Not Everything is Funny: A Close Look at Humor as a Coping Mechanism

 

Not Everything is Funny: A Close Look at Humor as a Coping Mechanism in The Good Life Elsewhere by Vladimir Lorchenkov

Check out more Mike Organisciak for more dark humor.

Have you ever found yourself laughing hysterically at the most inappropriate moments? Or perhaps cracking a very non-PC joke to break some awkward tension? This happened to my daughter today as she worked her shift at a local café.

“Mom,” she recounted, “Terry just finally had enough of Bob’s mouth and punched him! I couldn’t believe it! I also couldn’t stop laughing, even after my boss told me this was not a funny situation.”

Giggle, giggle, giggle. 

Snicker.

Snort.

“I mean, it was a really great punch. Right on the eye. And it started bleeding and swelling immediately.”

Now, my daughter isn’t a bloodthirsty savage, but she has always had an unfortunate tendency to laugh when other people get hurt. She doesn’t do this because she finds it funny, but somewhere in her early years, she decided that laughter was an excellent coping mechanism for negative and/or painful situations.  Maybe it’s the endorphin release?

She’s not the only one who uses laughter for stress management. Military, first responders, and law enforcement communities are well known for their black, dark, or gallows humor. Cracking crude and rude jokes over traumatic scenes and horrific deaths is often the way members of these professions deal with tragedy after tragedy. And while these groups might have the notoriety for gallows humor, the average Joe Schmoe is capable of exaggerative ridiculousness in the face of horror, too.

Call it karma or bad luck, but it also seems as if some inhabitants of this Earth have more than their fair share of misery in life. Finding ways to manage these hardships are often the stuff of legends, and as art replicates (and inflates) life, many authors deal with their real or imagined tragedies with dark humor. This same coping mechanism is also a literary device found in some of the world’s most beloved tales. George Orwell’s Animal Farm provides hordes of dark humor examples that some fail to notice, or perhaps they just don’t appreciate the attempt. The incongruency between the animals’ ridiculous and outrageous living situation and USSR’s punishing communistic regime doesn’t spark laughter from everybody. For example, Squealer’s constant linguistic manipulation of “the rules” to justify piggy privilege is so outlandish as to be funny, yet so sad because the people living under Stalin truly suffered some of the same atrocities found in Orwell’s novel. Another example is found in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. In this novel, the author takes on the brutalities of war, turning highly emotional and traumatic scenes into slapstick humor so that readers might be able to deal with the gruesome descriptions of war and escape the seriousness and reality of combat.

Moldovan writer Vladimir Lorchenkov followed in the footsteps of his tragicomic inspirations. In an interview conducted by World Literature Today, he said, “writers who inspired me to start writing books are primarily great Americans: Faulkner, O’Connor, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Saroyan, Mailer, Miller, Updike, Bukowski, Heller, Malamud, McInerney, Capote, Kerouac, Doctorow, McCarthy, Salinger…My heroes are obsessed with reaching the Promised Land of milk and honey. And if we are talking about such things, we need fantastic exaggerations.” It is the immense leap into the absurd that have led most reviews of Lorchenkov’s The Good Life Elsewhere to at least mention the extreme use of black humor and similes, which illustrate the sad, tragic life of Serafim and his other Moldovan comrades who seek their prosperous fortunes in Italy.

The Good Life Elsewhere begins with an assembly of citizens from the Moldovan city of Larga excitedly en route to their new lives in Italy. These fine people have begged, borrowed, and stolen the money to pay their smugglers to deliver them into Rome, where the jobs are plentiful, the money abundant, and happiness within reach. Upon their arrival, the group quickly learns that they were swindled and were actually in the capital city of their own country.

Lorchenkov’s over-the-top description of Serafim’s confidence that the river they are standing next to must be the Tiber, thus the land of plenty is near, and his fumbling attempts (and failure) to ask for help in Italian trick the reader into thinking the situation funny. Or at least it seems so at first. But as the cast of characters troop back to Larga, the reality of their situation sinks in. The debts owed from borrowed money to emigrate into Italy and no way to pay it back, the sold homes and farms that no longer welcome them back, and the embarrassment at being hoodwinked caused one woman to hang herself with her husband’s encouragement and other citizens to sink into deep depressions. Hilarious, right?

The rest of the story unfolds with more and more outlandish schemes to get to Italy, including a flying tractor, a modern day crusade led by the town’s Priest (echoes of Canterbury Tales, perhaps?), and the creation of a curling team intent on competing in European championships despite not having any real curling equipment or even ice on which to practice. Not to be left out is the story of Jan, who raised a pig in order to take the pig’s kidneys to replace Jan’s own kidneys that he sold on the black market. But just as Jan was set to conduct his own transplant, the pig kidneys disappeared. Side note: Jan’s wife had the winning entry in a recipe contest that year… “Recipe for kidneys in a strong sauce”. This all sounds insane and it was meant to, but only to make the real message more palatable to readers. Life was harsh in Moldova. So harsh that some areas became the heart of the organ black market, citizens were trying to flee the country by any means possible, and those who remained could not stand to live another day.

Critics of Lorchenkov might say that not everything is funny and not everything should be made into a joke. But Lorchenkov knows his audience. He knows that not everyone can look at their bleak reality and accept it at face value. He knows that many prefer to laugh rather than cry or die over their plight. In the same World Literature Today interview, Lorchenkov said, “If Moldovans spent all their efforts to leave Moldova on creating a normal state instead, they would be living in paradise…this is one of the topics of my book. People are chasing a dream, not realizing that Moldova’s performance is in their heads and hands. But to understand this simple idea, people need journeys.” Wise words couched in a joke.