Write Good or Die

boss, where laughter is the worst option. I was weakened by it, sliding off the chair, unable to stop while the others stared on in horror, like I was a monster. Come ON! The guy tried to dry his sinuses to death.
    Since I started publishing fiction, my brand of humor as been repeatedly called “dark” or “black,” which recently led to pondering the source. Does a dark sense of humor come from the viewpoint of an author, or does the world regularly present us with these scenarios that only a certain personality type recognizes as humorous? Is it the same thing? And where do we draw the line between dark humor and a simple lack of taste?
    The late Roald Dahl considered this endlessly, as evidenced in this quote:
    "If a bucket of paint falls on a man’s head, that’s funny. If the bucket fractures his skull at the same time and kills him, that’s not funny, it’s tragic. And yet if a man falls into a sausage machine and is sold in the shop at so much a pound, that’s funny. It’s also tragic. So why is it funny? I don’t know, but what I do know is that somewhere within this very difficult area lies the secret of all black comedy."
    I think most will agree that Roald Dahl found that balance in his own work. I wonder if his was based purely on speculations, or if he too felt plagued with darkly humorous scenarios thrust before him in daily life. This reminds me of another incident that happened while I was skiing with a group of friends at Killington Mountain. We spotted a man with no arms, expertly swishing down a mogul field, and thought, “Wow. That is incredible.” There was nothing funny about it. We certainly weren’t juvenile and callous enough to laugh at a no-armed skier. We looked on in awe and admiration of his courage.
    Yet two hours later we spotted the same man in the ski lodge, casually watching the television as he had lunch with a companion. My friend nudged me and signaled to the TV screen, on which played out the Black Knight scene from Monty Python and The Holy Grail. The knight continued to fight King Arthur even as both his arms had been hacked off by Arthur’s sword, jumping and kicking as fake blood gushed dramatically from his stumps. Dear God, I thought, why are you doing this to me? I mean, what are the odds of watching a no-armed man watching a comedy scene about a no-armed man? I don’t want to laugh at the no-armed skier! The universe is NOT playing fair.
    There is a certain safety in laughing at such things in the realm of entertainment, and it would stand to reason that suspension of disbelief or the fiction buffer is the key. But there are just as many staunch haters of Monty Python’s brand of humor as there are fans. I’ve seen people come to blows over this topic. Which brings back the theory that dark humor is about viewpoint, in observer and creator alike.
    Since I can’t dig up Roald Dahl and ask him, I participated in a discussion with some living writers of black humor about their life view and how it affects their writing. Author Aurelio O’Brien used to make his living on the big budget animated kiddie films, but crossed over to the dark side with his first novel Eve, a blackly humorous tale of genetic tampering gone awry in a dystopian future.
    “For me, so much of life is observably funny and this automatically feeds my writing. When I was creating my all organic, genetically designed future, things like McDonald’s Characters directly inspired me to go further than I might otherwise think to go…The little giggling McNuggets are really chunks of dead fowl flesh with cute little smiles carved into them. I find these kinds of things to be so twisted and humorous and odd. Most people don’t think about these characters beyond their surface appeal. So, when people tell me my Lick-n-Span© is gross, I think, is it really any grosser than having a hacked-up chicken giggle at you?”
    I agree with O’Brien on this, most consumer icons are creepy. Like the Tidy Bowl man and Mr. Clean. Why is it always a little fantasy man helping the lonely housewife with her daily chores? Strange men coming up out of the floor and the toilet? And why does the housewife always keep them a secret from her husband? Notice the way Mr. Clean winks at her when hubby walks in? And what’s the actual purpose of that little hand guy from Hamburger Helper? What’s he really helping her with?
    Speaking of sex and animation, most people know Gary K. Wolf as the creator of