Humour in the Trick - Michael Mackenzie

Choose a novel or a short story in which humour plays an important part. Explain how the humour is created and show how it made an important contribution to your enjoyment of the text as a whole.

"The Trick Is To Keep Breathing" written by Janice Galloway is a novel dealing with a women's recovery from depression caused by the drowning of her partner. Despite dealing with the protagonist's depression, the novel has glimpses of humour throughout; giving hope to the reader of Joy's recovery. This essay will show how the humour is created and describe its contribution to the reader's enjoyment of the text as a whole.
At points in the novel, we see that the character of Joy can laugh at herself. "The Bowie poster hides wine stains where I threw a glass at the wall. A wee accident." She makes light of her obvious drunken violent tendencies by calling it "a wee accident". The use of Scots word "wee", has childlike connotations which gives a sense that she doesn't understand what she has done wrong. The childlike persona clearly shows sarcasm conveying that she knows she has a problem-being violent when drunk-but she can laugh at herself at the same time. This gives an optimistic edge to the story as we see Joy is not completely depressed and her real personality-rather sarcastic and cynical using dark humour- shines through.
She often uses a Scottish voice to poke fun at the Scottish race and their culture. "Scottish Education: apportion blame that ye have not blame apportioned unto you. It wisny me, it was you/him/her/a wee man and he ran away." The clear contrast between the archaic,sophisticated first sentence and the colloquial Scots second, creates a very humorous effect, mocking the Scottish race. This is again finding problems with herself, as she is Scottish. But it also shows that she notices flaws in society; Scottish people will rarely take the blame for something and they do not have a very wide vocabulary. This shows, despite frequent thoughts of her partner's death, she is not always thinking about him; she is not in such a deep pit of depression that she cannot think as she would have before his death. This helps to show what Joy's personality was like before the accident.
With use of the stream of consciousness narrative, we are 'trapped' in Joy's mind and the author is taken out of the situation altogether. Notwithstanding Galloway's equally dark humour does show in parts. The character's names are rather ironic and humorous in this way. The character of Michael Fisher, Joy's partner, drowned. The link between fish and water is clear showing that Galloway chose this particular name for a humorous effect. In addition, the name Joy Stone is ironic as Joy is in a state of depression; she is anything but joyful. These aspects to the story are the only parts where Galloway's personality shows and we see she is rather similar to Joy as far as humour is concerned.
Humour plays an important part in this novel as it shows that Joy is not a completely broken character and there is hope for her recovery. We see what she used to be like before the accident-making light of her problems, sarcastic and cynical. However this may not be completely true as her personality has obviously been affected by Michael's death and this may be why her humour is so dark. Overall, the humour has a positive effect on the reader as it helps us deal with Joy's depression easier. It helps us see the inevitability of her recovery and makes the character of Joy much more likeable.