STEPHEN FRY

Anytime I've read or watched Ophelia after her father's death, I found it anything but funny. Heartbreaking, really.
When I was younger, I remember people laughing at words like "bosom," but it stopped by high school (granted, I did go to an all-girls high school).

And no, I wouldn't want people laughing at me or anyone I knew who was having a "moment of lunacy," as you say. But some people, no matter how old they are, are immature enough to find other people's suffering funny, or will latch onto one thing that could be taken as funny in another context and laugh at it. Hopefully your classmates will grow out of it.

No need to apologize. It can extremely upsetting to see people indifferent to or amused by things by tragic or serious things that just aren't funny. I am in my early 20s and more than halfway through college, and I still run into the kind of people you're talking about. I find it troubling, too. Unfortunately, we do live in a society that encourages not taking a lot of things seriously. I mean, the occasional dark joke is fine and can sometimes help people cope, but when people are constantly making a mockery of things that are not funny, it really does become a problem. Honestly, I'm glad to know that there's another young person out there who finds this frustrating.

Actually I consider myself to have had an easy life so far, in the way that I really didn't carry much weight on my back for family income, but I was born in the working class and now am up to upper middle. I was usually the only kid without a gameboy or whatever the fad was back then. But I feel it may be part of the fact that there wasn't routine involved in my childhood and I was allowed to just watch and listen to good, old fashion cartoon network, never really understood what most of the shows said but I just absorbed and actually developed an above average vocabulary by the sixth grade. The rest of the kids were signed on to after school programs, not that I have anything against these programs, and they just didn't achieve the imagination I had. This may sound like bragging as well as off topic but rest assured I'm not and this is leading to somewhere. I think that in my free time of watching all those shows lead me, and I'm sure many others, to thinking along more dimensions of personally while those that had their lives scheduled o the last second had no opportunity to absorb and gain the same process, and it was the lack of that which prevented the insight into Ophelia's condition. I hope this wasn't too self superiorating, is that a word? Spell check says no, lack of a better word changes that to yes.