Stay Updated: Posts | Comments

Posts in the "Humor in SF/F" Category

  • Earlier this week, Michael J. Martinez shared his thoughts on humor in SF/F. I figured I would follow up on his post with something I wrote last year about a specific kind of humor, parody, and the genre of the fantastic.

    The piece was inspired by the Tim Burton movie Dark Shadows and talks quite a bit about it. In fact, on one level, it’s kind of a stealth review of the flick. Now, I realize that at this late date, it’s unlikely that you, Gentle Reader, are jonesing to read anyone’s opinion on this particular subject. But I hope the essay says some things of general significance with the Burton movie simply providing helpful examples of what I’m getting at. Anyway, onward!

    HOW TO SPOOF (AND HOW NOT TO)

    The first SF-related parody I recall experiencing was “Superduperman” by Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood in the fourth issue of Mad. I’ve read or watched many others over the years, including Quark, the Adam West Batman series, Love at First Bite, Young Frankenstein, Galaxy Quest, and Seth Rogen’s The Green Hornet. Evidently I belong to the target audience for this type of material, and I proved it again last weekend by catching Tim Burton’s send-up of Dark Shadows. Parts of Burton’s movie are hilarious and parts fall flat, and that got me thinking about what works in this kind of story and what doesn’t.

    As usual, this is a topic I can’t discuss without tossing in some spoilers. If you haven’t caught Burton’s movie yet and want to do so uncontaminated by any revelations or opinions from me, I recommend you do that and then check out the rest of this little essay at a later date.

    If you’re contemplating spoofing virtually anything, the first thing to know is that some fans of the original material are apt to despise your project and clamor to see you horsewhipped no matter how clever it may be. There are Batman fans who still can’t forgive the Adam West show for making fun of the Caped Crusader, and months ago, I heard from a Dark Shadows devotee who regarded the idea of a send-up as inherently deplorable and disrespectful. He didn’t need to see the movie to get an early start on hating it.

    But some fans are willing to give a parody a chance, especially if the treatment, however barbed, bawdy, or outrageous, communicates affection for the original. Young Frankenstein, perhaps the best SF-related parody ever, accomplishes this in every scene, in part with its black-and-white cinematography and faithful recreation of Colin Clive’s lab. The new Dark Shadows manages it too with such details as the madly overblown Gothic magnificence of Collinwood, a Widow’s Hill perfectly formed for long, long, suicidal plunges into rocks and crashing waves, Johnny Depp’s spit curls, and, cameos by Jonathan Frid, Kathryn Leigh Scott, David Selby, and Lara Parker.

    Love of the original, however, is not enough. A spoof must also be funny, and the humor is likely to derive from two sources.

    One is exaggerating elements manifest in the original. Clark Kent acts “mild-mannered” to keep others from suspecting he’s Superman. Clark Bent, Superduperman’s alter ego, is an absolute crawling worm of a human being. The Batman of Silver Age comics is a paragon of every virtue, and TV tweaks this characterization into Adam West’s homily-spouting model citizen. And in the original Dark Shadows, Jonathan Frid’s Barnabas Collins is in theory a tragic antihero forever pining for his lost love Josette and wracked with guilt over his vampiric misdeeds, but over the course of the series, he gets busy with lots of babes and runs up quite a body count. Johnny Depp’s Barnabas is the same breed of bat only more so, flipping suddenly from melancholy gentleman to horny cad or bloodthirsty monster as best suits the moment. Allegedly, this is the dark, uncontrollable side of his nature getting the better of him, but by the end of the film, we’re entitled to wonder how much he really minds.

    A spoof can also generate humor simply by directing attention to aspects of the original that are inherently absurd. Galaxy Quest addresses the alarming truth that red shirts are mere cannon fodder, and Burton’s Dark Shadows mines comic gold from an idea that seems obvious but which the original show ignored: supernatural powers or no, a man from two hundred years in the past has some catching up to do.

