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Mountain. We spotted a man with no arms, expertly swishing down a mogul field, and thought, “Wow. That is incredible.” There was nothing funny about it. We certainly weren’t juvenile and callous enough to laugh at a no-armed skier. We looked on in awe and admiration of his courage.
    Yet two hours later we spotted the same man in the ski lodge, casually watching the television as he had lunch with a companion. My friend nudged me and signaled to the TV screen, on which played out the Black Knight scene from Monty Python and The Holy Grail. The knight continued to fight King Arthur even as both his arms had been hacked off by Arthur’s sword, jumping and kicking as fake blood gushed dramatically from his stumps. Dear God, I thought, why are you doing this to me? I mean, what are the odds of watching a no-armed man watching a comedy scene about a no-armed man? I don’t want to laugh at the no-armed skier! The universe is NOT playing fair.
    There is a certain safety in laughing at such things in the realm of entertainment, and it would stand to reason that suspension of disbelief or the fiction buffer is the key. But there are just as many staunch haters of Monty Python’s brand of humor as there are fans. I’ve seen people come to blows over this topic. Which brings back the theory that dark humor is about viewpoint, in observer and creator alike.
    Since I can’t dig up Roald Dahl and ask him, I participated in a discussion with some living writers of black humor about their life view and how it affects their writing. Author Aurelio O’Brien used to make his living on the big budget animated kiddie films, but crossed over to the dark side with his first novel Eve, a blackly humorous tale of genetic tampering gone awry in a dystopian future.
    “For me, so much of life is observably funny and this automatically feeds my writing. When I was creating my all organic, genetically designed future, things like McDonald’s Characters directly inspired me to go further than I might otherwise think to go…The little giggling McNuggets are really chunks of dead fowl flesh with cute little smiles carved into them. I find these kinds of things to be so twisted and humorous and odd. Most people don’t think about these characters beyond their surface appeal. So, when people tell me my Lick-n-Span© is gross, I think, is it really any grosser than having a hacked-up chicken giggle at you?”
    I agree with O’Brien on this, most consumer icons are creepy. Like the Tidy Bowl man and Mr. Clean. Why is it always a little fantasy man helping the lonely housewife with her daily chores? Strange men coming up out of the floor and the toilet? And why does the housewife always keep them a secret from her husband? Notice the way Mr. Clean winks at her when hubby walks in? And what’s the actual purpose of that little hand guy from Hamburger Helper? What’s he really helping her with?
    Speaking of sex and animation, most people know Gary K. Wolf as the creator of Disney’s Roger Rabbit , but he’s also a novelist, and one of the masters of dark humor. For Wolf, the humor definitely comes from a unique way of seeing the world, and is more second nature than calculated creativity.
    “There’s something unfathomable about humor writers that compels them to look at a situation or a character, twist it, turn it, squeeze it, squash it until it’s a round peg that fits into a square hole and looks funny doing it,” says Wolf. “Good stand-up comedians have the same ability, taking everyday situations and making them funny. They do it verbally. Most of the humorous writers I know, me included, aren’t very funny in conversation. In fact, I’m so boring I could suck the laughs out of a hyena convention. However, give us a blank page and a pen, and we’ll have you in stitches. I’ve been applauded by editors, critics, and readers for the humor in my work. All well and good except they were talking about what I consider to be my serious