(Jeepers, it’s been a while since I posted. So, this may wander around a bit.)
“There wasn’t a laugh in it.” I remember my father saying that on a fairly regular basis, generally as a negative. Sometimes he was annoyed that the [movie, television show, play, whatever] he had just watched had failed to make him laugh, and sometimes he was more regretful (he’d seen the potential in the writing, but in the end it hadn’t delivered the jokes).
(I do have to note that he was not an easy laugh. He had high standards.)
Of course, he liked, and even loved, some things which had no laughs at all, such as the movies Persona, The Exterminating Angel, and The Seventh Seal. But if laughs were a possibility and those laughs were not delivered, he was cross.
I’ve been thinking about this in a few connections in terms of my reactions to various things.
1) Ulysses.
As I wrote before:
I’ve been watching videos about Joyce and Ulysses, and I just saw one which clarified why I’m always drawn to Ulysses rather than to Joyce’s earlier works, even though they’re a lot easier to read.
Ulysses is funny, sometimes wildly funny. Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man are not funny.
I think it’s that simple.
2) I’ve been thinking about David Lynch since his death. Why do I like Mulholland Drive so much better than some of his other movies? Maybe partly because it’s funnier.
I do like directors who, even in the most serious moments, can insert a pratfall or a malapropism or some other bit of goofiness. Maybe it’s just because that can make a scene more realistic, since real life does that all the time.
Plus, of course, there’s was FBI Regional Bureau Chief Gordon Cole (played by Lynch) in Twin Peaks. (I wish the YouTube clip had gone on a bit longer, since when Cooper and Cole go into the Sheriff’s office for a private conversation, everything they say can be heard by everybody in the building anyway. 🙂 )
I don’t have any big statements to make about Lynch or his movies. As I’ve said before, some things just please me tremendously without giving me a feeling that I need to dissect them.
3) My third novel, which I wrote about last time, makes me laugh. If it didn’t make me laugh, I doubt if I’d put a lot of work into it at this point, given that:
- It’s not really a novel. (It’s more like a single episode of a long-running television show, probably a soap opera.)
- It’s got a ridiculous number of characters.
- It sets up a big question which it never answers, and I’m definitely not taking the story any further at this point.
So, for now, I’m continuing to polish everything up. I don’t have any idea when it will be “done,” but I am trying to trim it a little — to slice off a few characters who don’t advance the plot but who require, for various reasons, enormous amounts of explanation. (At least The Golden don’t appear — I think because I hadn’t invented them yet.)
There are some laughs in it, at least for me, so it’s fun to work on. And I do know one thing already: This is going to be the first chapter.
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Tedious background information follows.
This story was originally called “The U-town Mystery.” It was going to be an early chapter in the third novel. I was working on the novel — with no idea where it was going (of course) — and it occurred to me that Jan Sleet was a detective but I’d never written her a proper, traditional mystery to solve. It seemed like she’d enjoy having one of those, so I wrote this one.
But then, two thing happened (in some order):
- I found that I really enjoyed writing mystery stories, and
- I didn’t think the novel was going anywhere.
So, I wrote a whole series of mysteries for JS to solve.
For that purpose, I renamed “The U-town Mystery” to “The Apartment Mystery,” since it didn’t work to have it called “The U-town Mystery” as part of a whole series of mystery stories set in U-town. (Sherlock Holmes never had an adventure called “The London Mystery.”)
But then, some attentive readers pointed out that “The Apartment Mystery” didn’t work as part of the whole series, since the tone was very different (more dark, with more blood). That was a valid criticism, so when I completed the series I removed that one (I also removed a couple of other stories, for other reasons).
So, it was kind of an orphan, but now it’s going to be back where it originally belonged.