When Kleist first declaimed his tragedy, Die Familie Schroffenstein, before a group of friends on his island retreat in Thun, the reaction of those present was recorded by Heinrich Zschokke, a former colleague of the author from his army days as follows:

No doubt the laughter was, in part, a reaction to the melodramatic aspects of the play. However, there are a number of genuinely comic moments in Die Familie Schroffenstein, not least the way in which the exalted pathos of the characters' rhetoric is deflated by the bathos of the situation in which they find themselves. Time and again, the characters adopt conventional, ritualistic poses yet, because of their youth and inexperience, do so in a manner that makes their behaviour appear ridiculous. Indeed, it is striking how often the dividing line between tragedy and comedy is blurred in Kleist's work. This is true even of those works not explicitly referred to as comedies, such as Die Hermannsschlacht and Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, all of which contain genuinely comic moments. Of course, often a second viewing or reading of these works is required for the reader or spectator to appreciate the subtleties of Kleist's irony.