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Hit or Miss
Comedic compendium cracks itself up
by Lloyd Babbit
There was a time when the comics page of a daily newspaper was a vast wonderland of creativity, artistic depth and accomplished humor writing. That time has long since passed, for a variety of reasons. Shrinking page space, syndication, the pernicious influence of television, less newspaper competition and strips with multi-decade life spans have all turned the comics into a bland pap of mediocrity. Pages that once housed George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland and Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes are now filled with one-joke rubbish like Garfield and Family Circus. It was cute the first time Billy mispronounced the word “toothbrush.” Forty years later, I think we’re all hoping Billy finds himself on the underside of a minivan.
Of course, the comics’ page isn’t the only place to go for shoddy, one-joke humor. Poor comedy writing exists everywhere from The Tonight Show to even The Onion. Knoxville fiction writer and University of Tennessee professor Allen Wier once said that humor writing is a more difficult undertaking than drama. That’s because people are often moved to grief by similar scenarios. None but the most hard-hearted can resist pangs of sadness at the dramatization of a dying child or a damaged romantic relationship.
Comedy is more difficult. The writer who wants his audience to laugh must consider timing, rhythm, simplicity, invention, and the effects of juxtapositioning. If the writer of drama doesn’t emotionally move his audience, there might still be redemption. If the humor writer doesn’t bring about laughter, readers will go elsewhere.
The problem with McSweeney’s new humor anthology is that it is often the literary equivalent of the one-joke comic strip, albeit much smarter. Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans (Alfred A. Knopf /$16.95) is described in the introduction by co-editor Dave Eggers as “some of the best writing our contributors have created while trying to be less serious and being paid very little or nothing. It will fill you with such joy that you may want to beat your head on a rock in the garden.” It’s true that Troubled Americans made me want to beat my head on a rock in the garden. But that was mostly because it just wasn’t all that funny.
Troubled Americans is an anthology of 49 short pieces written by a variety of contributors to the McSweeney’s literary journal and website. Also proffered are several pages of lists, including “Lessons Learned from My Study of Literature,” “Ineffective Ways to Subdue a Jaguar,” and “Rapper or Toiletry?”
The first hint that this anthology written by troubled Americans is itself troubled comes in the first selection, which is a short play by Tim Carvell entitled “A Brief Parody of a Talk Show That Falls Apart About Halfway Through.” The topic of the talk show lampooned in the script is “People Who Enjoy Being Verbally Abused by Talk-Show Audiences.” That’s the joke. Get it? Not quite the sidesplitting irony you hoped for, is it? Nor does the piece improve when it stretches to four pages and painfully tries to make us laugh again by breaking the fourth wall. As if that’s never been done.
Or try Kevin Shay’s “Pirate Riddles for Sophisticates.” Here, we’re subjected to three pages of jokes using the same bad pun. “What’s a pirate’s favorite aspect of computational linguistics? PARRRsing sentences.” The wordplay isn’t funny the first time. It doesn’t gain anything by being repeated over and over. Despite the mildly clever juxtapositioning of snobbish intelligentsia and awful joke telling, Shay’s piece mostly comes across as pretentious, distant and dull.
That’s not to say that Troubled Americans is complete dreck. Some of the entries are very funny. Pieces like J.M. Tyree’s “On the Implausibility of the Death Star’s Trash Compactor” and T.G. Gibbon’s “Reviews of My Daydreams” work because they engage the reader. Here, we are exposed to some degree of analysis and wit, instead of the repetition of bad jokes and inflated ingenuity.
The collection works especially well when its contributors rely on short bursts of wit and absurdity to carry the laughs. In other words, read the lists and skip much of the rest. There’s still plenty of one-joke mentality in these lists, as in the case of Ross Barnes’ “Good Westerns, Not Porn” and “All of Chewbacca’s Dialogue in the Comic Book Version of The Empire Strikes Back.” Even so, this stable of writers is clearly a lot more skilled with short barbs than with humorous exposition.
November 11, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 46
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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