The gravedigger found in William Shakespeare's Hamlet serves as an archetypal trickster that divides the boundary between comedy and tragedy, using comedic devices such as wordplay and satire to profane the sacred and ridicule the follies of Christian doctrine in regards to unfounded Scriptural interpretations. One such comedic device that permeates Shakespeare's plays are puns. Puns bifurcate meaning and disorient the natural flow of speech, generating humorous violations of conventional language use. The incongruity theory of humor perhaps best conforms to the nature of wordplay. The main principle of this theory is that laughter is created by occurrences or concepts that defy our expectations. However, considering the complexity and highly specialized nature of the mind's cognitive mechanisms, it is not surprising that many instances of laughter cannot be accounted for by a single, narrow theory. Another such theory that also helps to explain laughter is the superiority theory, which posits that laughter stems from assertions of dominance over another group or individual. This theory is particularly relevant to forms of humor that serve to ridicule others, such as the gravedigger's satirical jests.
Immediately upon entering the fifth act, we are cast down from the castle and into the inverted world of the churchyard, where we first meet the gravediggers. In the play, these two anonymous rustics are dubbed “Clown” and “Other”, but to assist in differentiating between them and to highlight their individual roles, for the duration of this essay the “clown” will be labeled the “gravedigger” and the “other” character will simply be referred to as the gravedigger's “accomplice”. With this in mind, humor is first sparked in the gravedigger's initial line, when he asks of his accomplice, “Is she to be buried in Christian burial when she willfully seeks her own salvation?” With this rhetorical question, the gravity of the scene is lifted, and wordplay is established. “Salvation”, as used in this context, denotes the redemption of the soul from earthly sin, and this is comedic on one level because this figure of speech—“seeks her own salvation”—is an oxymoron: only God has the power to liberate one's soul from sin, so to claim one's own salvation is absurd. On a less obvious level, the word “salvation” can also be interpreted as the preservation of life, literally to save the physical body from harm or calamity. Viewing the gravedigger's question with this ironic twist, humor is also achieved, and once again it stems from a contradiction and violation of expectations: Ophelia, the subject of the gravedigger's question and the cause of his present toils, has not sought salvation in either sense of the word; in the former case, simply because it is an impossibility for her to redeem her own soul from sin, and in the latter case because it is equally impossible for her to have attempted to preserve her own life, given that she is alleged to have “willfully [sought] her own salvation.” Pay attention to the word “willful” in this context, used to suggest that Ophelia's death was voluntary or deliberate, a clear indication that the gravedigger believes that she has voluntarily taken her own life, or in other words, has committed suicide.
