Complete with hopefully humorous screenshots of the outline for this self-aware meta-listicle. How droll.

Six Techniques For Adding Dark Humor To Your Coping Style

People who’ve envied someone else’s ability to laugh at the bad stuff, your self-help listicle has arrived! But I’m trying to do this funny on a few levels, so I’m including the screenshots of the outline I dashed off when I got this assignment.

Writing formulaic content isn’t hard. You know, on account of there being a formula. My big problem is I always write too many words. Watch and see.

So I’m writing this piece by request, for a friend who was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. She’s not stupid; as soon as they asked her to come in after her mammogram, she knew, like anybody with tits does, that this shit was not right and of the things that can be not right with your gazongas, the big C is, you know, the big C.

Now, this friend of mine is a powerful, imposing figure with a tremendous presence. She is vibrant and dynamic — when she’s in the room, it’s like she’s drawn in full color and the rest of the room is pastel, man, I’m telling you, this bitch is there. She is brash and unafraid and she can wade through waist-high swamps of horseshit in the middle of a massive shitstorm, pulling everyone else along in her wake and getting everything handled. Which a lot of people probably look at and think, wow, she’s untouchable, look at her go. But the truth is she can do that because she’s already had plenty of experience in wading through shit.

So when she said I should write an article she could share around about how dark humor works, for her friends who struggle with it, I said of course I would. I mean, she’s been the kind of friend to me who can handle it when I need to talk about the genuinely extreme shit in my life. The kind of friend who I could call up and say “Holy fuck, you won’t believe what just happened in my sister’s investigation,” and she’ll say “Oh, did she turn up having drinks in Tahiti? Are you gonna kick her ass?” and I can say “Oh man, I would kick her ass,” and then we build that image and the backstory for it and the narrative of what it would look like if my sister had, in fact, faked her disappearance and presumed murder. And then I can just matter-of-factly speak the bad news that no, the suspect in her killing is now dead and we expect never to know what happened or where my sister’s remains are.

Which isn’t funny at all. Not at all. But it’s like my late mother said to us kids all the time, usually when we were somewhere like stuck on a train in between two landslides in the cejas of the Peruvian jungle, the worst trips make the best stories. And someday we’d look back and laugh, she would tell us, while we all gathered up our things and got ready to start walking across the landslide in the direction we’d been going.

My mother was using a variant of dark humor to get our asses on the same page while we all got in gear, and got going. As we crossed the landslide, acknowledging parental rightness in insisting everyone be able to carry their own bag, instead of being bogged down or waylaid in the mire of shit, we were already laughing — already envisioning ourselves on the other side of it all, telling the story.

Dammit, I blew the formula already, but I did touch on these points, except it took me more than two paragraphs. Also, I don’t think I gave any ground for virulent issue to be taken, which may make the piece less compelling and certainly means it won’t get shares from people saying they disagree. Dammit. Maybe in edits. Shit, now that I spent more than two paragraphs, and then made this long caption, I think the next bit should be a summary. of what I just said.

So that’s the big why — dark humor keeps you going; it keeps the very real suckage from actually attaching itself to your psyche. If things are still funny on some level, how bad can they really be?

But the truth is it’s partly a personality thing, too. You know how people say they don’t know whether to laugh or cry? I think for a lot of folks, if you get dealt enough shitty hands, eventually you get sick of crying. Seriously. Crying just gets old, after a while. So does shock, and seriousness, and all of that. So you start to choose to laugh.

Anyway, so that quote I was thinking of when I wrote the outline was incorrect. The full quote is much better, and drives to the heart of dark humor. It’s Mel Brooks, and what he actually said was apparently “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die.”

It’s hard, when it’s happening to you, not to take it… well, you know, personally. And getting up close and personal with something like a cancer diagnosis, all you can see is this monolithic, smooth, impassable obstacle. There’s no horizon. There’s no sky. There’s nothing but this enormous, looming Bad Thing. It’s too close, so it blocks your entire view of everything. You need distance to see around it, and sometimes, to see the whole thing for what it is.

