Why is humour sacred and what is its role within literature?
Jane: Humour is incredibly important within the storytelling traditions of so many of our communities. It signals shared values and the capacity to break rules, find joy, and expose ethical failings in an embodied, communal way. A friend once gave me a copy of translated Ancient Chinese Jokes from the late 80s; much of it is still funny today because the humourists of the past were also ridiculing society’s wealthiest and most powerful. And laughing at themselves, too.
My favourite stories, poems, and books make me laugh and make me cry. It’s difficult to sit with the gruesome, the painful, the horrifying, the heartbreaking for too long, but the absurd and ridiculous are gentler teachers and companions that sustain me as a reader; they offer a cushion for the urgent lessons within literature. More and more, the world we live in is satirizing itself. Do we even need The Onion anymore? Writers have a responsibility in pushing satire as a genre, to not use comedy for comedy’s sake but to ignite inquiry into under-exposed conditions and truths. Sometimes, humour is a hook and starting place for more serious conversations. Whether the payoff is instant or gradual, literature that engages with all our emotional responses and senses speaks to a need to stay connected to ourselves, each other, and our inner wisdom.
Tara: When Jane pitched this issue theme, it really made me stop and think because my own sense of humour gears more towards sarcasm or bluntness, mostly because I’m often bewildered (but not surprised) by the state of the world. But the role humour plays in life and literature is so much more than just a quip here and there. This theme really forced me to consider what other types of humour exist and how the best writing is often searingly funny in its honesty. For me, that honesty and humour lends itself to authentic writing, which is the kind of writing that sticks with readers.
Sadie: At its best, the mode of comedy is a clear-eyed way of seeing—maybe the clearest—and the resultant surprise, discovery, the shock of relation or desperately needed recognition, is the purpose of literature itself. A good punchline is an epiphany, a volta, a third act twist. We see ourselves, or we see each other, or we see society, or we see violence, more sharply and specifically than we did before. They don’t call it your funny bone because you laugh when you hurt it. Your jaw drops, a current surges through you. Like a good joke, you never see it coming. I think so many of our communities gather around humour because of the connection of a shared set of references and experiences, yes, which form a comedic shorthand and an emotional intimacy, but also because we see violence so clearly, and we have an understanding of (with?) death, and along the way we have survived so many terrible shocks.
What is the funniest book you’ve read or funniest sketch/piece of media you’ve seen in the past while?
Gitanjali: I kept coming back to Pagglait dir. Umesh Bist, it follows a woman after her husband dies, as they haven’t been married for long she has a hard time grieving. She is surrounded by immediate and distant family members as they squeeze into their house to pay respects. The humour is subtle and by no means able to evoke belly laughter, but it appears within the family drama and awkward interactions filled with tumultuous personal history. It stood out to me because of how familiar and fleshed out the characters are, with scenes of realistic humor reminiscent of uncomfortable family gatherings.
Pagglait’s more natural take on humour feels distinctly down to earth, focusing on atmosphere over punchline.
Tara: I’m a little late to the party, but I finally read Joshua Whitehead’s debut novel Jonny Appleseed. It reminded me of the role that humour plays in Indigenous communities. You won’t find anyone funnier than when you put a group of Indigenous people in a room together (or on the internet), except maybe if you put the protagonist of this novel through a 200 page romp of Whitehead’s fictional interpretation of the contemporary two-spirit millennial experience.
Sadie: I recently revisited Tamsyn Muir’s Harrow the Ninth for an essay, which is a novel about grief that made me cry tears of laughter. Either/Or by Elif Batuman has one of my favourite jokes in a long time: “The radio in the Quincy kitchen was playing the new Alanis Morissette single, ‘Head over Feet.” It was about having the maturity to want something good for you. I felt outraged. I had thought Alanis Morissette was there to remind us.” Lastly, not a book (yet) but Andrea Long Chu is the greatest comedienne of our time (and a collection of her criticism is forthcoming next year.)
Jane: Samah Fadil’s “Good Mourning Palestine,” after Robin Williams’s first radio broadcast in Good Morning Vietnam, is so skilled at impressions, pacing, and musicality. It reminds me of Douglas Kearney’s performative typography work wherein letters on the page emit sound without needing to be read out loud and incorporate comic-book elements, and also Sobhi al-Zobaidi’s Looking Awry (Again), a mockumentary about western liberal co-optation of Palestinian films and storytelling.