    Burton makes this element of the movie even funnier by popping Barnabas out of his coffin not in 2012 but in 1971 when the original series aired. Forty years later, aspects of the 70’s seem quaint and amusing in their own right, and the movie combines them with its befuddled 18th Century aristocrat to good effect. I may never again hear the Carpenters without thinking of Dark Shadows.

    Unfortunately, as I indicated earlier, the movie also demonstrates ways parody can go wrong.

    One is stuffing in too many elements of the original without doing them all justice and without melding them all into one cohesive plot. The spine of Burton’s film is the love triangle defined by Barnabas, Angelique, and Josette/Victoria. But we also get David’s ghostly mother, a little random lycanthropy, and Dr. Julia Hoffman’s effort to cure Barnabas’s vampirism with modern medical science. Admittedly, we can take this hodgepodge as a satirical acknowledgment of the fact that in the show, there were always several demented things going on in Collinwood at any given time. But a movie is different from a daytime soap, and generally speaking, this scattershot approach doesn’t satisfy.

    It’s even more of a misstep when a story changes elements of the original without a perceptible reason or payoff. In Dark Shadows, the victim of such a change is Roger Collins. In the soap, he’s a stiff, pompous, self-important man, but decent withal and devoted to his family. Burton’s film turns him into a sleaze who only cares about himself without making him either funny or necessary to the resolution of the plot.

    Worst of all, perhaps, is when the parody leaves beloved characters in a place unworthy of them. On the Green Hornet TV show, Cato, as portrayed by Bruce Lee, is a more compelling hero than the title character. This disparity provides the comedic engine for Seth Rogen’s Green Hornet movie. In the film, Cato is spectacularly competent and at first, the only reason any actual crime fighting gets done. Brit Reid starts out as a dolt. By the end, though, the Hornet is growing into a genuine hero in his own right, and the movie wouldn’t work if this were not the case.

    Sadly, Dark Shadows falls down in this regard, too. If you liked the original, it won’t please you to see Elizabeth, Carolyn, David, and the Great House itself left as Burton leaves them.

    It’s still worth checking out, though. At those moments when it does parody right, you may even feel like “you’re on the top of the world, looking down on creation.”

    Read More...
  • The late, great Douglas Adams would’ve turned 61 this week. For many of us The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy remains a seminal work combining speculative fiction and laugh-out-loud funny. And sadly, few have tried to take up Adams’ mantle to bring humor to the genre.

    Sure, there have been some. Good Omens is an all-time favorite of mine, and I thoroughly enjoyed John Scalzi’s Redshirts as well. The mix of humor and pathos in these works is truly inspirational.

    I can’t really point to many other works I’ve read that have achieved what these books accomplished. And I think it’s because, in the end, funny is hard. But we could stand to use a bit more humor in the genre today. I mean, really…lighten up, people!

    This isn’t a call for more outright comedic books in SF/F, per se, though that would be awesome. Instead, I wouldn’t mind seeing a few more lighthearted moments in otherwise straight-forward genre works. I’ve found that so many books delve very deeply into their settings and their life-and-death plots, forgetting that, in so many cases, humor is very humanizing.

    My novel, The Daedalus Incident, isn’t a comedy. (At least, not intentionally – it really hasn’t been reviewed much yet, so the unintentional comedy remains unexplored, I suppose.) But I did try to weave some moments in there where the characters can show that, yes, they can laugh and joke, even under duress.

    That’s not to say they’re whipping out one-liners at every turn. The stakes are high, and the heroes have to rise to the occasion. Yet those who lead people through difficult times know that a well-placed bit of humor can do a lot to rally the troops or let off steam. It’s what people do. Without humor, the writer risks making his or her characters one-dimensional.

    Readers need a break, too. There’s absolutely a place for an unsparingly dark and driven tale, one that keeps the reader on the edge of his or her seat from page one. But with that, you run the risk of throwing too much at the reader, making the work perhaps a bit more difficult that it needs to be.

