in the United Kingdom, and he is even initially dubbed a “clown”, a title which by itself is synonymous with the word trickster.
Returning to the original question, as an “[outsider] looking in”, the gravedigger would be privy to information from the two worlds he alternates between, and therefore would be expected to know of Ophelia's death. However, his classification as a trickster, an outsider immune to standard social conventions, also would have allowed him to violate societal norms with more impunity than he would otherwise be afforded. It is possible, then, that this comical interlude did not cause much indignation for the majority of Shakespeare's audience, regardless of individual differences in social rank.
As absurd as Ophelia killing herself in self-defense sounds, the humor elicited by this suggestion is at least in part due to the adulteration of religious doctrine with earthly laws. Suicide is not explicitly condemned anywhere in Scripture, only on the basis of Christian doctrine is the taking of one's own life classified as a sin. Thus, the gravedigger may in fact be pointing out the folly of interpreting Scripture to suit one's own whims. If the church can put their own slant on the laws laid out in Scripture, then why not muddle Scripture with further earthly laws? By taking this idea to its logical extreme, the gravedigger makes apparent the ridiculousness of presuming that Scripture is equivocal, or amenable to any interpretation beyond its explicit meaning.
