"Aesthetic concepts only began to interest me when I first perceived their existential roots, when I came to understand them as existential concepts: people simple or refined, intelligent or stupid, are regularly faced in life with the beautiful, the ugly, the sublime, the comical, the tragic, the lyrical, the dramatic, with action, peripeteia, cathersis, or, to speak of less philosophical concepts, with agelasty or kitsch or vulgarity; all these concepts are tracks leading to various aspects of existence that are inaccessible by any other means."

Milan Kundera, The Curtain

peripeteia-reversal of circumstances

Agelasty-a neologism Rabelais coined from Greek to describe people incapable of laughing.

Kitsch-exaggerated sentimentality; exaggerated anything really, but mainly of the fake smile

Vulgarity-the opposite of kitsch; keeping it real