Black comedy comfort line

I stop at nothing. I personally think that no situation, no matter how disgusting and horrific it is, could not be used as a joke. Pedophilia, necrophilia, necro-pedophilia, 9/11 attacks etc, they can all be hilariously funny. Of course that's my personal sense of humour and I'm sure there are a lot of people who will not laugh at my apparently sadistic jokes, but I firmly believe that we need to be able to laugh at everything. Real-life instances of pedophilia furiously enrage me, but that does not mean I shun jokes about it.

Anything goes.
Just because I can make fun of something doesn't mean that the joke reflects my opinion on it.
Then again, I *am* South African an a little desensitised... and I'm a born cynic.
If your publisher sends you anthrax ask him if he does bulk orders and if he can deliver to a few choice addresses.

that's getting into the spirt of humour! :D

thanks for the input, you guys.

I draw the line where it stops being funny. I wouldn't make fun of pedophilia, but perhaps of a characters perception of it. A scene featuring a five year old having sex with a fifty year old is never funny, but let's say Mark has a date with Lisa. His stoner buddies don't know that she's only eight, but since he's been single he wants them to think that they're dating.
"Hey man, you tap that?"
"You know it" High five.
Funny? Only if the characters were well designed.
Humor that is shocking is nothing unless it has humor attached to it. You could say, oh a fifty year old doing it with a five year old, that's shocking, but it's not funny. Jokes about the catholic church aren't edgy anymore...and less often are they funny. So where do I draw my line? When it's not funny anymore.

Meh. I smear lines because they're there to be smeared. Morals mean nothing to me. That doesn't mean that I'm going to write the most vulgar piece of crap you can find ever, but nothing's going to stand in my way if I need to make a joke.

~Siswi

Meh. I smear lines because they're there to be smeared. Morals mean nothing to me. That doesn't mean that I'm going to write the most vulgar piece of crap you can find ever, but nothing's going to stand in my way if I need to make a joke.

~Siswi

I draw the line where it stops being funny. I wouldn't make fun of pedophilia, but perhaps of a characters perception of it. A scene featuring a five year old having sex with a fifty year old is never funny, but let's say Mark has a date with Lisa. His stoner buddies don't know that she's only eight, but since he's been single he wants them to think that they're dating.
"Hey man, you tap that?"
"You know it" High five.
Funny? Only if the characters were well designed.
Humor that is shocking is nothing unless it has humor attached to it. You could say, oh a fifty year old doing it with a five year old, that's shocking, but it's not funny. Jokes about the catholic church aren't edgy anymore...and less often are they funny. So where do I draw my line? When it's not funny anymore.

Really, it all depends on the context and the characters. Regardless of what happens there will always be someone who gets offended no matter what you do; 'tis the nature of the beast. You can certainly be considerate without worrying about it all too much. Might as well keep it in your NaNo for now--makes up more words. ;)

As for me, I definitely have my morbid moments (generally out of left field considering I'm often described as 'bubbly') and get the odd looks. Long story short, I have some inkling on what you mean.

Good luck and happy writing all the same.

What humour?
I was *deadly* serious.
*blink blink*

I think any of the situations the OP mentioned could turn humorous in the right hands. It's one thing for an author to "go there" with no purpose besides creating a false veneer of edginess, but another entirely when talent and a literary (or maybe not so literary) purposes end up making the reader laugh themselves stupid over something intrinsically morbid.

I would also have to say that people are not as easily offended as they used to be. Whatever you're thinking of doing, you should go ahead and do. If you decide to cut it out later, so be it, but trying will be worth it! And quite possibly hilarious beyond your wildest dreams.

I hear that: I once read a piece of fiction that was so incredibly ultra-violent, without respite, that it was hilarious.
(probably not what you meant)

I'll go ahead and put in the super-black humour, but i'll probably have to re-read it a week later, to ensure it's not just 'shock' humour.

-thanks for your responses

As long as its genuinely funny, in some way? I will laugh at it no matter the content, bar nothing. I'm an awful human being in many respects. But. Can't help it. :D

EDIT: To add on to that... it just fits my belief that fiction is fiction and free from morality. There is no such thing as moral or immoral fiction. Because fiction has no consequence. At the same time, it has all the consequence in the world. It's a paradox, sure, but I firmly believe that one cannot judge a fiction based on morality, so therefore, I will read and laugh at anything - as long as it's well written and well executed.

Humorous fiction is difficult because its often hard to fit absurd situations into a storyline and still make it be believable.

Black humor is especially difficult because you are making a joke about a topic which most people typically take seriously.

As a writer, I feel the line should be drawn at having anything too horrible happen to (or be performed by) any sympathetic characters. I don't feel that this is a social convention as much as it is a literary one. You can make jokes about whatever you like, but if you try to write about a character you are trying to portray as sympathetic being raped, you better not make jokes about it, or you will lose your audience. If its a character that you aren't supposed to like, that's fine. In one of his novels, Carl Hiassen had one of the bad guys get raped by a porpoise, it was hilarious. If he'd had that happen to a character you were rooting for, then it wouldn't have been funny.

Bottom Line: The joke depends on the context. If you can make it believable while not sacrificing any sympathetic feelings you may have built up in the audience then go for it.

The furthest I've gone is one of my characters is raped, but for some inexplicable reason she enjoys it, confusing the rapist into wondering if he's gone nuts and if he, in fact, is the one being raped. So the rapist runs off in fear, and the girl, left altogether rather unsatisfied, finds a broken beer bottle and... actually, the narrator never says more than that he finds the entire scene repulsive and changes the subject to Genghis Khan.

