Humor matters in this work, and not by accident.

If you spend enough time with what I write, you will eventually run into a line that feels like it slipped in through a side door wearing a red rubber nose and flip-flops.

Something dry. Something a little unhinged.

Something oddly specific, like a lost 8mm orgy film starring long-gone character actors and narrated by Paul Lynde.

Something that lands right in the middle of material that, on paper, should have been too serious to laugh at.

That is part of the design.

I do not use humor to break the work.

I use it to keep the work from lying.

Life is rarely only one thing at a time.

It can be erotic and ridiculous, brutal and badly timed, tender and humiliating, profound and a little embarrassing.

A person can be trying to hold a serious truth while their body, memory, shame, desire, or timing does something completely unhelpful in the corner like it was hired by a competing studio.

That is not a flaw in reality.

That is reality.

Humor belongs there.

I do not trust authority that cannot survive absurdity. I do not trust darkness that never has to share the room with the fact that people are strange, needy, contradictory animals who say noble things and then ruin the mood by being real.

Humor is one of the fastest ways reality leaks through performance.

It keeps intensity from turning into parody.

It keeps pain from becoming so precious that it starts clinging to itself.

It keeps desire from pretending it is cleaner, wiser, or more important than it is.

That matters to me.

Because I am not interested in sounding profound at the expense of sounding like my whole voice got hit with a flat and lowered by a half step into tasteful lo-fi music. I love lo-fi, but I do not want my writing turning into ambient noise online.

Sometimes the truest line in a piece is the one that comes in sideways. Sometimes the joke lands because the alternative would be too polished, too solemn, or too fake.

Sometimes humor is the only thing keeping a serious piece from becoming a performance of seriousness, which is how you end up with writing that looks polished on the surface and somehow still reads like corporate drywall.

I have no interest in that.

My humor runs wide: dry humor, absurd humor, chaotic humor, body humor, reference humor.

The work is not trying to be the Elvis Presley of comedy. It is closer to the Chris Isaak of comedy, which is fine by me. I would rather haunt the right people than entertain everybody.

The kind that sounds too specific to be invented, and the kind that feels so left-field it almost should not work, except it does because the angle is honest.

I enjoy humor deeply, broadly, and sometimes stupidly. I always have.

One of my earliest ambitions was to be a comedian, which probably explains a lot and may explain too much.

Not because I wanted to stand on a stage and chase approval. Humor fascinated me. Timing fascinated me. The turn fascinated me. The way a joke can expose a truth faster than a serious explanation ever could fascinated me.

That still lives in the work.

But I do not use humor to punch down.

I am not interested in cruelty wearing the mask of wit. I am not interested in humiliation as sport. I am not interested in irony used by people who want all the freedom of saying something with none of the cost of meaning it.

I grew up around rougher humor. Louder humor. Vulgar humor. The kind that arrives half a second before someone tells you it should probably be illegal to laugh. Some of it still makes me laugh. That was part of my time, part of my exposure, part of how my own sense of humor got built.

I am not here to condemn that lane.

It is just not mine.

If a joke cuts here, it usually cuts toward the lie.

Toward the pose.

Toward the self-deception.

Toward the completely human absurdity of wanting impossible things with a straight face and then acting shocked when reality has other ideas.

And yes, sometimes it cuts toward me.

I will make myself the joke when it earns its place. Not because I am trying to weaken the voice, but because a person who cannot laugh at their own ridiculousness is always in danger of becoming unbearable. Or worse, becoming impressed with themselves, which is a fast way to end up writing sentences nobody should have to survive.

Neither outcome interests me.

Humor also creates room: room for a reader to breathe, room for shame to loosen, room for a piece to stay open instead of locking into one emotional register until it suffocates under its own seriousness.

In work like mine, that matters. Pressure without variation turns numb. Intensity without wit starts posturing. Darkness without absurdity starts dressing itself up and asking everyone to admire the tailoring.

It also explains why some of my references arrive from strange angles. My mind does not sort the world into respectable categories before it uses it. Humor can come from anywhere if it belongs. Meme logic. Cultural debris. High-end comedy. Something bodily. Something stupid. Something so specific it should not be funny to anyone but somehow is.

What matters is not whether every reader catches every signal.

What matters is whether the signal belongs.

If it belongs, it stays.

That is the same standard I use for everything else in my work.

So if a line gives you tonal whiplash, good. That may mean it arrived honestly. We can be ruined, aroused, grieving, sincere, perceptive, ridiculous, and socially off by half an inch all in the same afternoon.

The work should be allowed to know that.

The humor in my writing is not separate from the truth.

It is one of the ways truth becomes touchable without becoming unbearable.

Sometimes it softens the landing.

Sometimes it sharpens the blade.

Sometimes it is the only thing in the room honest enough to say what everyone else is trying to dress up.

Sometimes the smarter move is to stay calm, let the false seriousness embarrass itself, and admit that a meme is often more likely to capture the real feeling of life than anything trying too hard to explain it.

Companion Track: “Dare to Be Stupid” — “Weird Al” Yankovic