Funny fiction
May 26, 2003 | 12:00am
A few weeks ago, I received an e-mail message from a reader named Gene Martinez, who more or less guaranteed that I would pay attention to his message by titling it "fan mail (sort of)." Here’s what Gene had to say, slightly edited and abridged:
Dear Mr. Dalisay,
"Good day. I’m a fan of your essays (especially ca. Barfly – I wish there’d soon be a ‘Best of Barfly, Volume Two,’ which doesn’t necessarily have to be ‘the second-best Barfly’) and of some of your works of fiction. I have read all four of your story collections. I like your stories "Delivery" and "Sarcophagus" very much. But I have a few questions – pardon me for my presumptuousness – re your essays and your stories. Nope, this is not term paper-related.
"What I really like about your essays is that in the best of them, there’s an incredible balance of humor and empathy (I hate it when I sound like I’m parodying Michiko Kakutani); there’s almost a call-and-response thing going on. And I rather like that a lot, plus the fact that much of the humor in your essays is not based on contempt and ridicule.
"Which leads me to your stories: While I enjoy many of them, I’m kind of looking for some laugh-out-loud moments. I appreciate wryness; I appreciate subtle irony. But I also love sparkling wit and high comedy. And as a fan of your writings in English I’m genuinely curious why your fiction is rarely as funny as your essays. When you write essays, do they usually just end up with a lot of humor, or do you consciously make them funny (but not necessarily lightweight)? As for your stories, is the solemnity/seriousness/grimness always intentional?
"Digression: As a reader I find it disturbing that some critics undervalue humor. For example some youngish American writers like Lorrie Moore and David Foster Wallace are criticized for making their readers laugh. They are often accused of merely wisecracking, of being gratuitously, pointlessly humorous.
"But I think there is something generous about funny writers, and humor doesn’t make their work – at least as far as Moore and Wallace are concerned – any less serious. (I find it curious that in most contemporary novels/story collections that I read, the presence of humor is almost inversely proportional to a work’s adherence to the ‘realistic’ tradition, which kind of makes me think that this whole concept of ‘realism’ in fiction all boils down to the interest of some people in their own careers as ‘realistic’ writers, a way of masking their own lack of interest in and/or inability to produce what is outside the prescribed concept of realism – and here I’m kind of thinking about Gardner’s On Moral Fiction. Then again, this observation probably says more about my own interest in what lies OUTSIDE the conventions of realistic fiction than the actual deficiencies of realism.)
"I know the above sounds like an implicit accusation that you are one of those people who undervalue humor, or that just because your stories are not laugh-out-loud funny they are any less memorable or significant, or that your fiction is inferior to your essays. It may even seem like I’m carping about the fact that your stories aren’t your essays. But I enjoy reading your work, and I’m only really genuinely curious to know what you think of my (presumptuous, possibly impertinent, and maybe even self-important) observations. Thank you very much."
Not having the time then to give the message the response it deserved, I acknowledged it gratefully and promised Gene that I would answer him in a forthcoming column, and here it is:
Dear Gene,
Thank you very much for your message, and for your kind observations about my work. No matter how disinterested (folks, check the meaning of that word) I may try or pretend to be, I’d have to admit that it always pleases me to find someone who appreciates what I’ve done. Writing has no better reward than a sympathetic (and, more importantly, an intelligent) reader.
Your puzzlement about the relative absence of humor in Philippine fiction is well put and well placed. I’ve often wondered about this myself. I’m on record as saying, with regard to the current state of literary affairs, that "Unfortunately, what we often get are sappy or improbable stories that don’t get taken seriously by the critics and other writers, or – even more likely – dark-browed treatises on the ugliness of human society and the general futility of life. (And the consensus seems to be that sadder and grimmer stories win more prizes and get more attention.)" Why is it, I keep asking, that a people who can otherwise be so comic and so funny, and who can smile even in the grimmest of circumstances, will turn so stiff and solemn as soon as they grip a pen or brush a keyboard?
It was last July when, perhaps depressed by the dolorous and angst-driven stories I kept getting in my fiction writing classes and wanting to give my students a fresh challenge, I made a one-time offer of a flat "1.0" for anyone who could turn in a well-written story with a happy ending – a believable happy ending – by semester’s end. I did give out a few "1.0"’s – but not for this salutary reason.
