VLVL2 and NPPF: How Authors Achieve Humor (part 1)

[Tim Strzechowski]

from Elaine B. Safer, "Pynchon's World and Its Legendary Past: Humor and the Absurd in a              Twentieth-Century Vineland."  The Vineland Papers.  Ed. by Geoffrey Green.  Normal, IL: 
        Dalkey Archive Press, 1994.

[...] "Like John Barth, William Gaddis, and other comic writers, Pynchon uses specific methods to tempt and then frustrate the reader, thus creating the black humor of the absurd: (1) he develops traditional themes and myths in a highly allusive manner and then uses such patterns from the past to create "a half-farcical, half-passionate spirit" in his contemporary comic novel; (2) he presents fascinating and fantastic episodes -- like those in a tall tale -- and then shifts the focus to similar situations in the present era that are real and terrifying; (3) he moves swiftly between a high and a low style and between farce and horror.

"Most of the scenes in Vineland have a humorous quality even though the novel has a serious undercurrent.  Humorous episides use such devices as slapstick, incongruity, verbal play, and puns.  Slapstick humor usually involves the antics of Zoyd Wheeler, a figure who resides "between the comedy of errors and the comedy of terrors," one who seeks fun, usually without money, and threatens no one because he is so low on the "scale of competition."

"Slapstick humor is evident in the first major episode in which Zoyd, dressed in drag, enters the Log Jam bar in Del Norte, planning to enact his annual bizarre stunt in order to collect his mental-disability check from the government.  His garb is a party dress of multi-colors that he believes "would look good on television" (4).  Much of the humor in this opening scene is based on incongruities, particularly the image of Zoyd wearing a large-size woman's dress from a discount store and carrying a small lady's chain saw that is ornamented with mother-of-pearl and rhinestone, a saw advertised as "tough enough for timber [ . . . ] but petite enough for a purse" (6).  The room is filled with tough-looking loggers, who are perched on designer barstools, chatting about George Lucas's third Star Wars film, Return of the Jedi (1983), as soothing New Age music is audible in the background.  Comic irony is developed by means of the contrast between the powerful, heavy-set, rough-looking California loggers on the one hand, and on the other, their yuppie life-style signified by "three-finger-price-tag jeans" and their trendy New Age consciousness with its borrowings from Far Eastern religion and philosophy boiled down to accommodate an easy and comfortable life in the United States.

"The tone becomes more serious when the narrator indicates that underneath a calm exterior is the smoldering violence of these "dangerous men" with "coarsened attitudes" (5), big men who are thinking about lunging at the intruder, Zoyd.  Humor and pain continually collide in these passages.  When Zoyd finally yanks at the silk cord that starts the chain saw's action, Buster, the bartender, cautions: "no channel's gonna send no crew this far out of town, why are you not down in Eureka or Arcata someplace? [...] If you would've come around last month, you 'n' 'at little saw, could've helped us gut the place" (6-7).  Bewildered by this strange New Age scene, Zoyd hedges: "Sorry, Buster, guess I did come to the wrong bar, I sure can't saw any of this stuff, not with the money you must've put in" (7).  Then the humor takes on a more caustic tone as the lumberjacks and their New Age attitudes are satirized: Buster informs Zoyd, "since George Lucas and all his crew came and went there's been a real change of consciousness" (7).


continued . . .

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