    Look at The Dark Knight Rises. My God, that was hard. Grim doesn’t even begin to describe it. Even its predecessor, The Dark Knight, had moments of levity; sure, it was gallows humor and often disturbing, but at least it broke things up somewhat. But TDKR was unrelenting. I honestly didn’t like it as much as the others.

    On the flip side, you can’t be all things to all people either. To keep with the movie motif, look at Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. There’s a reason we hate Jar-Jar Binks with the white-hot passion of a billion supernovae. The comic relief was too much there, and was neither comical nor a relief.

    So, it’s a balance, one driven by both the tone of the work and the needs of the story. But I’ll maintain that even in the midst of the worst dystopia or the most insane world-threatening crisis, characters – and readers – could learn to take a moment and laugh. Sometimes, it’s all you can do.

    Michael J. Martinez is the author of The Daedalus Incident, coming out May 7. His wife maintains they remain married because of his sense of humor…and the fact that she can’t make coffee as well as he can, thus requiring her to keep him around. When not making books, jokes or coffee, he blogs at www.michaeljmartinez.net and is on Twitter at @mikemartinez72.

    Read More...
  • A bit late to the party, my friends, but I was missing for good reason. I was attending the GenCon gaming convention, where I’m a part of the GenCon Writer’s Symposium. This was a busier year than most since I had, well, a book to plug this time. So preparations for and the participation in the symposium was a bit crazy.

    And can I say, my goodness, Congratulations to Courtney! It feels like a long time since we started this blog early this year, but I’m sure it’s felt a lot longer for Courtney as she waited for The Whitefire Crossing to hit the shelves. She’s getting wonderful reviews, so do be sure to check it out.

    Ok, on to humor. You know, I’m glad things worked out like they did. I’m not much of a humorist. I don’t read much humor, and I have a horrible time writing it. But while I was at GenCon this past weekend, I moderated a panel on tension in fiction. We were talking about lots of things like action and suspense and mystery and horror. And more things like political machinations, societal pressures, personal expectations, and so on. We started talking about varying tension so that the reader didn’t feel like the amp was always on eleven. I brought up the notion of tension, thinking it could be used to release pressure when it built too high, and another panelist, Dave Gross, said something very interesting about humor with respect to tension.

    (more…)

    Read More...
  • Courtney’s The Whitefire Crossing comes out this week. Check it out here! It looks like a rousing fantasy adventure, and I’m looking forward to reading it.

    The Horror of Laughing Children

    Laughter is horrifying sometimes, and horrific situations can be genuinely funny. But too often horrific situations are accompanied by someone else’s laughter. And you don’t get the joke.

    That’s pretty scary.

    In case you missed the memo, my first novel, coming out in about a month, is a science fiction horror apocalypse called The Panama Laugh.

    It’s funny at points, but it’s not all that funny overall. It’s not a comedy, but comedy is a running theme; there’s a Vaudeville backstory, and a viral media campaign that viewers clearly find campy and amusing, at least partially because they don’t realize that some of the most horrifying elements of the videos are real. Within the context of the novel, I mean, of course. If they were really real, and I was writing a novel about them being real but then being presented as fake to an audience that didn’t know they were real, then that’d be, like, reflexive, right? That’d be, like, Sex, Lies & Videotape for cannibals!

    Laughing, like screaming and/or lashing out physically, is one of the ways humans react to stress or discomfort, social or otherwise. It’s held up as the descriptor of “having a good time.” Go out with friends, “have a few laughs.” We all need laughter in our life. Right? Right?

    But laughing can also be a terrible weapon aimed not at positively releasing tension but at viciously hurting other people. Ever been laughed at on the playground? Like that. Ever felt like something in a comedy routine was wretchedly hateful, racist, misogynist, whatever? Like that. Ever seen the oh-so-funny racial images from the KKK or from Nazi Germany, or read the single-panel cartoons in Hustler? These things hide behind the costume of comedy, but they’re something far more simplistic. They’re hate, pure and simple, and whether the claim “it’s funny” is an excuse or the creator really is that screwed up, it’s often not possible to tell until it’s too late. (more…)

    Read More...
  • How happy am I that Courtney’s  The Whitefire Crossing releases this week? I have been looking forward to reading it for months!