In Douglas Kearney’s “Noah/Ham: Fathers of the Year,” you see the large “HEE! HEE! HEE! HEE! HEE!” but when you look closer at the smaller letters, you see an examination of anti-Blackness, patriarchy, and white supremacist justification of slavery. The very onomatopoeia of mockery and humour are turned on its head within this poem, putting comedy on blast (standup, after all, evolved from minstrel shows). Likewise, irony, satire, and tragedy intermix within Fadil’s poem in a multilayered way. It is a beautiful demonstration of the effectiveness of satire and how poetry can allow a mockery of the powerful to simmer and stretch. What remains when you peel back the layers is a sense of dignity for one’s people amidst genocide and occupation.
What do you do when you ask yourself if you should be laughing at something?
Jane: As a disabled person there’s a lot of ways I’ve internalized the oppression of ableism, and so much of traditional comedy – improv, sketch comedy, and so on – uses disabled people as punchlines. We don’t often see comedians sitting down, using mobility devices, or with intellectual disabilities on stage. So I ask myself, who do I not see making jokes and what kind of humour liberates us from oppressive ideals of the human? Who is excluded from a type of humour? And, what is the purpose of ridicule, who is the humour directed against? Am I the right person to tell this joke?
Tara: I am a big advocate of going with your gut. If you’re questioning whether something is right to laugh at, the fact that you’re asking the question means it probably isn’t. I like what you say, Jane, about “am I the right person to tell this joke?” I personally don’t want to partake if the joke isn’t told from the perspective of someone with that particular lived experience.
Sadie: There’s a fraught dynamic between a comedian and an audience: the power of the comedian, who has a microphone, toward the audience, and the synergetic force between the individual audience members who are swept up in a shared experience, which is pleasurable until it suddenly and sickeningly isn’t. In college, I watched an improv show (I was in the scene, judge me accordingly) where three guys asked for “a non-geographical location”—got “a frat house”—and made a joke about a girl passed out at a party, standing up there in a line staring down at empty space shaped like a body, inviting us the audience to collectively imagine her there. After the show, I found them and asked: did they really think that was funny? “Uh, yeah.” So maybe there was no convincing them. But maybe their conviction in their funniness was punctured by the question, which is what questions are for. Do I think this is funny? Do you? Sometimes just asking is enough to interrupt the reflex. The only thing more powerful than laughing is not laughing. The only thing more powerful than an audience is someone leaving it. You can put the book down. You can write something better.
What kind of pieces are you excited to read for this issue?
Gitanjali: I’d like to read pieces that use laughter as a form of resilience. Where the author introduces witty characters that linger through to the final pages.
Tara: I’m particularly drawn to how joy is necessary to advance movements of liberation and resistance. The world is burning, but how do we connect these small flickers of joy and hope and progress—however limited they may be—into the threads of larger resistance movements? What role does laughter have in healing us and bringing us closer to where we as a community need to be? How can humour be a tool and not a distraction?
Sadie: I really like how you phrased that—humour as not just something that is felt, but something that is used. On the flip side of things, I’m interested in how people use humour and laughter to create closeness or to create distance, both on a meta level as writers and on an interpersonal, social, communal level. Jokes as flirting, jokes as forgiveness, jokes as family, jokes as failure, jokes as punishment. I’m interested in the inherent tension of jokes, which tend to create an inside and an outside. I’m also interested in humourlessness, in humourless lesbians, in feminist killjoys, in awkward family dinners, in writing “lol” at the end of every text but not meaning it, in the hot rush of shame when you try to make someone laugh and they don’t, worse, when they do but it’s just because they feel bad for you.
Jane: I’m interested in works that relish in surprise, wit, wordplay, and irreverence. Poets are often doing entire stand-up routines before reading the most devastating poem. It’s like, “In order to survive this I’ve had to laugh about it.” That energy, and the attention to tension and knowing when to release it, is often required in a poem or work that stays with us.
I think of how Kayla Czaga has a poem in For Your Safety Please Hold On called “Another Poem About My Father.” The punchline is the title, but that initial eye-roll-chortle—at what grief requires of us and the ill-conceived notion that we need to ‘get over’ something already and to write about something new—prepares us for the equally ridiculous and gut wrenching line, “My father is more like a poem than most poems / are.” Who are we to ever question? And as the speaker makes the connection between their father’s search for both loons and loonies with the work of poetry, the father is transformed from poem to poet, inhabiting an afterlife through the speaker’s observations and memories, taking on an agency that we give poets and our loved ones to cut “such slender metaphors from the earth.”
As writers we know that every detail matters. And these details matter in an idiolectic, very you kind of way. So funny writing is about letting readers in on the joke. You have to feel and observe and have courage to feel and observe on the page and then let out an exasperated, “Okay that’s enough feeling for the day! I give up!” And keep that line in the work giving up because it’s honest and what do you mean you don’t know what it’s like to tell a joke instead of feeling your feelings?
