Where Is the Humour?

by Edoardo Albert

The future, it appears, has no jokes. Nor, for that matter, does the urban present, even if it is filled with glittery vampires. For some reason, speculative fiction appears to be almost completely humourless – think of the number of magazines, ezines, fanzines and geezines that advertise themselves as ‘dark’, ‘darker’ or ‘so bloody morbid we’re invisible at night’. Why is this? True, the old grandmasters of speculative fiction that I grew up reading, men like Robert Heinlein, Arthur Clarke and Isaac Asimov, were more concerned with imagining and, dare I say, propagandising the future than populating it with jokes (although anyone reading ‘The Number of the Beast’ would have to assume that Heinlein, at least, had a sense of humour since the alternative, that he seriously means this, is just too awful to contemplate). But surely now – when we live in a world with all the trappings of the wildest science fiction future in an everyday iPhone – it’s time to admit that the future is here and it’s completely and utterly ridiculous. I mean, what would the Futurians have made of a future that achieved technological miracles and used them to turn Paris Hilton into the most famous person on the planet?

In fact, all the prophets and soothsayers were wrong. Take George Orwell for example. Although he was correct in much, he saw the future as a boot stamping on a human face forever. Well, the future turned out to be a human face gurning forever. As such, maybe the reason there’s so few jokes in speculative fiction is because it’s pretty well impossible to top what’s actually out there. Imagine the most extreme ad absurdum you can, and someone will be offering it on eBay. After all, one young woman just auctioned her virginity for $780,000 and justifies it as a career move. You really couldn’t make it up.

Then why should you? The world is the most wonderful resource for the writer of the absurd and it’s there to be mined: after all, what could be sillier than sex, money and politics?

The temptation, of course, is to conclude that because we are absurd, as a species and a civilisation, then everything is. But that, it turns out, is a conclusion too far – there is nothing absurd in nature although there is much that is strange and grotesque. Absurdity is a human specific attribute, and one that grows more pronounced the greater our powers become. “Ye shall be as gods,” was the promise, and we are, wielding powers undreamed of, sufficient to make a paradise on earth. But, instead, we have the Shopping Channel. It’s an object lesson in unintended consequences. We could imagine Jehovah, standing by the gates of Eden, asking, “So how’s that god business shaping up for you?” It’s the job of the writer to answer, “Er, not so well.”

Edorado Albert's story Time Hoppers is featured in the November issue of Penumbra EMag.

The responses to Edoardo Albert’s work rather prove what he argues above. The stories, the books, the articles, have drawn some compliments, but the best response ever, which saw a friend rolling on the ground, helpless with laughter, was a lonely-hearts ad. It was probably the bit about tickling the belly of a wolf that did it.

Find Edoardo Albert’s books (he’s particularly proud of Northumbria: The Lost Kingdom which has just been published) and stories via his website although the lonely-hearts ad will not be making an appearance in the foreseeable future). Connect with him through his blog, Twitter or Facebook.