This paper clarifies Hegel’s argument within the “Comedy” section of the Phenomenology of Spirit, by fleshing out and developing Hegel’s basic point concerning the individual and its clash with abstract universals. It does this by engaging current scholarship on “Comedy,” building upon some of its fundamentals, yet showing that the picture we get of “Comedy” in this literature should be supplemented. To this end, the paper explicates Hegel’s claim that the individual is a “negative power,” and then develops a central point in Hegel’s section on “Comedy,” namely, that in comedy abstract universals are put in play and revealed as they are actually made concrete in the lives of individuals. This reveals the pretensions of abstract universals, unmasking the gap between what we might think of a universal, such as honesty, and this universal in it concrete/actual form. It this pretense and gap that Hegel finds comedic.