Affront to Decency

You may notice from my Medium account that I wrote a some short/long stories between 2020 and 2022. I hit upon a little style that was creatively productive after working at writing and those first-person kind of confessional things are the result. Everybody starts out writing about themselves, and, while that is wonderful, you run out of road with it pretty quickly and have to decide whether you will actually learn the craft of writing to go further or just keep writing the same story over and over again. 

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If you're like me, you'll pretend that you haven't reached that stage for a while and keep trying to make it work instead even if it clearly isn't. I had the idea for this story in 2020 and wrote about 3,000 words of it in that style and kept trying and hoping that it would start to work if I pushed ahead or gave it enough time. In that iteration, I was kind of venting my own frustration with the story's themes rather than drawing attention to what is absurd or funny about them and the result was a bit hateful, bitter and self-pitying and not funny at all. ​I think I took that style as far as it could go with Dead Man, which I actually haven't looked at a word of since 2022 as I'm worried that I'll be similarly embarrassed to find it similarly a bit hateful and self-pitying. It was important for me to write at the time though so I've left it up. Missteps are as much a part of your work at the successes.

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Anyway, I really wanted to write this story and spent over five years thinking about and working on it. The ideas and themes and many of the main story elements remained the same but I had to learn a lot of new skills to write it.

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​Evelyn Waugh​

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Has this ever happened to you? Someone tells you that you have to read or listen to something because it's hilarious, but then

you read or listen and it turns out not to be hilarious at all? It's very, very hard to be funny in writing and my theory is that it's because you are essentially being funny at a captive audience without the immediate feedback of laughter or its absence to let you know whether you are correct in your belief that what you are saying is funny. It's easy to be hilarious on your own in a quiet room with yourself as the judge ​(you will always decide after a little reflection that in fact you are hilarious and a genius after all). ​

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There are different kinds of funny and I think a kind that appears often in media where you are the passive audience is the one that is effectively used interchangeably with being likeable, which is fine, but does require you to be sold on the writer's/performer's/presenter's personality which you won't always be. I can think of John Bishop (who I like!) as an example of someone who is funny even though I can't immediately remember an isolated funny thing he has said or any jokes that he has told, he is just extremely likeable and I and many people enjoy him telling his funny stories. Meanwhile, every single thing Danny McBride says makes me laugh, even when he's not trying to be funny, as does everything Eddie Murphy says and everything this boy Ben I went to school with said. And Jim Cornette. Being naturally and inherently hilarious and being able to conjure comedy gold at will is a different skill and I think is distinct from being just likeable.

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The force of somebody's personality, their physicality and their appearance can make someone 'funny', all of which are neutralised in writing which is presented simply as uniformly formatted text on plain paper. We have a kind of instinctual revulsion to people who appear to us to be 'trying' to be funny and I think the absence of the effects of these additional persuasive forces makes people's attempts at humour more naked which therefore makes them more high-risk and increases the likelihood of that revulsion kicking in. And once you've started to feel that way, it's difficult to come back. If you are relying on your personality and your likability to make people laugh, you must keep in mind that most readers will be reading you for the first time and will not know who you are, and the reality is that not all of them will find you likeable. And in that case they might consider your presumption of likeability an affront, or the suggestion that they are supposed to find the stuff funny a put-off, and might even be determined not to find it funny out of spite and stubbornness. Maybe you know the feeling of jumping into a podcast on its sixth season and getting irritated at how hilarious the hosts find each other (what are they laughing at?).

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I have read Catch-22 which is hilarious, but many years passed in my reading life without a book making me properly laugh. Granted I'm not exactly extremely well-read but if that many years passed without a TV show making you laugh you'd wonder why it is so hard to do. There are snatches of hilarity (Sylvia Plath is very funny, '...usually from people who disguise themselves in creams and perfumes. These highly scented people are not to be trusted'), but out-and-out funny books are the site of some of the most horrific work known to man, especially if it's non-fiction about 'dating' or city life or that sort of thing. There will be self-deprecating anecdotes and frequent use of the word 'Reader' will signal that you are about to be told something cheeky and scandalous.* Uh oh!

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I remembered Richard Dawkins referencing something in The God Delusion he said was by 'the funniest writer in the English language' which turned out to be Evelyn Waugh which led me to reading Scoop. Unfortunately this was the cause of some of my own embarrassing and scandalous anecdotes, I was not ready for the onslaught of hilarity and kept having to leave cafes and coffee shops because I was laughing so hard while reading it. Then I would think about what kind of person laughs at a book from the Classics section and be disgusted with myself, tell myself 'come on, it's easy not to laugh at a book in public', but then it would happen again.

