I love funny moments in otherwise serious shows. Remember the eighties and nineties? It seemed to be in everything: danger, big monster fights, and then closing on a few quips. Xena was great at it, I remember. The Princess Bride was largely a comedy, and yet it still worked as a serious fairy tale.

TV has gotten a lot more serious since then, I feel. Main characters can die, good characters can be corrupted. Writers still try to alleviate the grimness with humor, and yet sometimes that makes it worse.

Remember what we talked about a few posts ago: humor releases tension. So putting it in at the right moment can help wind the audience down, make a quick recovery from what could otherwise have been a little bleak. But when you put it in at the wrong moment, it can undermine the tense moments of the story.

Gallows humor

I’m not meaning to imply nobody can ever quip in a bad situation. In real life, people do it all the time. Have you ever been crying your eyes out, and somebody said something that made you laugh till you were ugly snorting through your tears? It happens. And if you can make your audience feel that exact way, it works.

It’s a tricky balance, though. It works so well in real life because the humor doesn’t successfully release all the tension there is. When somebody is actively bleeding in front of you and quips, “You should’ve seen the other guy!” you chuckle because it’s making your fear and upset slightly better. But because your fear and upset are real, it can’t dissipate them altogether. 

When we use humor like this in fiction, I think it works best if we try to mimic that feel: a joke that contrasts with the mood, that lightens it, but doesn’t pull us out altogether. When, in Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio announces that his wound is “not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door; but ’tis enough, ’twill serve,” it’s enough to provoke a chuckle, but not enough to override the fact that a character we liked is dying. Importantly, it’s in character. We see this not because Shakespeare wants to pull us out and make us laugh at the situation, but because this character would handle dying in just this way.

Breaking tension

It’s different when, in The Princess Bride, Grandpa stops reading in the middle of the shrieking eels, and we get a little funny scene with him and the boy. In that, we have a mood being built, the mood of fear and terror, and that interruption breaks that mood altogether. Why? Because it was getting a little too scary for the boy (and the younger viewers). The creators deliberately broke the scary scene so that it wouldn’t be so scary. That means they don’t get the reaction from the terrifying moment they otherwise would—but that’s because they’ve made the conscious decision that they’re not making that kind of movie.

Humor can be used in this way when the creator wants to show a certain thing, but doesn’t want it to land with its full emotional impact. The Lord of the Rings (the movie) is full of grim moments, but the creators decided to make the scenes with Legolas and Gimli a bit lighter, so they can kill an Oliphant and instead of grieving for the fact that this captured beast had to die for a cause it didn’t understand, the audience laughs because Gimli said, “That still only counts as one!” I think it was a conscious decision that the rest of the movie was getting pretty grim, and if we want to mourn the tragedy of what this war is doing to Middle Earth, we have plenty of opportunities.

Another reason you might do this is because you’re managing the tension level and you know it’s time for a break. Tension can’t elevate forever. It has to be relaxed in some moments, in order for there to be contrast when things do amp up and become dangerous.

The Murderbot show deliberately breaks tension very often. One reason for this is because it’s meant to be a lighthearted show, despite some of the grim material. Another, though, is to strengthen its tense moments through contrast.

This moment is ridiculous. It’s our signal that the tense combat scene is over. The tension releases and we start to calm down, which only makes it more intense when, a moment later, we discover the danger isn’t actually gone at all. A whole episode of tension would feel less tense, but by breaking it up, the creators ensure that we will feel the tense moments more powerfully.

When writing, you have to know ahead of time what kind of story you’re writing, how tense you want it to be. And you also need to keep track as you go, asking yourself if the same emotional note has been stretched too long and it’s time for a change. Humor is a good tool for that.

When bathos ruins the mood

I find that the juxtaposition of humor and seriousness bothers me when it’s disrupting a scene that is meant to have a certain emotional impact or tension, and instead that tension is drained away with a joke. This is what the word bathos refers to: the sudden drop from the sublime to the ridiculous, creating an anticlimax.