Oh, and I don't really have a problem mocking Nazism. Really, I don't know how far I could go with black comedy, but I certainly could stretch for a long way.

The only time you cross the comfort line is when you get too personal about something and I don't mean like
"Your mother left becuase she hates you," what I mean is when you reach a point where you change the tone of what's being written from jovial to flagrant hate speech. You can get away with almost any topic imaginable as so long as you come across as joking.
The only thing that could cross over the comfort boundary is connected to personal belief, and even then, you can still get really close and still not stumble over that line. But from what you've listed, I'd be pretty sure that you're safe.

Everything and anything can be fair game. I recently had a short story rejected by The Town Drunk (an online horror/humor market) because they thought that the murder of a child wasn't particularly funny. However, the same story ended up being sold to another market with superior taste. So it seems to me that no matter how sick and twisted you think you are, you're always likely to find someone who is even more sick and twisted. The only comfort line that matters is your own.

I have a very cynical sense of humour, and have developed a bad habit of sneering at pretty much everything I see or read in the papers, and making jokes about otherwise serious stories. People have scowled at me for making jokes about the McCanns, but to be perfectly honest everything about it seems like a joke anyway.

I would only censor myself if I didn't find it funny, or if I was in the presence of someone who might take it personally.

I think everything is fair play, but I like to consider the target audience. If someone is reading your novel, and they were sexually molested as a child, how would they feel when your MC is going Dane Cook about the subject? I can, and might hit some taboo topics in my novel, but nothing that will get me on the FBI's top ten most wanted list. Now on the other hand, if you did hit some taboo topics, people that read it might crack up laughing thinking "Did he just say that!? Awesome!" and continue reading. It's your choice Padawan, use the force wisely.

That was put very aptly. I don't think I could say it any better myself!

"The world is a tragedy to those that feel and a comedy to those that think."
It's mainly perspective, my friend. Though jokes too often used and jokes
that are jokes SIMPLY because they are shocking-not clever or well dealt
are a perspective that eludes me.

I write black comedy that makes me laugh. That's all. If I laugh, it's funny. That's all there is. I don't even think about boundaries or what anyone else thinks. If I laugh, it has to be funny. I doubt I would write a paedophile joke (I haven't yet..) as it wouldn't occur to me to write one. Which begs a question... As for writing to shock someone. Never considered that. Seems to have no purpose as I just want to make myself laugh.

I'll laugh at anything as long as it's funny. But when you get into subjects like rape/murder/etc, you have to work a lot harder to make it funny. If someone genuinely makes a good joke about something like that, I usually appreciate it more than a tame one-liner no matter how good, but that rarely happens. Usually people are going for shock value, and if there's one thing that puts me off a comedy it's when people start doing things solely for shock value. Even then, it's not so much the subjects that bother me as the fact that it seems like a cheap attempt at humour by someone who doesn't know what they're doing.

Lots of good comments here. Seems the general consensus is that it's fair game provided it's funny. I agree.

Also I think it helps if you take your joke to an absurd length, totally over-the-top. Make it almost cartoonish. This ensures your readers know your intent is humor, not shock.

The first thing that popped into my head is a sketch from Monty Python about cannibalism:
http://www.ibras.dk/montypython/finalripoff.htm#Undertaker

Hmm...they seem to have a thing for cannibalism:
http://www.ibras.dk/montypython/finalripoff.htm#Cannibalism

Here's some black humor:

Emporer is watching gladitorial games. One of the lions jumps the wall, bites out his throat. Gladiator walks over, spits on the twitching corpse, and says :"I always knew some pussy would beat you."

Puns are the lowest form of humor....and oddly fitting for this kind of situation.

Black comedy is overused. There's a lot of "I'll say whatever I want!" bravado mixed in with the genuine comedy, and just because it's hard for some people to tell the difference doesn't mean there isn't a stark, brutal difference.

In my opinion, looking for a hard-and-fast "line" is the wrong question. I would never, ever, ever advocate restraint for the sake of "respecting" a taboo, but black comedy requires strategic doses of restraint to serve the joke instead of the shock value. Something I ask myself (when I remember to hipcheck my own writer's pride) is, "am I saying this because it's funny, or am I saying this because I want people to think I'm a crazy, savage, edgy, rebellious motherf---er?" If the former, I know I'm on the right track. If the latter, I'm entering transparent tastelessness.

If a character is funny then what they say is funny, you don't need to play for it.

Personally, I like jokes that shock and challenge, but if I don't like the person telling them I'm way more likely to be offended.

I thin what people have been really saying is black comedy needs to be comedy. Say what you want. Jonathan Swift wrote a proposal on EATING IRISH BABIES! Eating babies is wrong, unless it's funny. I know I've spent my fair share of time trading the dark, foreboding Woods of Dark Humour, (The extra u makes it more dark and foreboding, because the English are terrifying.) and it's nearly gotten me in trouble. Nearly, but not quite. My first day at work I told my boss I was going to commit suicide and I'd be back in 15 minutes, but it was okay, because it was all in the phrasing.

"Hey, I'm gonna go smoke," I said.
"Jake, those things will kill you," says the boss man. Boss Woman, really.
"That's fine. In fact, that's kind of the point. You see, I don't like myself very much, but I don't have the wherewithal to try and kill myself. Besides, it'll get misinterpreted as a desperate cry for attention if it doesn't work. My plan is to commit suicided by lung cancer. Nobody will suspect a thing, and my family will even get my life insurance money."

My boss laughed and all was well. My desperate plea for help went unnoticed because it was funny. Nothing is sacred. Expect for the Flying Spaghetti Monster. I'd say as longa s people are laughing, say whatever you will.