Dark humor works by providing that distance, one way or another. It enables you to reframe falling into an open sewer and dying as instead simply cutting your finger. Or a breast cancer diagnosis as an extreme route to getting a boob job you didn’t want. Although to be fair, in a best case scenario, the comedic breast cancer story doesn’t involve falling into an open sewer and dying so much as it involves falling into an open sewer and hanging out there for a year or two wondering if you’re gonna die, and even in a worst case scenario, welp, it’s gonna be a long-ass fall into that open sewer. In slow motion. At least sometimes things look funny in slow motion.

Hey man, this paragraph isn’t that bad. I should throw out this whole stupid draft and rewrite everything around this paragraph that I don’t hate. Except then I’d lose that “dung swamp with shitstorm” going on imagery, so fuck it.

I didn’t tell you how to mine your own tragedies yet, though. Probably because I have to put that in the numbered list that will make this into a list passing itself off as an actual piece of writing. Why? Because lists masquerading as articles are the hot trend on social media and within self-help content, so if there isn’t a list, I’m blowing this whole exercise in writing a self-help listicle. So yep. Gotta have a list.

About that:

Ugh, this is the part where I always fall down. I don’t like writing lists of paragraphs. But it’s been my experience writing instructional content that people do seem to love them.

Here Is The List Of Techniques!

But first, a caveat: it’s always okay to apply dark humor to your own plight. If someone else doesn’t like you doing so, fuck ’em, man, they’re not the ones who fell into an open sewer and died. But if you’re the one with the cut finger, step carefully. You should know that person who’s drowning in shit well enough to know whether, when they can’t decide to laugh or cry, they tend to go one way or the other. For best results, use these techniques with someone who tends to choose “laugh.” And, if they choose crying instead, dark humor is probably not gonna help you, so stop reading this article right now and move straight to commenting that it wasn’t helpful and actually made matters worse.

