Comedy Rooted in Expectation Instead of Absurdity

Comedies can be deep, but often all comedies come back to their roots. While lots of famous shows centered around laughs such as Tom and Jerry, Dumb & Dumber, or even The Office, revolve around making the audience laugh through slapstick humor, idiotic or nonsensical characters, or the results of boneheaded decisions, a newer brand of comedy has subtely made its way into the mainstream. This newer brand of comedy doesn’t focus on absurdity as much as it focuses on the mind of its consumers. The main question for the comedian becomes “what is the audience expecting?” instead of “what’s something so stupid anyone can laugh at?”

This cultural shift started with one movie: Monty Python and the Holy Grail. While Monty Python doesn’t lack absurdity, absurdity is no longer the main focus. Sometimes a joke, gag, or reference may go over the head of the viewer, only to smack them right in the face 10 seconds after the punchline. What makes this brand of humor better and more fulfilling to the viewer is the attention from the audience and the specific audience it requires. To call Monty Python and the Holy Grail ‘niche’ is a bit of an understatement, yet those who fit the bill in terms of “who it was intended for” generally love the movie. While it may require more focus, the audience gets more out of it as a result. The same could be said for John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany.

When I read on the back cover of this boring looking novel that was handpicked to torture me this summer for AP English, I scoffed. “Roomy, intelligent, exhilarating, and darkly comic,” according to the Los Angeles Times. How can a book chosen by my English teacher be funny? Was the main thought circling around my head. Boy, was I wrong.

It’s obvious John Irving wants the reader to pay attention. Throughout the early chapters of A Prayer for Owen Meany, I found myself laughing my ass off. I understand it may be hypocritical for me to explain to you how intellectual and dark humor is more fulfilling and then tell you my favorite part was when Owen rasped “YOUR MOTHER HAS THE BEST BREASTS OUT OF ALL THE MOTHERS,” but what I found more funny about this statement isn’t Owen’s use of the word BREASTS in all caps, although hilarious. It’s John Irving’s beautiful understanding of his audience’s mind. 

John Irving understood his audience very well in A Prayer for Owen Meany. This is evidenced by his wordplay and more importantly, the way he paves the reader into expecting one thing and being hit by the other. Before we hear Owen praising Johnny’s mother’s breasts, we have the background that Owen is “angelic” to Johnny and that Owen is the sole reason for Johnny’s faith. This would lead any reader into thinking Owen would be a role model in society, the kid you want YOUR kid to be like. 

This paving of ideas leads to even funnier scenarios too. For example, Hester, Johnny’s cousin that is “pretty but not too pretty” and is described as manlier than Johnny and Owen, is Johnny’s first real girl to sexualize. This is obviously really weird and contributes well into the darker side of Irving’s comedy, but what is more important and more interesting is the ratchet game of hide-n-seek they play in the closet. Because the game revolves around Hester, the only girl, grabbing the boys “doinks” before she is found, and Johnny & Owen obviously find Hester attractive, it seems Irving is going to lead us into a very unsettling place when Owen is crawling near Hester, in the dark, with his doink seemingly about to be grabbed by a foreign presence he just met but finds attractive. Immediately as I got too scared to keep reading, I was greeted by Owen literally pissing on Hester because he got startled when she picked him up and tickled him instead of grabbing his doink. Thank God Irving is a dark comic and not a pedophilic maniac who writes books in his spare time.