In Star Trek 2009, at the moment when Kirk leaps onto the bridge to announce that the lightning storm in space around Vulcan is hiding the Romulan ship that killed his father, it could have been a big moment. Kirk’s first moment of actually trying to be a hero instead of treating life as a big joke. Our first realization that the peril to Vulcan is serious. Instead, Kirk is having a bad allergic reaction, so his tongue and hands are all swollen. He waves his sausage fingers and yells “WOMULANS!”

And it’s like—yes, I laughed. But at the same time, I was annoyed. We get zero emotional impact now from the Romulans themselves. This should have been a serious moment and it wasn’t. I was reminded that I was watching a movie, so I was no longer absorbed in it at all.

I feel like it tends to happen when writers get a little nervous about their big emotional scenes. This could be a big moment, and they’re building it up to be. But then they think, what if viewers don’t come along with me on this emotional moment, what if it only looks silly to them? Answer: throw in a joke, and then I’m being silly on purpose.

We’ve all done it sometimes in real life, when we fear we’re being too sincere, too vulnerable, so we break the moment we’re in with a joke. “I…I think I might be falling in love with y—JUST KIDDING, I don’t know why I said that.” It’s a cowardly backtrack because we can’t stand by what we said. And as a result, we never get the reaction our serious words would have gotten. 

You can’t simultaneously win the rewards of being known without the vulnerability of unironically letting yourself be perceived. You can’t throw in jk jk unless…? without weakening the power of what you wanted to say. If you are serious, they might laugh at you and your scene might not have the impact you wanted—but if you throw in a joke silly enough to break the scene, it definitely won’t.

The power of sincerity

If you want to make a story that has a certain emotional impact, you’ve got to make the scenes with the biggest emotional impact stone cold serious. Go whole hog and make us feel one emotion in the scene, which you don’t undermine at all. 

A skilled writer can sometimes make us feel two: for instance, that gallows humor where the tension is lightened a little, but the feelings are too big to be fully undermined by it. But it’s risky business. It relies on you having made those feelings big enough to still land, and on the audience believing this is a realistic reaction of these characters at this moment. If you try it, get someone to read over it and see if it works.

Then where do the jokes go, if you want this to be a largely lighthearted story? They go everywhere else. Murderbot, for instance, is constantly cracking sarcastic little jokes, even in dire circumstances. That’s part of what makes those books feel “cozy” when objectively they’re full of grim events. But at the most emotionally charged moments, the jokes stop. In a character like that, the mere absence of joking is a huge signal that things are serious, which helps build the feelings we have in those scenes.

Jokes also go after the tension. The original Star Trek does this in almost every episode. Sometimes the show has genuinely grim plotlines, if you think about it too hard, but the show isn’t meant to leave you feeling sad. So after everything is fixed, Kirk, Spock, and Bones hang out on the bridge and trade a couple of quips. It’s the show’s way of telling us the bad part is over, helping dissipate the tension that was created in the heavier parts. 

Releasing tension in the middle of a heartfelt scene can feel like a popped balloon, but doing it afterward feels like letting out a breath you didn’t know you were holding. Time to move on from the catharsis the show has walked you through and be reassured that everything must be okay now, if the characters are back to teasing each other.

Humor in its place

I love humor in sci-fi and fantasy. It makes the fun stories more fun and the grim stories less grim. But it’s important to place humor carefully in a story, keeping in mind the mood of the scene and the tension you’re trying to cultivate.

Here are a few works that do humor well:

Murderbot. I’ve loved the books for a while and the show is very much the same.

The Martian. I’ve only read the book of this one. With a different hero it could have been a much darker story, but Mark Watney is just a cheesy nerd on Mars.

Most things written by John Scalzi. It can be seen as a weakness—he’s not one for big emotional moments. But I feel it just means I know what I’m in for going in.

The Saint of Steel series by T. Kingfisher. Only in the hands of a master could I get the full horror value out of the severed heads zombie plot and be laughing my head off ten minutes later.

Hench, by Natalie Zina Walschots. It’s got its serious moments and themes, but the witty narration is a treat.