In Every Love Story is a Ghost Story, the biography of David Foster Wallace by DT Max, there's an anecdote about an anecdote the writer hears from a journalist who covers the porn industry. It's simple: The journalist once offended a porn star he was interviewing, so the porn star put him in a headlock. It made me laugh. I think anyone with some trace of a sense of humor could see why that's funny. I presume it made Wallace laugh, too, because he attempted to improve it, going on to describe how the journalist's glasses flew off and landed in another porn star's cleavage. And with that addition, he ruined a good story by overdoing it.
I remembered the Wallace anecdote recently after trying to read a novel advertised as comic. I couldn't stand it for more than a chapter. It's relentlessly overdone almost from the outset, straining for every laugh. Insufferable.
Fear, I went on to reflect, can manifest as strain and strain is always trouble. David Foster Wallace, haunted by the specter of genius and the suspicion that he was a fraud, predictably strained for a lot and that, combined with a weakness for losing himself in mental loops and dead ends, makes his writing mostly excruciating. Which pains me to say in the case of someone who put up an honest fight with himself til the end. One strains to be lyrical and ends up sounding flowery. One strains for profundity and ends up sounding portentous. One strains to be unpretentious and ends up lapsing into crudeness. And people burdened by the need to get laughs tend to strain for them. What's the allure of silence after all this strain? The weary or embittered writer decides that it beats a life of awkwardness and constriction and seemingly wasted effort.
The goal is to write fearlessly: All channels of lexicon, rhythm, memory, and imagination open. Eyes open. Resilient in the face of everything from technical issues to a tyrant. Guided by an intent that doesn't darken your soul, the soul that the work is meant in some way to capture.
One possible solution: this is not going to be amusing but still: the need to get a laugh, for example, is a self-imposed, unnecessary burden. Relieve yourself of it. Develop standards. Think about whether you're really laughing at those tweets or standup acts. Then, without neglecting quality control, write to make yourself laugh. Get the personal benefits of a laugh plus a bit more freedom of movement, which loosens you up to find more than laughs.... If someone joins you, that's strictly a bonus reward.
And hey. Sometimes it's not even a reward.
