Humor In Liza Donnelly's The Graveyard Shift

As Liza Donnelly stated in the TED talk video, “Humor relies on the traditions of a society. It takes what we known, and twists it.” After watching and reading the plethora of stories from this week, we see that there are several kinds of humor. Along with the fact that there is an abundance of kinds of humor, we also see that there are many different ways as to why that particular kind of humor is being used. We see that through these stories, there is morbid humor, satire, ribald humor, irony, hyperbole, exaggeration, and self-depreciating humor. While listening to David Sedaris’s story, “The Graveyard Shift” the entire story was rife with audience laughter. Listening to this story brought nostalgia back to the one time I went to a stand-up comedian show. This style is known as stand-up humor. In this style, the comedian will often use several kinds of humor. The most evident type of humor is morbid humor. In this kind of humor we see a funny spin on something that one might find sad or …show more content…
This type of humor has to do with events going on currently. In this TED talks episode, Donnelly accounts for how she is using comics to make a change in the world by depicting how societies form what women are supposed to be like. However, for others such as Ron Hansen, the use of humor types is much different than Donnelly’s or Sedaris’ humor. In “My Kid’s Dog” we see the use of hyperbole. For most people, we would not believe that our dog’s death was the dogs way of getting revenge. At the very end of the story, Hansen states, “That was Sparky’s final revenge…”(Hansen 3). In Margaret Atwood’s story, we see the use of morbid humor again as well as ribald humor. This is seen all throughout “Happy Endings” where in turn, majority of the story does not end “happy.” The final story is “Nuit of the Living Dead” by David Sedaris. This story is rife with humor such as farce irony, exaggeration, and morbid