Comedy often works because of disjunction, whether between two things we'd expected to match that don't or two things we hadn't expected to be similar that are. It also comes when we dwell on what we wouldn't (or shouldn't) normally do, or when we fail to attend to what we ought — again, disjunction

Take Chapters 76 and 79 of Moby-Dick together, The Battering Ram and The Prairie. If this whole part of the book is an extended (quite absurdly extended, really) set of mediations on the head of the whale, these chapters in particular focus on the forehead and noselessness of the sperm whale.

The Battering Ram describes with outrageous foreshadowing the implement of the Pequod's eventual demise. The whale's flat forehead is highly padded and deadly, a heavyweight's boxing gloves gone exponentially large, yet also mystical, with blank page connotations, especially when we ponder Moby-Dick himself, whose forehead is a true white blank page. With the chapter The Prairie, Melville returns tot he same space, that flat forehead, but focusses on the lack of a nose in the whale, and noses, as Cyrano knew, are almost always comic. In their presence, but also in their absence. To say you can pull the whale's nose is to make us think of that silly act.

What's going on here may be a corollary to gallows humore: it's taking pressure off from the heavy foreshadowing we've been subjected to, not that there won't be some serious calamities to come, thanks to whale heads, but just so the tires down't blow before we get there, Melville makes the thought of it all more tolerable (by far) with a bit of a goof-off: "Dash the nose from Phidias’s marble Jove, and what a sorry remainder!" (Naturally, Melville must close this joke-filled chapter with something more serious, just to tip the balances: The return to the trope of hieroglyphics and Chaldean, reminding us of the impenetrable genius of the whale, on whose white-page of a forehead a utterly inscrutable language is written.)

PROMPT:

Wherever things are most serious in your text, seek the ridiculous. Where things are frothy, seek murky depths. Try juxtaposing the comic and the grave —and doing it in quick succession. Start by goofing off, having fun, writing absurd or extreme that doesn't need to be good enough. Then see if you can salvage the humor — or darkness — you've forged by welding it permanently to the main body of the story, not despite but because of how dichotomous it is.