1. Follow the worst case scenario to an outrageous outcome. So you’re laying wounded and stunned amidst the wreckage of whatever disaster has just transpired. Take a moment to imagine what would make the situation worse. Then imagine what would make it even worse at that point. Sometimes, I’ll go six or seven things deep before I hit the absurd thing that nobody would ever believe. Other times, I’m on the phone telling my uncle his little sister just died in Peru when I have to say, “Shit, I think I have to take this call, it’s the state department,” and my teenager is walking in the door from school, and the absurd is already right there, because who the fuck ever pictured that scenario? If it were happening to anyone else you’d be laughing your ass off. So go ahead. Laugh.
2. Trivialize The Big Stuff. I use this technique when I’m talking to someone who’s facing heavy shit. “Man, I’m jealous as hell of your all-expense-paid mandatory vacation where they’ll wait on you hand and foot and even wipe your ass for you! Living the dream, man. Living the dream.” This also works because somewhere out there, there’s always an asshole who actually kinda thinks that shit, so now we’re poking fun at them. If I’m the one facing heavy shit, I can trivialize it to myself and others with pretty much the same technique: “Man, I gotta get me a set of these automagic calf massagers for home. Do they make ’em that don’t run off a hospital bed?” Now I’m not obsessing over whether or not I’m about to experience deep vein thrombosis and have a stroke and die after surviving major surgery, I’m picturing reaching the end of a long work day and putting my feet up in my recliner with an automatic calf massage that looks like it came out of a hospital. Oh baby, can’t wait to get home and treat myself to a medical device. That’s a funny image. You know you laughed when you pictured that in your mind’s eye. Unless you were thinking, yeah, man, that’s a good idea, someone should make those things for home use, in which case, send me a set when your kickstarter funds or you win that As Seen On TV gig.
3. Swap Cameras. Reframe it all so now it’s about you. You can combine this with number 2. “Dude, that sucks about all your lymph nodes. That sounds almost as bad as this time when I cut my finger. I mean it bled for hours.” This variant works largely because it’s poking fun at people who really, seriously, do this in earnest, so you’ve gotta be aware that there’s a risk involved if you’re talking to someone who isn’t in the mental space to detect sarcasm. On the flip side, reframe it so it’s all about them — if you’re the one clinging to a handhold in a flash flood of shit blasting through the sewer you just fell into, you can hope to measure up to my friend’s line: “I mean it sucks that I’m getting the full fucking ride on cancer treatments here, but it really sucks for you because I’m not making any Christmas cookies this year.” Why? Because it’s funny that we’re talking about cookies, when what we’re really talking about is in fact this river of shit. Because it’s funny that we’re talking about the trivial impact on my life instead of the complete hijacking of hers. Who would do that? Well, okay, actually, some people do. Which is, again, why it’s funny to do it knowingly. It gives you a chance to feel like you’re lifting at least half of your body above the river of shit even as you’re acknowledging that from the waist down, it stinks pretty fuckin’ bad. We can legitimately grieve for the loss of normality that Christmas cookies would have meant, and won’t, this year. And we can do it by grabbing hold of the lifeline the mere image of Christmas cookies provides. What’s even funnier is the deep and untold story of how Christmas cookies were already, for both of us, wrapped up with times someone fell in the open sewer and died. Shit, this paragraph is too long, but fuck it; it looks like this text editor doesn’t support a multi-paragraph list that stays numbered, so here you go.
4. Find The Mundane Parallel. What if waiting in a surgical oncologist’s office were like waiting for a table at a chain restaurant? Well, there’d be sports on the TV instead of home and garden shows. Meh, that’s not very funny. The menus wouldn’t be for payment options that include paycheck deduction. Well, that’s more depressing than funny, though framing it as a menu is funny. And they’d give you one of those buzzers so you can go walk around and not have to sit there waiting to be called. Okay, now we’re laughing. Spoiler: turns out sometimes they do. So really, why can’t you have table service and a bartender? I mean for what you’re paying, and all… right? Right. Seriously. The least they could do is put a cocktail umbrella in the radioactive egg sandwich they’re gonna follow through your gastrointestinal tract with fancy fuckin’ machinery. Also, what’s the deal with how there are never knitting magazines in doctor’s offices? They should put yarn stores in the damn hospital food courts. Maybe bring a yarn cart around to the inpatient rooms on a daily basis, you know? For those who can’t even be trusted to go walkabout with Outback steakhouse pager. Shit, just picture the jokes about hospital yarn, that you could access readily by repurposing all the hospital food jokes someone’s already cracked. I bet that hospital yarn would be every bit as good as the hospital fashions in general.
5. Speak The Unspeakable. No, seriously — just come right out and say that taboo thing that nobody would ever say. Break the rules. Actually be the person who says “Yes, but other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?” I told my friend this breast cancer shtick was some bullshit competitiveness on her part; she really didn’t have to one-up me just because I had a borderline malignant 20-pound ovarian tumor out a few months back. It’s not a fucking contest, but she would treat it like one. And yeah, here’s the unspeakable thing to ask: if we’re gonna make this a contest, make sure you weigh yourself before and after all this so we can figure out who lost the most weight, the 20 pounds overnight plan or the long, slow hack and slash followed by chemo and radiation and hormones forever. Bad news is unspeakable because when you speak it, you make it real. Again, and again, and again. So if you’re already speaking news like “I have cancer,” why is anything off the table? And as far as hearing the unspeakable from someone who cut their finger, well. If you’re in the river of shit, you know whoever’s standing there with a cut on their finger has noticed you are in a river of shit. They’re probably not gonna impress you by pretending you aren’t. So just say that absurd thing, whether you’re in the river or tossing someone a rope who’s in it. And throwing a rope is what just saying the taboo thing can be, because odds are the shit-swimmer’s already gone down that mental road anyway. It’s amazing how much time there is to think taboo thoughts while you’re clinging to a low-hanging branch in the shit flood.
6. “But On The Bright Side…” But on the bright side, you can either say something that actually is bright but trivial (“But on the bright side, the hair I’m about to lose to chemo looks fucking fabulous today! So pro tip: you want to feel good about your hair, just find out you’re gonna lose it!”) or thoroughly ironic (“But on the bright side, this also means you have a new full-time job you didn’t want, which is being a cancer patient! Congratulations!”).