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I find Evelyn Waugh sickeningly funny. Unfortunately the key ingredient of Waugh's cruelty means that he is pretty much impossible to replicate or imitate, but I think it can be productive to think about what makes him different to other 'funny' writers. The key is Waugh's 'deadpan' I think, which isn't just a stylistic choice from among many possible styles of writing but instead, if you think about it, solves all of the problems with funny writing I've listed above. Evelyn Waugh, the writer, is not attempting to be funny in his writing, he is simply relaying information to you about what happened and instead characters and situations are funny. 

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*Something extraordinary happened after writing this, this is absolutely 100% true. I wrote everything up to here in one sitting. After, on that exact day a mere hour or so later, I opened up the Guardian and there was an article called 'I was 31, burned out, and single. Would a string of dates with French men bring back my joie de vivre?', 05/10/2025, around 2:30pm, on the banner at the top. On a hunch I opened it, pressed CTRL+F, typed in 'reader', and...

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Uh oh! I know what I'm talking about. Join me in helping to kill this trope.

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You can watch BBC interviews with Waugh which feels a bit anachronistic for names you walk past in the Classics section. As I never actually studied writing in any way, I've learned basic lessons like this that are probably drilled into students from day one in creative writing class way too late:

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'The feelings should be the reader's [...] You tell him or her the facts and if it's a properly told story they'll quickly pick up on the feelings [...] The novelist deals with speech and action [...] It isn't the novelist's business to feed the reader with emotions, if your novel's any good the reader should get emotions from it.'

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The sparse, deadpan relaying of information is inviting and inclusive as it comes with is no suggestion that you are 'supposed' to find whatever is being relayed funny, nor that the writer themself finds it funny. You are invited to observe and consider what is happening together and you have the space to find it funny if it is actually funny. 

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I managed to turn this story around with the single realisation some time in 2023 that it should be in third person. ​I wanted it to be a challenge to be brutal with my editing and make it as close to 100% lean in favour of actual story as possible. Speech and action only. Obviously this goes out the window pretty quickly once you start writing, but with goal in mind I attempted my most brutal editing exercise to date and tried to excise everything that was description and did not drive the story forward. Having this restriction was very helpful for achieving what is, I think, my first ever 'story' with characters and a plot where conflicts and problems happens and everything resolves nicely at the end. You can easily fall into the trap of thinking that you can make a story better by doing more writing or describing things in more elaborate and ornate detail (I've certainly better there), which is how you end up with overly effusive writing that is thin on substance. This was an exercise for trying for the first time to make 100% of the content the 'story', not 'writing'.

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I used the clip of the South Park writers talking about how there should be a 'but' or 'therefore', rather than 'and then', between each story beat as an aid, and the little axiom 'good drama is giving every character their best argument' that I heard, to teach myself how to write a story. Learning how to do this was why it took so long.

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Absurdity

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The funniest thing I've ever seen is quite possibly that bit at the end of Hot Rod where Ebeneezer Scrooge is in a bus for absolutely no reason, but I've also been kept awake laughing at night that bit in Futurama where Stephen Hawking says 'toss it in the garbage' and by this photo. I like things that are funny beyond explanation. Why 'waffle scramble', why 'Pip and Pop the bedtime pets', why 'curiously flutey', why do people keep saying 'I tell you what I'll do'? They're funny because they just are. I called the character Adam after Adam in Vile Bodies to acknowledge the debt to Waugh's sense of humour while I had fun, just in case anybody in the know thought I was trying to pull a fast one.

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The idea at the centre of this story is that creativity is irrational. This was the perfect justification to have at it with absurdity and the sense of going beyond what is merely required or explainable. Creativity involves stepping beyond what is required of or necessary for you through your own motivation, and this idea is embodied by Adam whose motivations do not need to have a basis in reason and does a lot of stuff because he just does. I had a lot of fun using him as an excuse to shoehorn some of my funny ideas (funny to me, that is) into writing which are of course offset against the rigid requirements of his role and the organisation of the conference, the supposed authorities on creativity at the conference, and their failure to imagine a management style that isn't interventionist and authoritative (have you ever worked anywhere that lectures you on 'creativity' but can't bring themselves to let you decide where to sit for yourself? Bizarre).

