Books with dark humor can actually be really funny, I swear
I am concerned about how my book club scheduled for next Thursday at the time of this writing is going to go.
Given that I’ve been telling people what to read for better than a decade in these pages, it is weird that I’m so nervous about a book I’ve assigned to my book club, but there’s something different about knowing you may have disappointed a group of folks that you’ve been enjoying talking books with since last fall.
The other reason is because the book I’ve chosen, “Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust” by Nathanael West employs a particular strain of dark humor that is not everyone’s cup of tea. I presented the book to my book club compatriots as “funny,” but rereading it for the purposes of our discussion, I’m concerned that they’re going to think I’m off my rocker because it’s not exactly LOL material.
But it’s really funny, I swear! How do I explain this?
“Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust” is actually a book of two novellas published together, the first a story about a lost soul who writes a newspaper advice column to the lovelorn, and the second a satire of 1930s Hollywood based on West’s own experiences as a contract screenwriter. A minor character in “Day of the Locust” is also the inspiration for the name of one of the 20th and 21st centuries’ most iconic characters, Homer Simpson.
“Day of the Locust” reads like a novelization of a missing Coen brothers’ showbiz-centric film a la “Barton Fink.”
Dark humor mines its comedy from the taboo, sometimes taking the form of literal gallows humor as reflected in a novel like Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22” where the absurdities of war are lampooned by showing the inevitability of death. Kurt Vonnegut works in similar territory in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Fertile periods for dark humor come often in the aftermath of great tragedies such as World War II in Vonnegut and Heller’s case, and the Great Depression, which marked West’s worldview.
The humor in these books comes from their close proximity to despair. Having been overexposed to the pleas of help from people he considers to be unlovable, something he also suspects about himself, the character of Miss Lonelyhearts cannot imagine the existence of love. He is literally sickened, bedridden by this knowledge. The end of the novel involves a (probable) death rendered in absurd slapstick.
There are a lot of routes toward humor. During the pandemic, television’s “Ted Lasso” became a kind of emotional balm in my household, both because it is genuinely funny, and also because it has a fundamentally positive view of humanity. It felt necessary at the time.
But part of the gag of Ted Lasso is that he seems too good to be true, and as we see as the first two seasons unfolded, there is a personal price that Ted pays for his positivity. Still, the fundamental decency of Ted and the other characters reassures the audience that everything will be OK.
Dark humor flips that equation, positing that everyone is fundamentally indecent, and the struggle runs the other way, to find moments of decency amid the darkness.
I suppose deep down that worldview just seems more true to me. I mean, look at the world and tell me you disagree.
Given that context, the ability to find humor and moments of release from the tension of knowing the awfulness of humanity and the world around us serve as a true triumph of some resilient part of the human spirit.
I suspect we are doomed, but how great that we can laugh about it?