Trying to implement Ajax comments in WordPress, getting WP error

I figured it out. Instead of trying to combine the two functions together in my functions.php file, I added both of them. Why did this work? Because one is adding a new comment (via a call to ajax-comments.php) and the other function is querying all the existing comments. So it’s something like this:

  1. My original html5blankcomments() function grabbed the existing WP comments.
  2. the misha_submit_ajax_comment() function (that you can see in the tutorial link I posted in my question) talks to the ajax-comments.php file and just works on submitting (and displaying) the new comment.
  3. With both functions running, we get the old comments (html5blankcomments()) and the new comments misha_submit_ajax_comment() showing up without page refresh.

Because they both need to exist, combining them was not the answer. I thought it could all happen in one function (and perhaps it can), but that was not how the tutorial code was written.