Granted, a happy story is not necessarily a funny one, and vice versa. But both of them spring from the same comic sense of life, whereby – in what we might call a heroic feat of attitude, a way of looking at the world – the individual triumphs over the massed forces of suffering, injustice, absurdity, and meaninglessness, and turns a period into an exclamation point.
There is, to be sure, a comic tradition in our literature in print, theater, and film, going back to the trickster tales, to stories where the poor little guy outsmarts the big and powerful, all the way up to Juan Tamad, the Dolphy comedies, and even our current sitcoms (as brainless as some of them may seem to be). Let’s not forget the sharp satirical humor of writers like M. H. del Pilar and Carlos Bulosan, and the folksiness of Alejandro Roces.
In contemporary fiction in Filipino, you can look up writers like Jun Cruz Reyes and the brilliant young Mes de Guzman to see how far we’ve come from Banaag at Sikat; Joy Barrios’ poems can be both funny and mordant. And as you pointed out, there’s been a lot of dry, ironic humor in the Philippine essay, with the likes of Jessica Zafra and, yes, the old Barfly pushing the craft along. In theater, I can think of plays like Marcelino Agana’s hilarious A New Yorker in Tondo.
But I think this brief roundup tells the story. Humor is a decidedly minor strain in our literature, and it might take a doctoral dissertation to conclusively establish why, but let me make a few quick-and-dirty conjectures – about the general case to begin with, and then, to answer your specific question, my own.
First, something strange happens when we write – and here I mean the act of writing itself. We become suddenly conscious of the fact that we’re no longer just talking, no longer just swapping stories between friends, but committing something to paper for all time and for everyone to see. And so we stiffen up, curl our brows, look ponderous, and start thinking of things like "plot" and "character" and everything else Professor D expounded on in fiction workshop instead of just letting the bloody thing flow. In this society, we put such a premium on the printed word and on the byline that writing becomes such a deliberate, serious, and therefore humorless labor. (I don’t think I need to dwell too long on what every real writer knows or soon finds out – that humor is very serious business, and that a truly funny story is so much harder to write than a truly sad one – not only because it’s the exception, but because it’s so much harder to make people laugh in this sad, sad world than to make them weep. As the French woman of letters Mme. de Stael memorably observed, "Man cries by instinct but laughs by convention.") In other words, we take ourselves and our writing much too seriously.
Second, we love – we crave – catharsis, and we get that in spades from melodrama, rather than from farce. (To try and simplify a rather more complicated notion, "catharsis" is that cleansing feeling that washes over you inside and out when you watch a tearjerker and bawl like a baby, or when you scream your guts out in a rollercoaster and survive the ride.) We walk around with so much baggage, so many dark and unresolved emotions, that we often need a good, rough jog to sort things out. "Serious" and "tragic" fiction and drama in the realist mode tend to provide a more thorough catharsis; we all need a good laugh, but comic relief is often just that.
Third, and to get a little more specific, I suspect that with humor being so culturally conditioned, many writers – especially in English – find it hard to be funny, or don’t know how to be funny, in that awkward cusp between language and social reality. A lot of humor and wit is language-dependent; puns and wisecracks in English don’t carry over so easily to patently Pinoy settings and situations; the alien-ness and artificiality (not just of the words but also of the attitudes that provoke them) would be so obvious. It’s a bane, I think (perhaps revealing my bias), of sophomoric writing – the characters firing witticisms at each other like they might on an American comedy show, with little else to go for the story. Humor for me works best situationally, relying on some deeply intuited understanding of life, people, and their foibles, than on the surface effects of language.
I think we Pinoys have what it takes to write riotously funny stories; we wouldn’t have survived our daily doses of aggravation otherwise. So why don’t we? Why do I write funny (sometimes) essays but not funny stories?
No big reason, I suppose, just personal predisposition – and a bit of history. I used to write editorials for another newspaper, and you know what high-and-mighty editorials are like; if you had to churn one out before 2 p.m. three or four days of the week, you’d go nuts. So I asked to be allowed to write a lifestyle column – for no additional pay, just for the release and the relief. And that’s how and why, after a detour or two, you’re reading me here, this way.
