This article explores the role of tragedy and comedy as hermeneutic perspectives present in some passages of Hannah Arendt's thought. The first claim is that, as a hermeneutic device applied to the understanding of history, tragedy can be a key to interpreting On Revolution . The Aristotelian concept of mimesis and the characteristics of tragic theatre set out in Poetics are important sources of this approach. Secondly, the article examines the sardonic tone that Arendt uses at the end of the first chapter of On Revolution , where she accuses the protagonists of the bloodiest phase of the Russian Revolution of being the ‘fools of history’. Some suggestions are made regarding the meaning of this comedic key, which reappears, not coincidentally, in another of the philosopher's most important historical analyses: Eichmann in Jerusalem .