There’s a time and place for humour. From the darkest Grimdark gallows humour to Kafka’s satirical take on faceless bureaucracy, it’s a rare story that has no humour at all. But how much and what kind?
Editing my fantasy series, what do I find? Accidental humour. Despite my ‘no-jokes-this-is-dark-fantasy’ policy. Not laugh out loud funny, but it’s there. It’s my natural inclination to write Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Jonathan Swift.
I found this exchange in Book Two last night;
“He would have left me in the jail.”
“It’s not personal. Some days he lacks… long-term goals.”
“They say he killed the Emperor’s generals one by one, surrounded by soldiers. That’s a pretty long-term goal.”
And while that’s not exactly Terry Pratchett (ok, close), maybe it’s an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
There goes my ‘serious‘ fantasy.
But a story with no humour to leaven the darkness has no light and shade; no contrast. It’s dull. And it’s not real.
Hang around with first responders and military personnel, they share a dark gallows humour. It breaks the tension of the job. It diverts from the literal life-or-death stakes.
Man versus Fish
Why do I spend so much time hovering over the delete key? My second protagonist is a legendary resistance fighter, rebel and sword master. Varla is a gruff gunslinger from a Western, a forces veteran with complex PTSD and a messiah complex. He’s not a people person. He’s on a revenge trip. But he can’t abide a bully and he’ll wade into unwinnable fights to even the odds.
He’s more than an adventure-genre trope, he’s a cliché. This is problem number one. In fiction, trope equals good, cliché equals bad.
But outside of a sword fight, he’s a fish out of water – the basis of comedy for millennia, right back to the ancient Greeks. I’m treading on dangerous ground. How far is too far?
Set them up, knock them down
In the post-modern world, we like our heroes relatable, fallible; more like us. Which is why every reboot of Superman amps up his moral conflict and doubt, and Batman stacks up more mental health issues. We prefer imperfect heroes. Readers actively dislike the Mary-Sue and the Gary-Stu protagonist; they’re just not relatable. We turn away from shining perfection cast in bronze on a pedestal.
Varla is admirable in his skills and his courage, but he’s also frequently a complete jackass.
You meet a legend, the first thing you do is look for faults, something to cut them down to size. Anything else is fawning hero-worship.
Throughout my series, everyone somehow takes the p* out of the great swordmaster. And it’s funny because it undercuts the trope-slash-cliché. It shows a certain self-awareness. It lets the reader in on the artifice of the genre. It’s a cheap nod-and-a-wink, get-out-of-author-jail card. And it risks undermining the whole thing.
How far do we go in puncturing the icon? What happens to the consistency of tone?
A funny thing happened on the way to the Labyrinth…
Humour is subjective; jokes are hit or miss. Funny is in the ear of the beholder. The wrong line in the wrong place can destroy hundreds of pages of carefully crafted atmosphere. Include a fart gag in a tense scene, suddenly it’s Blazing Saddles. You take the reader out of the story.
Tarantino’s Inglourious is unwatchable after the prologue. Everyone from Brad Pitt to Michael Fassbender is obliged to deliver Tarantino’s pre-pubescent dialogue with a wink. When Mike Myers does his turn as Peter Sellers in bad prosthetics, we’re transported to Doctor Strangelove. Tonally, it’s all over the place.
Inglourious wants to be a brutal, edgy reinvention of the war movie. Instead it elbows you out of the story at least twice a minute with a bad gag, bad line or bad concept. This is Tarantino’s faultline in every self-indulgent script from neo-noir Pulp-fiction to the incomprehensible Django.
The Greeks stood by the Unities of Time, Place and Action. Tarrantino plays fast and loose with all of them. No rules for this rebel. Remind me never to eat dinner at his place.
The Thief of Bad Gags
To hit the tone that I want, I should go through the funny lines with the red pen; excise them all.
But without with humour, it’s just 200 pages of misery. Although Steven Erikson’s Malazan is over a million words now; there must be a market…
So what if the gags undermine a main character? They define the gap between the truth and the legend*. Pointing out the legend’s feet of clay makes his achievements more remarkable, don’t they?
And in conclusion? How far is too far? I still can’t decide on the right time and place for humour.
*”When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance