6 Tips for Writing a Dark Comedy
Italo Calvino, in Six Memos for the New Millennium, his treatise on the art of writing fiction, holds that humor is one of the virtues of great writing, observing “th[e] particular connection between melancholy and humor,” and describing the ability of certain writers to “foreground [with] tiny, luminous traces that counterpoint the dark catastrophe.”
(How to Mix Humor With Horror in Fiction.)
Whether it’s satire, dark comedy, or absurdist fiction, such work uses humor as the means of making a larger point, as a means of seduction, as a beguiling and subversive way of addressing disturbing subject matter. (Calvino speaks of how “everything in life that we choose and value for its lightness quickly reveals its own unbearable heaviness.”)
When we think of high school reading lists and long-winded classics, we don’t often think of humorous writing. But humor’s roots in fiction are deep. Don Quixote is a rollicking, laugh-out-loud picaresque, a metafictional spoof of chivalric antecedents. Tristram Shandy involves, among other things, an episode of self-circumcision via a strangulating window treatment. The master prose stylist, Nabokov, wrote of deranged professional jealousy and proscribed love affairs, using humor as the honey trap. We laugh at Humbert Humbert; we think him ridiculous; but in the end, we weep at the denuded tragedy of the object of his obsession.
Write a Complaint Letter
My first attempt at dark comedy involved writing complaints from the point-of-view of a curmudgeonly neighbor. Complaint letters, letters to the editor, epistolary writing generally, are all good ways of experimenting with a humorous tone.
Imagine a ridiculous personage like Akaky Akakievich, the bureaucrat in Gogol’s The Overcoat, or Ignatius J. Reilly in Confederacy of Dunces—for me, assuming such guises has always yielded rich fodder. Invent an affected voice, verbal tics for the character, and begin writing a complaint letter!
Pay Attention to the Voice and the Tone of Your Narrator
Humor is driven by and depends so much on tone. More than plot-heavy types of writing, humor depends on character and voice to express a particular viewpoint. Find a model. Choose a paragraph from a humorist/absurdist writer as a jumping off point. Think about what is driving the humor—the voice, the syntax, the juxtaposition of thoughts (humor will often rely on absurd deflation, an undercut). Imagine a similar set-up.
I remember a passage from Infinite Jest where one of the characters, an addict, is staring at a cockroach on the wall of his apartment. Not exactly thrilling subject matter. But it’s not (as in plot-driven fiction) the situation that’s luring the reader in, but the voice. I worked on creating a similar, obsessive voice with a singular fixation. That exercise gave rise to my law firm stories—all from the obsessive, singular point of view of an overworked character trapped in the life they’ve chosen, viz. the tragic aspect.
The more absurd the situation—in one, a woman is trying to clean out the attachments of her breast pumping apparatus, the absurdly named Pump-and-Go, in the office pantry, reflecting on the dilemma of satisfying neither her child or her bosses, who in the end will likely pass her over for partnership because she is perceived as insufficiently committed—the better. It’s the absurdity and proliferation of detail, the obsessive ruminations, the pile-up of clauses that make the work funny.
Choose Absurd Character and Brand Names
Speaking of details, absurd names add to the humor. Think of George Saunders’ capitalized corporate speak; of “Catch-22,” a term denoting an impossible situation or double bind, which of course has entered the lexicon. Or the names of Pynchon characters like Oedipa Maas or Saäre Bummer.
I’ve named several psychologists Dr. Fein, capitalizing on the pun. I also like coming up with absurd drug names like Soliloquil and Somnambulis—the names of real pharmaceuticals themselves being ridiculous.
Revel in (More) Absurdity
Reflect on inherently absurd situations. Medical billing and abstruse codes. Bureaucratic snafus. Lawsuits and the law give rise to absurdity almost by definition. The never-ending trial in Bleak House; or the schoolboy savant in JR who amasses a fortune in penny stock holdings, a send-up of the American capitalist dream. Think of the trial of Josef K.; the very title is ironic.
Focus on the Inverse Relationship Between the Tragic and the Comic
Consider the tension between the situation (tragic) and the voice (comic). The inverse relationship between the two gives rise to the humor and the pathos. My first novel, Someday Everything Will All Make Sense, involves a bumbling professor of medieval music whose mother chokes to death on a wonton. But he rivals Ignatius J. Reilly in terms of appearance and peculiar affectations, and he ends up prosecuting an absurd lawsuit against the Chinese take-out for what is essentially an accident—the humor that leavens the tragic aspect.
The voice of the narrator in my latest novel, The Vixen Amber Halloway, is hyperliterate and over-the-top, in the manner of Humbert Humbert; from the opening we sense a screw is loose somewhere in the psychic apparatus. We learn Ophelia’s husband has been sleeping with his mistress at a motel called the Minnie Ha-Ha. The juxtaposition of the high and the low, of an affected voice and the ridiculous detail, adds to the comic effect.
Enchant the Reader
Remember Nabokov’s first precept: All great writing shares the quality of enchantment. Like a fairytale, it casts a spell; it is incantatory, mesmerizing the reader, making them want to continue to turn the pages.
Check out Carol LaHines’ The Vixen Amber Halloway here:
(WD uses affiliate links)