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You're around a century behind Kafka ​at this point if you're writing about the madness of bureaucratic work and chains of command, so you'd really better have something fresh or interesting to add if you don't want to repeat something people have read hundreds of times by now. I thought I had something interesting that could serve as a bit of an update by creating a kind of fresh four-dimensional absurdity where not only do people speak in banal corporate-ese and do no actual work, but the characters live in a universe where people have read Kafka and Heller and seen Office Space and Severance and used the Corporate Bullshit Generator and read Bullshit Jobs, know about this stuff, but keep doing it anyway despite knowing that they're doing it and that everybody else is doing it (and what if people actually enjoy it!? Mr. Gregory deals with the horror of this possibility for us).

 

I've had experiences of work like this where I've had to maintain a façade of having work to do to people who I know are also maintaining a façade of having work to do and know I'm doing it too. It's not just the pointlessness of the routine but the shared acknowledgement of the pointlessness paired with an omertà on vocalising it. What authority keeps us from acknowledging it, is it just camaraderie because we each get to carry on making money to pay our bills and live the rest of our lives as long as no one violates the code, or would you need to learn about the 'Big Other' in Lacanian psychology and what makes people behave themselves even when they're alone to understand who or what we unconsciously believe is watching us? This particular kind of absurdity is what I was trying to articulate and the elaborate codes and customs we have to employ to maintain it can be mined for as much material as you need. The story is pitched such that Adam is the supposedly weird one who does bizarre stuff for no reason, but attention to his environment will reveal this to be more insupportable the more closely it is paid.

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The scene on the balcony was my original idea for the story and everything grew from there. It was originally more fantastical in that it was to be a cherub that flew down to steal something important the character had been specifically been told not to lose, with the implausible nature of the theft obviously making the 'nobody will believe you' taunt funnier the more absurd it is. Plus the idea of a chubby flying baby is just funny anyway, perhaps you could take a second to imagine Adam standing with his mouth open watching it fly away with Vanessa's stuff as he concedes that nobody is in fact going to believe him. Once I restarted the story and decided to break with my previous more fantastical writing and ground it more in reality, I changed it to a little boy which I found was actually more useful anyway. The presence of a child character made for a lot of deliberate and accidental contributions to the overall impression of creativity in the story and created a lot of new possibilities for articulating Adam's experience of it. 

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I find the world a bit less domineering when we're able to laugh at our ridiculousness. I had a lot of fun writing this it was therapeutic sitting down each day to try and make myself laugh for a constructive cause. What you'll find if you do creative work is that sometimes you'll decide you're not going to make a 'real' piece of work, you're going to do something fun for yourself instead, but then you'll accidentally discover that this is actually how you're supposed to be working anyway and how the people you admire made the work that you like. So, forgive me for the indulgence here, but I will tell you about the adventures in self-amusement I had since they are integral to the project and this entire essay is an excuse to get to this part as I'm sure you've sensed.

 

• I gave myself my a chronic laughter case with my repeated use of 'ran away'. I only realised how funny it was after I'd already used it twice but the idea that adults believe this is a suitable way to act or to deal with problems, or that I the writer believes this is a suitable way for people to act, or that in this story universe there's nothing you can do about it if someone runs away from you, is funny.

• Elsewhere in things I did purely for my own amusement: there is a story element I invented just so that I had an excuse to use the sentence 'that man's exploded mum', I've waited many many years for an excuse to shoehorn the 'prints' and 'prince' mix-up which actually happened to me into something, 'chicken on the cob', 'Fuzzy Pumper barbershop thing' (just seen that there is a one-star review in that link that says: 'Although she loves it it’s a lot of money for shaver not to work'. Absolute gold), 'trouble with his ankles', 'talk to me about your hue', the idea of someone being called Mr. Gregory in the first place (maybe I got it from Mr. Eddy in Lost Highway). 'Raillery' and 'oaties' serve no real purpose other than making me laugh, and I've had the piss taken out of me for trying not to drink caffeine after 2pm, which is entirely justified and very welcome.​

• Some gags I sadly wasn't able to include are the phrase 'a bit jazzy' because I realised I'd stolen it from that episode of The Inbetweeners, uses of the words 'nibbles', 'misapplication' and 'yucky', describing someone as 'off the boil' (I got close with 'off-centre' anyway), a bit about Mr. Gregory mistaking Drum & Bass for music by a presumably Scottish man called Drummond Bass for the purpose of writing the sentence, 'until his death, he would remain privately astounded by the prolific Mr. Bass and his seemingly interminable output', and the not-that-funny-in-hindsight sentences 'my memory is fine, I don't even remember saying that' and 'tell them to hurry up faster'.

