Gallows Humor
Gallows humor — a joke that occurs in dangerously close proximity to horrors — can sometimes seem tasteless or insensitive, but it has a powerful ability to leaven, ameliorate and help process the intensity of emotion that surrounds the horror.
Lorrie Moore's Story "Terrific Mother" (Birds of America) opens with a scene in which the main character accidentally kills her friend's baby. Within a page (though in the story seven months have passed), her boyfriend proposes to her, and when she seems reluctant, he insists, "I'm going to marry you till you puke." It's both uncomfortable and funny. There are, as always with Lorrie Moore, lots more jokes, puns and funny stuff as the character works through her guilt and grief, and they're essential to that process.
Consider a very different instance: Starbuck's likening of a great whale inhabiting the watery world to a gold-fish in "its glassy globe," in Chapter 38 of Moby-Dick, "Dusk." It's a curiously humorous and diminishing image, considering the "latent horror" of life and "grim, phantom futures" Starbuck ponders in the same chapter, not to mention the impending fate of the Pequod. This small joke in the context of the horrors the crew will undergo is another micro-instance of gallows humor. In the case of "Dusk," it's the small pleasures that encourage us — and the crew — to persist in the face of a certain gloomy fate. Some of our most famous instances of this sort of humor are from Shakespeare: the Gravediggers in Hamlet or the Porter taking a piss in Macbeth, just after the murder of Duncan.
Prompt: After a dark passage, inject a surprising, dichotomous or humorous image, and see how it alters the energy. It may provide enough relief to let your characters -- and readers -- carry on.
Further Reading: Moby-Dick, Chapter 38Macbeth, Porter scene, act II scene iiiTerrific Mother by Lorrie Moore
Lorrie Moore's Story "Terrific Mother" (Birds of America) opens with a scene in which the main character accidentally kills her friend's baby. Within a page (though in the story seven months have passed), her boyfriend proposes to her, and when she seems reluctant, he insists, "I'm going to marry you till you puke." It's both uncomfortable and funny. There are, as always with Lorrie Moore, lots more jokes, puns and funny stuff as the character works through her guilt and grief, and they're essential to that process.
Consider a very different instance: Starbuck's likening of a great whale inhabiting the watery world to a gold-fish in "its glassy globe," in Chapter 38 of Moby-Dick, "Dusk." It's a curiously humorous and diminishing image, considering the "latent horror" of life and "grim, phantom futures" Starbuck ponders in the same chapter, not to mention the impending fate of the Pequod. This small joke in the context of the horrors the crew will undergo is another micro-instance of gallows humor. In the case of "Dusk," it's the small pleasures that encourage us — and the crew — to persist in the face of a certain gloomy fate. Some of our most famous instances of this sort of humor are from Shakespeare: the Gravediggers in Hamlet or the Porter taking a piss in Macbeth, just after the murder of Duncan.
Prompt: After a dark passage, inject a surprising, dichotomous or humorous image, and see how it alters the energy. It may provide enough relief to let your characters -- and readers -- carry on.
Further Reading: Moby-Dick, Chapter 38Macbeth, Porter scene, act II scene iiiTerrific Mother by Lorrie Moore
© Elizabeth Gaffney