    Humor is integral to a truly good book, whatever the genre. As a person who watches way too many sci-fi/fantasy movies and serials, I have seen so many excellent stories that started out strong but fizzled for want of a few gross gags. I was excited about Terminator, the Sarah Connor Chronicles and Spartacus, but neither had any humor and I got bored after a few episodes. A story without humor is a story that takes itself too seriously and somehow that gets boring. You don’t need much. One crazy nun or a light sprinkling of stupid animal humor will really smooth out an action story. A main character that blows away everyone but snores or pratfalls on occasion makes them more relatable.

    I think the humor in Carrie Vaughn’s ridiculous enjoyable Kitty Norville books and Kim Harrison’s Dead Witch Walking novels are what makes these two stand out in the urban fantasy genre. The stories are not all that different, but the way they tell them has me giggling every time.  In science fiction, Greg Bear has a very light touch with the humor, but it’s there and it’s lovely. I’m not going to retell the jokes. It’s better if you find them yourself.

    I find that it is difficult to keep the humor out of science fiction when I sit down to write it. The thought process goes like this: (more…)

    Read More...
  • Congratulations to Courtney on the release of The Whitefire Crossing! It looks like an amazing book and I’m excited to clear off my TBR pile enough to get to it.

    ——-

    So, I have very little experience reading SF or fantasy novels that are explicitly humorous, or branded as such. I don’t think there’s any such thing as humorous horror in literature – but damn I love me some Ghostbusters. I’m wearing my Gozerhead t-shirt right now.

    When I hear someone refer to humor as a genre, I immediately think of David Sedaris or P.G. Wodehouse or even Woody Allen’s classic story collection, Without Feathers.

    I’ve mentioned this before, but in advertising we use humor to get under our audience’s radar since everyone from children to geriatrics are so advertising-savvy, nowadays.  You can’t flash a pair of boobs or just show someone how your product takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’ and expect to sell anything. Sigh. Those were the good old days of constant boobage and guys strapping Timex watches to the props of motor-boats. (more…)

    Read More...
  • KameronHurley

    People have been trying to get me to read happy, funny books for years.

    The funniest book I read recently was NO HERO by Jonathan Wood. It was about brain squid, possession, explosions, dark magic, and involved a lot of deaths. Also, heads being chopped off.

    But it has some very light-hearted moments, guys! And jokes!

    What?

    So, yeah, I am not a reader of humor books, or “funny” fantasy. I have a very particular brand of humor that is not slapstick funny. Folks have been pushing Terry Pratchett books at me for years, and let’s not even talk about all those horrific Piers Anthony things. I just don’t read very many books with happy popcorn endings and rollicking wink-wink-nudge-nudge humor. In fact, in my reading life, a book with a happy ending is a book where the protagonist doesn’t die horribly.

    That said, grim books which are grim all the time can be relentless, and there’s something to be said for folks who can write dark books that understand that humor and grim optimism are how we get through the bad shit in our lives. Best Served Cold is a bloody, violent book in which terrible things happen to terrible people, but Abercrombie figured out when and how to slow down the grim and give the characters a chance to breathe and interact – oftentimes with much levity. And just as often, of course, with unexpected deaths.

    Erm. What? (more…)

    Read More...
  • “The duty of comedy is to correct men by amusing them.” –Moliere

    Happy release day to Courtney and The Whitefire Crossing! Congrats and good luck!

    Ask any actor and they’ll tell you. Drama is easy. Comedy is damned hard. The same is true for literature. For that reason, it’s ironic that the funny stuff gets so little respect. It takes more work and far more talent. Humor isn’t only about absurdity nor is it only about the expected versus the unexpected. It’s about timing and tension, and the precisely placed release of that tension. That’s something no one can explain, really. Either you have the knack, or you don’t. One can practice and hone one’s comedy skills, but the core instincts need to be there in the first place. Also, I feel that striking a balance between drama and comedy makes a story more powerful. You can stay on one side of the fence or the other, but what is really effective is a bit of both.