• Mr. Gregory and Annemarie's first date was also in a McDonald's which they left in disgust after waiting twenty minutes to be seated, and Mr. Gregory becomes irate at the mention of it for the rest of his life ('terrible service'). It would have been a very valuable bit of backstory to include for making some of the class implications more explicit but I'm officially making it canonical lore here anyway.

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I would love for you to tell me the funniest thing you've ever seen or heard using the form below if you can remember it. Nothing is too weird, the more inexplicable the better. And also enjoy this Reddit thread.

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Dialogue​

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I don't like writing that 'sounds' like writing. I gave myself a challenge to try and make people sound the way they sounds in real life rather than how people talk in stories, but without resorting to phonetic spellings of vernacular you see in some stories like 'woss dat over dere den?' for example which I find even worse. Where I had the choice, I opted for wording that is closest to what I would say naturally in conversation rather than the most grammatically correct. So for example I know 'that soft bit at the back of your shoulder' is not a valid way to say what I'm trying to say in there, but it is how I would say it in real life. 'The soft part at the back of one's shoulder' is obviously not what I would say ever, and 'the soft bit at the back of their shoulders' is more correct but sounds like writing instead of speech.

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I like my quick-fire exchanges that feel rhythmically right:

‘Can’t you get a new one?’

‘No.’

‘If you just go back to where you got it.’

‘No time for that.’

‘I’ll go.’

‘You can’t. Management only.’

‘I’ll take your lanyard.’

‘No you won’t.’

‘I could.’

‘They shouldn’t allow it.’

 

Everybody is self-interested and self-serving in this story and this kind of dialogue arises naturally from it. Conversations are exercises people participate in ​as a means of getting what they want and it doesn't occur to them that they would be anything other than that. I might have got the tone of this It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, especially the 'The Gang Tends Bar' episode where they can't understand why 'trick Charlie/Frank/Dee into doing it' isn't a valid response to being asked to do some work as a world where everybody isn't selfish and self-interested would be like asking a fish what water is like.

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People enter into conversation with objectives in mind in this story and the exchanges are extremely thin on the listening and waiting-your-turn part. I read White Noise a while ago and I thought that the way Don DeLillo writes dialogue in that comes closest to the way conversations happen in real life. I was at the dinner table on Christmas Day around the time I was reading it and I drifted out of the moment for a while and realised how random and chaotic group conversation is. There are several conversational threads happening at once, each person pauses their own and picks it up once there is a space for them to speak again, new ones can appear out of nowhere with no apparent logic or reason, people talk over each other there can only occasionally or not at all be direct responses to anything anyone says. The idealised form of dialogue that is tidy and convenient for writers where people listen, respond and take turns to make a logical sequence of thoughts doesn't really happen in real life.

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I've exaggerated this idea in this story. There might not be a single instance where anybody actually listens to anything anyone says, except where they detect some kind of threat or danger that interferes with their ability to be self-serving.

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Creativity, Class

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​Adam is clearly working-class of some kind and attempting upward mobility, while Mr. Gregory with his unquestioned self-assurance and belief in his abilities is presumably upper-class and born into wealth. There is broader theme of an idea to do with authority and power throughout the story that I can't exactly describe which is good news as it gives me something to work through in future work.

 

Loosely, I think I'm interested in the way that people in power are able to be their own judges and critics and how sickening it is that the beliefs about themselves decided in this manner are then fortified by mandated subordinate compliance and attention, say through their compulsory attendance at a seminar where the authority figure pontificates at uninterrupted length about their expertise in the field or discipline du jour, which is also something that has very much happened to me more than a few times. it's very, very childish and an irresponsible use of power, I think, to require the mandatory attention of a group of people unable to dissent or refuse to convince yourself that you are specialised in some way and make yourself feel better about yourself. You may as well make it mandatory for people to be your friend if you have that power. In a sense I am trying to wreak vengeance on people who have scorned me in situations like this at times in my life through this story, which is ineffective and obviously does nothing to them but at least makes me feel a bit better (and is also pretty funny). Take that. The only part I think might be too cruel in this story is the hard lampooning of the Hey Arnold man whom you might sense I have some kind of clear personal vendetta against. Look how long he makes those poor people sit in that room listening to him talk though.

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Everything else I might have said on this subject and the interaction of these two characters is what you will have picked up on if I've done my job well, so this is where I will not be explainy. I'll reiterate the point that Adam is supposedly the inept and incapable one among experts on creativity, but it's worth thinking about the creative merits of what he ultimately achieves.​

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