Kay tries to give [his characters] an even more sympathetic cast by having them constantly joke and banter with each other. In several years of reviewing novels, many of which also try to capture an atmosphere of kidding around, I have never seen it work. Kibitzing just doesn't travel well onto the page.It's true. From my own experience, the first draft is the one where no one talks – characters are merely embedded, like raisins in a cake, within big, doughy rolls of description and exposition. In the second draft, in an effort to liven things up, everybody has long, jokey, self-aware conversations that go on for pages and that repeatedly shred the tone. In subsequent drafts, this gets cut back ever further until, at last, the rule that characters (and people) are funnier when they don't know they're being funny re-asserts itself.
It's a tricky thing, having a character be intentionally funny – a tricky thing not to let that joke be merely one the author is telling the reader.
Another thing: I've read a fair number of sci-fi, thriller, and mystery novels in the last couple of years (mostly because I was paid to), and, like Marchand, I often found myself annoyed at the jokey, sub-sitcom tone that overtakes a lot of the dialogue. It's a mood-killer every time. I think there is a way to represent the very real influence that sitcoms and the like have had and continue to have on the way a lot of people speak, but in most of the cases I'm referring to, it was clear the author meant for the reader to come away thinking those characters were "funny." I think it only ever works if the author is able to contain a character's "funniness" within a cloud of negative capability; in other words, leaving room for the reader to not find the character funny at all, or to find that it's the character's very funniness – or the attempt to be funny – that is funny, not anything he/she actually says. Does that make any sense?
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This is one of the problems I have with most Douglas Coupland novels. (I just finished reading JPod, so the subject has been on my mind.)
For humour, sitcoms often rely on their characters being in a state of excruciating anguish and/or fury. Add a bit of incest and fratricide, and "Everybody Loves Raymond" becomes Sophocles. Archie Bunker always seemed just a suck on a gas hose away from Willie Loman. "Extras" is at times almost unwatchable because Andy and Maggie are so profoundly avaricious and stupid. I think the humour comes from an imbalance between the desperation of a sitcom character as compared to the pettiness of his/her goal. Oedipus Rex had something to be upset about. Ray Romano, not so much.
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