Perhaps it's only funny if we laugh, Fred. Mel Brooks' theory was something like, 'Tragedy is if I fall down and hurt my finger, comedy is if you fall down a manhole and break your neck.'

To me The Cherry Orchard was more sad than funny. I've only read it. Perhaps it can be lighter on stage. Chekov seems to have felt the decline in his society, he was sick himself. The idea of cutting down trees that ancesters planted a hundred years before while thinking about past family and fruits, longing for the past but no one knowing how to bring it back.

Not long after Chekov wrote, in historical terms, Molotov had a cocktail in his hand. Chekov couldn't have known the details of the future but he felt cold winds blowing. Another Russian writer, I can't remember who, wrote about the good old days when his mother had enough authority to whack a servant in the head with a stick from behind the stove and kill him. Newer technologies in the hands of newer authorities brought horror to millions.