The so-called comic relief in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment

The post-funeral reception - at which Marmeladov's widow puts on a elaborate spread and invites pretty much everyone in the run-down tenement in which she and her 3 children live - turns into a riotous dispute between the widow and the landlady, with much commentary from the many drunken guests. In some ways it's a comic scene, w/ lots of antics and ending in a physical altercation, and I suspect many who've read or taught Crime and Punishment would call this an example of "come relief." That's a term that I think has no meaning or validity whatsoever; it's often used to describe the appearance of the drunken doorkeeper in Macbeth, for one ex. But really - do these works build to such a pitch that we actually need some kind of relief, that we need to take a mental breather before proceeding onward? I doubt that. I think comic scenes such as this funeral catastrophe actually heighten the sense of the tragic; the behavior at the funeral could possibly be "comic" or more accurately a "farce" if one were to read this chapter only. But the context makes this brutal dispute among neighbors all the more ghastly; all this fighting and scratching and name-calling is set against the backdrop of a double-murder - and the perpetrator is sitting, mostly silent, among the many guests. What are Raskolnikov's thoughts? How does he justify his own placidity, and what does the fighting and ingratitude do to confirm his thoughts about humanity - the powerful and ennobled (who have a right to kill) and the ordinary (the victims)? But in the next chapter, he will speak up, in defense of the weak and ill-treated.