Can Murder Be Funny?
Does comedy work in crime fiction? Obviously yes. It explains why Janet Evanovich is a multimillionaire and why Carl Hiaasen has hit the New York Times bestseller list with twenty-one books. Successful comedy detective movies go way back to 1934 with The Thin Man, first of a franchise of six films. BTW the run may continue into the new millennium. Johnny Depp wanted to play Nick Charles in a remake but the project fizzled. Now Margot Robbie’s Lucky Chap and Brad Pitt’s Plan B are in talks to co-produce a remake.
In recent history we have Oscar-winner Knives Out with a Golden Age mystery set-up nominated for the Golden Globe awards in the comedy category. There are plenty of examples to prove humor goes well with murder. But what kind of humor suits crime fiction? Would it work to satirize the appearance of a grieving widow or parody a teenage assassin? Comedy can easily degenerate into the tasteless, as anybody who watches stand-up comedy knows.
People have been trying to analyze why and how comedy works since Aristotle wrote the Poetics. (The part of the book that survives explores tragic drama. The section dedicated to comedy was lost, then maybe found in 1829 in a medieval manuscript not everybody agrees is valid.) Comedy has many sub-genres ranging from parody, satire, slapstick, black comedy and surreal humor to funny wordplay. Overall, it goes well with crime fiction because both genres explore redemption. A comedy may be full of mistaken identities, obstructed loves, bumbling mistakes, but all comes more or less right in the end. In a murder mystery, killing wreaks havoc until an investigator restores justice and social order.
Take Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum novels. They could be described as romcom-crime with their somewhat incompetent heroine navigating soft-boiled conventions with inputs of romance, adventure and a touch of slapstick. Compare that to Carl Hiaasen’s Florida novels satirizing environmental degradation and political corruption with characters like Skink, an ex-governor who lives in the woods eating roadkill, Cherno with his Weed Whacker arm prosthetic and Tool, a collector of highway fatality markers. These guys qualify for the grotesque, meaning an outlandish mixture of mismatched elements. Another term for the grotesque is ludicrous horror. If you pile up a ridiculous quantity of bodies or overwhelm with revolting detail it becomes funny. A satire like Catch-22 plays with this trope.
Clue lampoons the conventions of a Golden Age mystery with exaggerations of cliched characters, so it’s a parody. Murder by Death, the 1976 film based on Neil Simon’s script, outdoes Clue’s parody of stereotypical murder mystery characters by bringing five famous detectives to a country manor house that will be the site of a murder game: Poirot, Miss Marple, Sam Spade, Nick and Nora Charles and Charlie Chan. The story also makes fun of crime writers’ plotting sins like guilty butlers and clues that only appear when needed for the final solution. Carl Reiner’s 1982 Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid gives parody a noir hue by cutting clips of famous noir films into the plot line.
To understand farce, recall the Pink Panther movies with Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau bumbling backwards through one wacky improbable scene after another to unbelievably solve the crime. Slapstick sequences, exaggerated characters, sexual innuendos and Clouseau’s deadpan preening imbecility turn caper or thriller plot lines into farce.
The Big Lebowski and Knives Out dabble in parody and satire. The Coen brothers set out to parody Raymond Chandler with a plot tripping over mistaken identities and messed-up kidnapping schemes. But the buffoonish Everyman Lebowski, who just wants his rug and his bowling nights with a couple of loony besties, ends up satirizing class in America and American masculinity. His Vietnam vet buddy, Walter Sobchak, arranging hopeless heists and smashing the wrong car in a rage, satirizes military veterans, a tricky thing to attempt.
Knives Out starts out with broad swipes at the upper class character types typically populating a murder mystery mansion. But as the twists pile up, the targets of Rían Johnson’s satire emerge: a selfish spoiled elite and abused immigrant labor. Here the humor is more subtle, tongue-in-cheek. We chuckle at Daniel Craig’s exaggerated southern drawl for detective Benoit Blanc, or his monologue comparing the case to a doughnut hole, and then a smaller doughnut inside the hole with its own tiny hole.
Like crime fiction, comedy juxtaposes things as they are with things as they should be. Comedy begins in trouble and ends in peace. It sorts out falsehoods to clarify a truth, so it’s a fabulous genre to mix with crime fiction. It has the power to highlight wrongs in the world without repelling readers or viewers. So let’s cheer for funny murders. May they live long in fiction, not reality.
The first New Mexico noir mystery is out. The second is coming soon. Stay tuned!