Dry Humor in HP

[lupinlore]

No: HPFGUIDX 129521

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "Tonks" <tonks_op at y...> wrote:
> It always amazes me how so many people can read the same books and 
> have such different interpretations of what they have read.  One 
> wonders what the author thought would happen when folks read her 
> books.  Prior to being a member of this list, if I were an author I 
> would naively assume that everyone would read it the way that I 
> intended. It would never occur to me that there would be such 
> diverse interpretations.  Now I am older and wiser and realize that 
> people do see the events and characters in sometimes radically 
> opposite extremes.  Reading this list has really been an education 
> for me in diversity.
> 
> Having said that, I wonder about the humor of JKR.  Dry, sarcastic 
> humor, what some call dark humor or gallows humor can be difficult 
> to convey in person.  I tend to use that type of humor myself and I 
> know that not everyone takes what I say as humor. Some think that I 
> am being serious.  It is even more difficult to convey that type of 
> humor in written form.  I think that JKR does use that type of humor 
> in the books and just as in RL the fact that it is humor does not 
> come across.
> 
> People on the list here are in two camps on a number of issues 
> involving the behavior of certain characters.  I suspect one reason 
> for this is that there is a difference in the perception of the 
> humor that the author is using.
> 

Very good point indeed, Tonks.  I used to work with somebody who had
that type of humor, and there was always severe trouble because it
just didn't always come across the way he meant it to.  I eventually
got into the habit of saying "Jim, there's two ways I can take that,
which one did you mean?" It drove the poor man banannas, but
eventually he became more effective at getting his point across (well,
I think the fact somebody slugged him once had something to do with it
as well).

The problem, of course, is that you can only do that type of thing
(challenging verbally, not slugging) when you are in direct
communication with a person.  In a situation like the Potter books, it
ain't possible the vast majority of the time.  If the author thinks
she is being misintepreted, and if she cares (and there is no reason
she has to care) then she just has to take action to make herself
clearer.  The burden, perhaps unfairly, is 99% on her in this
situation.  To a certain extent JKR uses her website to do that, as
well as her interviews, but since she doesn't give many interviews or
answer many questions on the site (and I'm not saying I blame her)
there is a limited amount she can do in such a forum.  If she really
wants to clear things up, she has to do that mainly in the books
themselves.

There's also the fact that I think she sometimes forgets that she
knows so much more about the characters than we do.  She knows, in
that anybody knows, how their minds work, where they are coming from,
what has shaped them and why they act the way they do. I think she
often forgets that to someone without all that information, the
actions and attitudes and motivations of the characters can seem very
different than what she intended. Thus a lot of people were blindsided
when she made a comment about Sirius having a certain attitude toward
people who he saw as social inferiors.  To her this was old news.  But
she forgot that there really wasn't any explanation about that in the
books, and thus Sirius' attitude toward Kreacher, which to her was
utterly clear, was seen a different way by her readers (i.e. the
social inferior aspect of it didn't come through at all).  I rather
suspect her bafflement about fans and Snape comes, in part, from the
same source.  She forgets that her readers don't have the information
she does.

One way to sum this up is, as a drama teacher I once knew used to say,
"What you hear come out of your mouth, what THEY hear come out of your
mouth, and what ACTUALLY comes out of your mouth are three very
different things."

Lupinlore