PS. You should read my Pinoy farces – Ang Butihing Babae ng Timog / Mac Malicsi, TNT (UP Press, 1997) might be worth your while. I think that’s the answer – I can really let go in Filipino in a way I never can in English.
Send e-mail to Butch Dalisay at: penmanila@yahoo.com.
"Good day. I’m a fan of your essays (especially ca. Barfly – I wish there’d soon be a ‘Best of Barfly, Volume Two,’ which doesn’t necessarily have to be ‘the second-best Barfly’) and of some of your works of fiction. I have read all four of your story collections. I like your stories "Delivery" and "Sarcophagus" very much. But I have a few questions – pardon me for my presumptuousness – re your essays and your stories. Nope, this is not term paper-related.
"What I really like about your essays is that in the best of them, there’s an incredible balance of humor and empathy (I hate it when I sound like I’m parodying Michiko Kakutani); there’s almost a call-and-response thing going on. And I rather like that a lot, plus the fact that much of the humor in your essays is not based on contempt and ridicule.
"Which leads me to your stories: While I enjoy many of them, I’m kind of looking for some laugh-out-loud moments. I appreciate wryness; I appreciate subtle irony. But I also love sparkling wit and high comedy. And as a fan of your writings in English I’m genuinely curious why your fiction is rarely as funny as your essays. When you write essays, do they usually just end up with a lot of humor, or do you consciously make them funny (but not necessarily lightweight)? As for your stories, is the solemnity/seriousness/grimness always intentional?
"Digression: As a reader I find it disturbing that some critics undervalue humor. For example some youngish American writers like Lorrie Moore and David Foster Wallace are criticized for making their readers laugh. They are often accused of merely wisecracking, of being gratuitously, pointlessly humorous.
"But I think there is something generous about funny writers, and humor doesn’t make their work – at least as far as Moore and Wallace are concerned – any less serious. (I find it curious that in most contemporary novels/story collections that I read, the presence of humor is almost inversely proportional to a work’s adherence to the ‘realistic’ tradition, which kind of makes me think that this whole concept of ‘realism’ in fiction all boils down to the interest of some people in their own careers as ‘realistic’ writers, a way of masking their own lack of interest in and/or inability to produce what is outside the prescribed concept of realism – and here I’m kind of thinking about Gardner’s On Moral Fiction. Then again, this observation probably says more about my own interest in what lies OUTSIDE the conventions of realistic fiction than the actual deficiencies of realism.)
"I know the above sounds like an implicit accusation that you are one of those people who undervalue humor, or that just because your stories are not laugh-out-loud funny they are any less memorable or significant, or that your fiction is inferior to your essays. It may even seem like I’m carping about the fact that your stories aren’t your essays. But I enjoy reading your work, and I’m only really genuinely curious to know what you think of my (presumptuous, possibly impertinent, and maybe even self-important) observations. Thank you very much."
Thank you very much for your message, and for your kind observations about my work. No matter how disinterested (folks, check the meaning of that word) I may try or pretend to be, I’d have to admit that it always pleases me to find someone who appreciates what I’ve done. Writing has no better reward than a sympathetic (and, more importantly, an intelligent) reader.
Your puzzlement about the relative absence of humor in Philippine fiction is well put and well placed. I’ve often wondered about this myself. I’m on record as saying, with regard to the current state of literary affairs, that "Unfortunately, what we often get are sappy or improbable stories that don’t get taken seriously by the critics and other writers, or – even more likely – dark-browed treatises on the ugliness of human society and the general futility of life. (And the consensus seems to be that sadder and grimmer stories win more prizes and get more attention.)" Why is it, I keep asking, that a people who can otherwise be so comic and so funny, and who can smile even in the grimmest of circumstances, will turn so stiff and solemn as soon as they grip a pen or brush a keyboard?
It was last July when, perhaps depressed by the dolorous and angst-driven stories I kept getting in my fiction writing classes and wanting to give my students a fresh challenge, I made a one-time offer of a flat "1.0" for anyone who could turn in a well-written story with a happy ending – a believable happy ending – by semester’s end. I did give out a few "1.0"’s – but not for this salutary reason.
