Dark Humor

 

Although Fun Home is a tragic yet stirring novel, Alison Bechdel presents it comfortably using her own humor to express how she has come to terms with the misfortunes she has encountered in her youth. The title of the book, for example, shortening a very morbid word into a word to describe joy and amusement shows how she has accepted the concept of death. Even though she has grown up around funerals, seen cadavers, and experienced the loss of an immediate family member at a young age, you would think it would still be as unnerving to hear jokes about death as it is for everyone else. In several instances, Alison laughs or smiles during some of these moments like when she first arrives home for her father’s funeral and she sees her brother they both smirk at each other as if their father did something only mildly reckless like fall off a ladder while painting the house. However even in the midst of her ignorance, she would make cynical remarks or be sarcastic. For instance, when she sees her father leaving for a town known for its mental institution, she teases him only to find out he really is going to a therapist.

This dark playfulness could also be stemmed from her mother’s constant negativity or a mixture of that and her innocence. Her mother always had a depressing one liner to every question. When she, Alison, and her brothers watch their grown uncle move into a trailer next door to their parents house her mother says, “After you graduate, I never want to see you again.” Although it was a joke, it is something that, if taken out of context, would sound like she is more than ready to abandon her young children. Through all she had gone through in her childhood, which would probably force most people into years of therapy, her jokes helped her cope with her awkward childhood, disintegrating family, and sexual confusion as a young woman and also used it as a method of healing, not an extension of any remaining anger or depression.