Yeah, probably, but I didn’t even try, because I already let this draft languish for almost a month since my friend said I should write it while we were talking about the ways we wished we could monetize and celebrate our mad shit-swimming skillz and all, so I figured I should just get my ass in gear and finish it. After all, she needs it to share with everyone she’s worried about not getting it with her preference for dark humor.

There’s a lot of risk involved in dark humor, whether you’re the person with the cut finger or the person who apparently doesn’t look where you’re walking. There’s the risk that you’re trying to console your friend in her river of shit, and you keep going on and on about cut fingers and she says, “yeah, so about that, turns out if I cut my finger during some parts of this treatment I have to, like, actually go to the hospital.” And now shit’s gone serious on you. Um, but on the bright side (no, seriously), you still actually have thrown her a rope, because she can speak the unspeakable starting from a position of at least a little distance. And she knows you’ll anchor her to the humor tree instead of pouring buckets of tears into the open sewer with her.

There’s also the risk that, as the shit-wader, you’re going to shock or terrify your listener; that your listener simply won’t be able to cope with you laughing at your own tragedy. But in this case, I say, let ’em grow that skill. They might find themselves needing it someday if a shitstorm whirls up in their path.

Bonus Points: if it looks like the bucket brigade of tears is on track to raise the shit levels in the sewer, the true friend to someone who prefers dark humor will stop at nothing to turn the tides. The thing is, I’m not sure I can call this a technique. But yesterday, my friend went wig shopping, and she sent pictures. There was one with a fantastic wig in a hairstyle that was, frankly, everything my friend is not. It looked terrible on her. So terrible, it was funny. That’s why, in the photo, she was laughing so hard someone who didn’t know her might have mistaken it for crying.

I laughed equally hard. Which sucked, actually, because I’m still recovering from this gigantic abdominal incision and all, but dude, it was worth it. So I told her that.

“I’m sorry you find laughter in me shopping for cancer wigs,” she texted back. “You know bald isn’t funny.”

“Oh,” I replied, “I will always laugh at your wig if it’s funny. You can count on me. I’m here for you.”

Then I thought another minute, and said more. Because words: I always use too many.

“Not only will I laugh at your wig if it’s funny, I will make sure the other motherfuckers laugh too. I’m not above it if it looks like the room is gonna cry on you. I will make you a laughingstock to save you from other people’s tears.”

This works, though, because I know it would be her choice (and she said as much, in response). So I want to stress that this is not a beginner’s technique; rather, this is what you can aspire to if you, too, are blessed to enjoy a long enough stay thrashing about in open sewers during a shit hurricane. So if nothing in this article resonates for you or makes you laugh, dude! Why did you even read it? But seriously, count yourself lucky, because the truth is, none of this shit is actually funny. Except for when it is, because if it isn’t funny, there’s nothing but a shitstorm, and that really sucks.

And this is also where, if you’ve read this far, you can seize the opportunity to mock me for this transparent and self-aware bit of cringeworthy trailer and explain my misunderstanding of writing on Medium.

Well, there you go, a few techniques for adding dark humor to your coping style. If you liked this piece, click the little green heart. You can find lots of my other writing in lots of places, but most of it is fairly different from this piece, because of being things like an entire super-serious book about making string with a stick. If you’d like to read the random and memoir type stuff, it’s mostly here on Medium (and continuing to grow), and if you’re curious what I actually do for a living, that’s at abbysyarns.com, and on all the usual social media platforms where I’m abbysyarns pretty much across the board on account of, you know, this thing where my job involves yarn.