    That said, my favorite humorous Sci-fi/Fantasy author is Terry Pratchett. Douglas Adams is… well… okay, I guess. However, (for me) Terry Pratchett is far more powerful.* He uses comedy to make serious observations about the human condition. It isn’t humor for humor’s sake. He can make me laugh out loud, and he can make me cry in the same book, and I inevitably walk away feeling I’ve learned something. That takes skill. Pratchett doesn’t limit himself with situational comedy either. He plays with words in clever ways too. Another favorite of mine is Jonathan Stroud’s The Amulet of Samarkand. The demon Bartimaeus acts as a young magician’s conscience. I love that bit of irony. I really do. Also, Bartimaeus’ voice is dead amazing. I’ve a thing for perfectly timed British humor, but then, I grew up on Monty Python and Terry Gilliam (who is an American, btw.) Terry Gilliam is definitely one of my favorite film-makers. Brazil is one of the funniest and yet single most depressing film ever made. (No, I’m not talking about the American ending. That’s a cheat.)

    Humor is complicated and miraculous and like ballet — it’s tougher than it looks, but that’s its beauty.

    ——————–

    * I’ve a theory that people tend to go with one camp or the other. Very few readers love both equally.

    Read More...
  • Courtney SchaferToday is The Whitefire Crossing‘s official release day – which means you can buy it for Kindle as well as (hopefully!) find it at your local bookstore – so forgive me if this post comes off a bit scatterbrained. (Hard to type while you’re bouncing off the walls!)

    So, right: humor. We always know funny when we see it, but boy is it hard to analyze. Doesn’t help that it might be THE most subjective category in fiction. Seems like if you poll a group of people on whether something’s funny, you’ll get a far greater variety of opinions (and more vehement ones, too) as opposed to, say, asking if an action scene is exciting or not. I haven’t figured out if that’s because people have narrower “sweet spots” for humor than they do for other emotional responses, or if it’s just that there’s such a broad range of what humans find funny that the overlap between individual people isn’t as large.

    It’s interesting, I can think of tons of movies and TV shows I’ve found hysterically funny, but not nearly so many books. I’d say that my sense of humor must be visual in nature, but when I think of funny movies, it’s not usually the visuals that get me (Top Secret and Emperor’s New Groove excepted), it’s the dialogue – I’m a huge fan of that particular style of satire and sarcasm perfected by the Brits. Monty Python’s Life of Brian, the 2nd and 3rd seasons of Black Adder, Shaun of the Dead…oh, yeah.

    Thinking of funny books (or rather, funny scenes in books), two examples sprang immediately to mind: (more…)

    Read More...
  • Alex Bledsoe is the author of five novels, including Dark Jenny and The Hum and the Shiver. A Tennessee native, he now lives in Wisconsin.

    I’m old enough to remember the literally grim state of science fiction before Star Wars. The books, movies and TV shows may have had their humorous moments (or more likely, moments that were intended to be humorous but actually fell flat: see the WWII-ish humor of Forbidden Planet), but pre-1977, humor and science fiction were considered contradictory. After all, the future would be a serious place.

    The problem is that humor goes to the core of humanity (and I mean “humanity” in the broad sense). SF always runs the danger of absurdity, and by acknowledging this with humor, you can get the reader/audience on your side. By pretending it isn’t goofy, you alienate them (see? I made a pun! “Alienate!”).

    My favorite joke in all of science fiction filmdom isn’t in Star Wars, or E.T., or any of the intentionally humorous SF films like Men in Black. It occurs in 1968′s Planet of the Apes, and is so audacious that it still astounds me that someone thought of it, actually filmed it, and allowed it to stay in the final film. (more…)

    Read More...