So I was taking my walk a while back, returning from dropping off my car at the dealership to have the backup camera software updated due to a recall (they say write what you know, but I’m definitely not writing about that). And, as is my wont, I was reading a book as I walked.
Some people are astonished that I can do this – I get comments about it all the time, along the lines of “Watch where you’re going, you freak”, or “Hey, that was my toe”. (Seriously, I have excellent peripheral vision, and I’ve only walked into a street sign, like, twice.) The particular book in question was one that I’d taken out of the library again, because I’d failed to get around to reading it the first time, and I’d finally succumbed to library guilt and had started it earlier in the week. And as I was reading this book, I started to realize, slowly, that I hated everyone in it. So I looked a bit more closely at the jacket quotes, and I saw that it was being advertised as a “dark comedy”.
I wonder whether anyone remembers the television show “Buffalo Bill”. (Bear with me, here.) I doubt it, since it was only on TV for two seasons, back in the 1980s, when you had to rub two remote control devices together to start a fire to turn the TV on. The thing about “Buffalo Bill” is that its lead character, played by Dabney Coleman, was utterly repellent. And that’s where, I think, this all started – this idea that “dark comedy” means that no character has any redeeming qualities, and somehow, this is intended to be funny.
Don’t get me wrong – I like schadenfreude as much as the next guy. But when the supposed joke is “look at all these terrible people” and that’s all there is, I call foul. I look at terrible people every day. They’re in the newspaper, drowning puppies and embezzling prescription money from senior citizens, frequently from public office, and – shockingly – I don’t think they’re funny. I’m not amused at their antics, nor am I amused by their comeuppance; it’s more of a terse, grim sense of satisfaction and a simmering disappointment that, whatever consequences they may have suffered, I wasn’t the one to impose them.
So, mostly, I’ve been eschewing the dark comedies, on the grounds that they’re mostly dark and hardly comedies. Instead, I read fluff, the funnier the better. As I noted recently, my wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, reviews books on Twitter, and she does not give me book recommendations, because my rule of thumb is, if it’s fiction, and the summary of the book does not end with “and hilarity ensues”, it does not interest me. So most of our literary conversations start with my asking SWMBT what the current day’s book is about, and she’ll say, oh, something like “it’s an alternate American history in which slavery was never abolished, which follows the journey of a young slave and her daughter via the modern Underground Railroad toward the promise of freedom in Banff”, and I’ll ask, “Does hilarity ensue?”, and SWMBT will respond, “Are you insane?”, and then I know I shouldn’t read it.
But there are plenty of books in the world, and lots of them are funny, so the chances are that I’ll be walking and reading for quite a while to come. So keep your eyes peeled for a tall, preoccupied guy with his nose in a book, and try to stay away from my toes, and if a minute or two later you hear a clang, you’ll know that my peripheral vision is having a challenging day.