On Humor and Parochialism by Richard Chiappone

1. Why did the joke not cross the road?
2. Because only the people on this side got it.

When I first started writing, back in the 1980s, I was mostly re-examining some disturbing times from my own life by recreating them as fictions. I’d give my fictitious characters my troubles and see if they handled them any better or worse than I did. It was cheap therapy. The stories were usually set in Western NY State where I lived for the first 32 years of my life.

But in 1994 I wrote a story about a character nothing at all like me, my first story set in Alaska. Getting outside myself for the first time was very liberating. Nothing is more empowering than getting out from under your own regrets. Writing fiction, I discovered, was a way to consider the problems other people had, to consider how they might think and feel about their lives. I decided to leave my life out of it. I’m not a memoirist.

In recent years, I’ve been writing stories about people not very much like me at all, except that they all live in towns a lot like Homer, where I’ve lived for the past 22 years. And I realized I might have a whole new problem. In my never-ending attempt to write knowledgably about life in my hometown, I may be undermining one of the elements of fiction writing I depend upon heavily: humor.

Yes, we should “write what we know” as the advice goes—as far as it goes. But if we write what only we and a handful of others know, we limit our audience drastically. And that’s especially true when humor comes into play. What’s funny to people who live in Homer, or who know a lot about Homer may not tickle the funny bone of the rest of the world.

For example, the title story of my new collection Uncommon Weather: Alaskan Stories coming out from University of Alaska Press in September, includes a joke that always get a laugh when I read that story in public. In Alaska. When the female narrator of the story (a married woman) explains why she had an illicit affair with a guy named Jimmy from her yoga class, she tells the reader this:

Let me also say that I didn’t intend to hurt Herb (her husband). When I met Jimmy, I saw a lonely, desperate guy in need of a friend. I mean, really, a grown man taking a yoga class by himself is a cry for help if I ever saw one.  

To a reader familiar with Homer’s sometimes New-Agey, health and wellness vibe that last line is obviously and intentionally absurd. To someone from places where yoga may be looked upon with suspicion as some kind of liberal hippie plot, that line might be taken seriously.

In my ongoing quest to be authentically Alaskan, and to poke a little fun at the quirks of my hometown, I’m worried my writing may become provincial and parochial. All of which brings up the question every writer must ask themselves at some point: What is my audience?

Yes, I want my friends and neighbors to be in on the jokes and to understand I’m poking a little fun at the foibles of our very small town. But I’d also like to have readers in the rest of the country enjoy what I’m serving.

In my next novel, a Homer police lieutenant tells a local boatyard owner and main character, Phil McDermott, that the town’s real estate mogul is receiving death threats.

Phil’s response:

“The guy is a land developer, Lieutenant. Of course people want to kill him!”

There again, if you’re aware of the sometimes very vocal anti-growth sentiment in our town, and the vibrant environmental organizations here, that could make you smile. But I worry about readers from Outside. So, just to be sure it’s seen as a joke, I bring the lieutenant—he does not embrace the town’s liberal zeitgeist—in on the humor. His response to Phil’s joke is this:

“Good one.” The lieutenant chuckles. “So, you think I should question the Land Trust crowd?” Then he gets thoughtful. “Actually, who knows what those greenies are capable of when they get hopped up on lentils and shit?”

I threw in that nutrition gag at the end just for good measure. In Homer, Lentils are as sacred as communion wafers.

Slipping into humor that’s just too insiderish (I’m sure that’s not a word, but it works) can happen to writer, including the greats. Listening to Moby Dick on an audio book, this humorous exchange cracked me up, although I do wonder how many people did not get the joke.

Ishmael and his heavily tattooed Pacific Islander friend, Queequeg, sign up on the whaling ship, the Pequod. One of the lesser officers (not Ahab) in charge of such matters, refers to Queequeg as “Quahog.” Now, if you’ve lived east of the Mississippi, you may know that a quahog is a type of hard-shelled Atlantic clam. But if you’ve spent your life closer to the other coast and ocean, that won’t tickle you as much. So, Melville, God bless him, added another joke just to be sure this whole bit got a laugh: he has a second officer refer to the Māori warrior and great harpooner as “Hedgehog.” Queequeg, quahog, hedgehog. It sounds like Dr. Seuss, a hundred years before the Whos of Whoville ever existed. I mean, come on, Moby Dick, funny?

You bet. And especially if you hail from the Atlantic seaboard.

Am I just writing for my friends and neighbors? If so, is that a crime?

Well, it is if I’m trying to get a novel published by a national publisher. They want to know how and why everyone in the country who owns a credit card will buy my book. If I tell them, everyone in Homer might, they are going to be under-impressed to say the least.

Okay, here’s one last provincial and probably parochial joke passage that may or may not ever be appreciated outside the Kenai Peninsula.

The main character is an eighteen-year-old boy, Chaz, whose parents (Marylin and Felix) are former hippies who settled in Homer in the 1970s. Here’s how the boy sees them.

He knew all of Marilyn and Felix’s friends. Like his parents, most had arrived there at the end of the road in the seventies: Peace Corps vets, VISTA volunteers, adventure travelers, painters and potters and weavers and musicians and optimistic vegetarian homesteaders. They’d come to Alaska to grow their own groceries, children, and cannabis. By now they’d mostly taken up meat-eating, traded their Volkswagen vans for Subarus and Priuses; left their off-the-grid cabins for fully plumbed homes with ocean views, good kitchens, and wifi. They’d all known each other for decades, and, it seemed to Chaz, had all been married or otherwise attached to each other at one time or another as well. The parentage and step-parentage of the children in the town was as complex as a strand of DNA—another reason nobody called anyone Mom or Dad.

To a longtime Homer citizen, that might be anything from amusing to insulting. I’m willing to take my chances. But the question remains: will it make any sense to the rest of the English-speaking, book-reading world?

I wish I knew.

 

 

Richard Chiappone is the author of three collections of short fiction and essays. His writing has appeared in Alaska Magazine, The Sun, Gray’s Sporting Journal, and Sporting Classics; in literary journals including Catamaran Literary Review, Crescent Review, Fiction Southeast, Missouri Review, South Dakota Review, and ZYZZYVA.  He has taught at the University of Alaska Anchorage since 1995, and served as an associate editor at Alaska Quarterly Review for more than a dozen years. His work has been featured on the BBC Radio 3 literary show “The Verb” and his story “Raccoon” was made into a short film and featured at international film festivals. He is a two-time winner of the Robert Traver Award. In 2021, Chiappone won an Alaska State Council on the Arts Literary Award and grant. His novel, The Hunger of Crows, was published by Crooked Lane Books and distributed by Penguin Random in November 2021.