Five months into drafting my memoir, I was drowning in the emotional fatigue of reliving my past to write my manuscript. No amount of self-care soothed the weight of the stories I was digging into, both for me and the writers in my Memoir Incubator, who also began to wonder out loud how we’d all cross the finish line if we were this worn down.
At that time, I’d been writing a difficult chapter about growing up within a large fundamentalist family when I remembered a joke my Dad used to make about it.
“Every Sunday, after your aunts collect the church offerings, they toss the money up to the heavens,” he said, as he tossed imaginary handfuls of bills up into the air. “Whatever God catches, He keeps. The rest goes to your aunts.”
Dad’s theatrical delivery of jokes about his problematic relatives made us all howl with laughter, including the accused aunts. Besides being a crowd pleaser, I believe these jokes were how he dealt with an uncomfortable reality: Our relatives were untrustworthy and harmful. Decades later, when those same jokes helped me finish writing that chapter with a smaller residual emotional hangover than I’d anticipated, I realized he was onto something.
While I am not the natural comedian my Dad is, it seemed I had a lot to learn from the absurdity, irony, perfectly timed jokes, and the downright silly dialogue with which he told stories. As I deliberately began to employ these humorous tactics during my memoir-writing year, I learned that humor-writing techniques can offer memoirists some relief, objectivity, and contrast in the retelling of our darkest moments — when appropriate and done with discernment, of course.
During my first-ever memoir workshop a few years ago, our class read Four Funerals, No Marriage by Michael Keren, which reviewers had dubbed “darkly funny” and “perfecting the delicate balance between humor and pathos…” However, many of my fellow classmates considered the book “too funny” and “offensive.”
In the book’s opening image, Keren writes, “. . . The nurse looked at me across Mom’s hospital bed, suggesting that I leave the room … ‘Oh, Mom was a stripper back in the day. She raised me in the dressing rooms at the clubs. I’ve seen it all.’ Mom’s monitor went berserk as she couldn’t restrain her laughing fit … Mom was never a stripper (at least not that I knew), but that was the warped sense of humor she and I shared.”
Before releasing the book to reviewers or readers, Keren addressed the judgment that might come of his “inappropriate” humor during his terminal parent’s days in hospice. “Outsiders could think me cruel, but Mom came alive in it, even at death’s door. It got us through some of the tough conversations, like this one, that she was going to die.”
For Keren and I, humor was a normal part of our family’s culture so there was no need to force jokes and sarcasm. Humor is an essential truth in our stories. However, not everyone enjoys or can employ humor in their memoir, especially some of those darker or more sensitive stories, which need to be told with the utmost respect. However, even in cases where humor may be less of a release valve, it can still play a role in exposing the depth and multidimensionality of our most complex characters.
For a fellow Incubator writer recounting a story of abuse, finding the humor in her story resulted in showcasing how her villain had been a funny and charming person in public, a key juxtaposition that made the abuse happening in private all the more terrifying and disconcerting. However insincere their villain’s humor might have been, it was a strategic part of the abuse. It validated the main character’s difficult healing journey, while also providing a momentary levity for readers that later intensified the tension. More importantly for the manuscript, finding the humorous moments in the story made the villain more multidimensional and, in turn, the writer a more reliable narrator.
If and when we use humor, memoirists may find that it can help us stay grounded during the most emotional parts of the drafting process. It can also enhance the reader’s experience by managing tension, deepening characterization, and even exposing the duality of our characters. When done right, humor expands our narratives and reminds us that our memoirs aren’t just sad, they’re also nuanced, complicated, and, at times, comical. And if humor can do that, then perhaps we can borrow other tools too, from horror, romance, and fantasy, to strengthen our narratives. After all, our villains and heroes are rarely just evil or just good. They’re absurd. They’re complicated. They’re human.
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