Granted, a happy story is not necessarily a funny one, and vice versa. But both of them spring from the same comic sense of life, whereby – in what we might call a heroic feat of attitude, a way of looking at the world – the individual triumphs over the massed forces of suffering, injustice, absurdity, and meaninglessness, and turns a period into an exclamation point.
There is, to be sure, a comic tradition in our literature in print, theater, and film, going back to the trickster tales, to stories where the poor little guy outsmarts the big and powerful, all the way up to Juan Tamad, the Dolphy comedies, and even our current sitcoms (as brainless as some of them may seem to be). Let’s not forget the sharp satirical humor of writers like M. H. del Pilar and Carlos Bulosan, and the folksiness of Alejandro Roces.
In contemporary fiction in Filipino, you can look up writers like Jun Cruz Reyes and the brilliant young Mes de Guzman to see how far we’ve come from Banaag at Sikat; Joy Barrios’ poems can be both funny and mordant. And as you pointed out, there’s been a lot of dry, ironic humor in the Philippine essay, with the likes of Jessica Zafra and, yes, the old Barfly pushing the craft along. In theater, I can think of plays like Marcelino Agana’s hilarious A New Yorker in Tondo.
But I think this brief roundup tells the story. Humor is a decidedly minor strain in our literature, and it might take a doctoral dissertation to conclusively establish why, but let me make a few quick-and-dirty conjectures – about the general case to begin with, and then, to answer your specific question, my own.
First, something strange happens when we write – and here I mean the act of writing itself. We become suddenly conscious of the fact that we’re no longer just talking, no longer just swapping stories between friends, but committing something to paper for all time and for everyone to see. And so we stiffen up, curl our brows, look ponderous, and start thinking of things like "plot" and "character" and everything else Professor D expounded on in fiction workshop instead of just letting the bloody thing flow. In this society, we put such a premium on the printed word and on the byline that writing becomes such a deliberate, serious, and therefore humorless labor. (I don’t think I need to dwell too long on what every real writer knows or soon finds out – that humor is very serious business, and that a truly funny story is so much harder to write than a truly sad one – not only because it’s the exception, but because it’s so much harder to make people laugh in this sad, sad world than to make them weep. As the French woman of letters Mme. de Stael memorably observed, "Man cries by instinct but laughs by convention.") In other words, we take ourselves and our writing much too seriously.
Second, we love – we crave – catharsis, and we get that in spades from melodrama, rather than from farce. (To try and simplify a rather more complicated notion, "catharsis" is that cleansing feeling that washes over you inside and out when you watch a tearjerker and bawl like a baby, or when you scream your guts out in a rollercoaster and survive the ride.) We walk around with so much baggage, so many dark and unresolved emotions, that we often need a good, rough jog to sort things out. "Serious" and "tragic" fiction and drama in the realist mode tend to provide a more thorough catharsis; we all need a good laugh, but comic relief is often just that.
Third, and to get a little more specific, I suspect that with humor being so culturally conditioned, many writers – especially in English – find it hard to be funny, or don’t know how to be funny, in that awkward cusp between language and social reality. A lot of humor and wit is language-dependent; puns and wisecracks in English don’t carry over so easily to patently Pinoy settings and situations; the alien-ness and artificiality (not just of the words but also of the attitudes that provoke them) would be so obvious. It’s a bane, I think (perhaps revealing my bias), of sophomoric writing – the characters firing witticisms at each other like they might on an American comedy show, with little else to go for the story. Humor for me works best situationally, relying on some deeply intuited understanding of life, people, and their foibles, than on the surface effects of language.
I think we Pinoys have what it takes to write riotously funny stories; we wouldn’t have survived our daily doses of aggravation otherwise. So why don’t we? Why do I write funny (sometimes) essays but not funny stories?
No big reason, I suppose, just personal predisposition – and a bit of history. I used to write editorials for another newspaper, and you know what high-and-mighty editorials are like; if you had to churn one out before 2 p.m. three or four days of the week, you’d go nuts. So I asked to be allowed to write a lifestyle column – for no additional pay, just for the release and the relief. And that’s how and why, after a detour or two, you’re reading me here, this way.
PS. You should read my Pinoy farces – Ang Butihing Babae ng Timog / Mac Malicsi, TNT (UP Press, 1997) might be worth your while. I think that’s the answer – I can really let go in Filipino in a way I never can in English.
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