From Darkness Comes Great Light

After three years of waiting of course I absolutely tore through the final season of Derry Girls and loved it. The show is maybe the best example ever of a show set during troubled times that spends 95% of its time with the everyday mundane part of life, which - mixed in with a sense of doom always hovering - is where true comedy comes from, particularly in such a place as Ireland where being funny is like a currency. It's a brilliant way of showing that events in history happen while people are trying to navigate their own daily lives. Creator/writer & real Derry Girl Lisa McGee in The New Yorker:

By the time McGee was growing up in Derry, in the eighties and nineties, it was not unusual to find a British soldier patrolling her street. Bomb threats were a commonplace disruption of daily life. “You remember the things that are sort of funny,” McGee told me recently. Once, there was a bomb scare in a shopping center, and her mother pushed to the front of the queue, exasperated. Sometimes, McGee recalled, the radio equipment carried by the troops interfered with her family’s television set. When “Coronation Street,” the longtime British soap opera, was on, McGee would be sent outside to ask if the soldier couldn’t move down a wee bit to improve the transmission. “Most of the time, they’d say, ‘Yeah, fine,’ ” she said. “They were around so much that you had to just get on with it, and sort of think, Probably nothing’s going to happen today, like most days.” 

It reminds me of when a buddy showed me his grandmother's diary entry from Pearl Harbor day and it briefly, barely mentioned the attack but then banged on and on about going to someone's house for Sunday dinner. Those moments of fear and darkness are always when we need the most funny bits anyway.