There has always been dark comedy, gallows humour, the laughter that pierces a bleak moment. But don’t mistake the latest book by Vancouver author and comedian Charles Demers for some abstract tribute to this strange trait.

Even with its staccato structure, broken up into short, sharply witty essays, The Horrors: An A to Z of Funny Thoughts on Awful Things adds up to a detailed, unsparing, and ultimately hopeful self-portrait. While being tossed by the alphabet from one great fear or challenge to another (from “E for End of the World” and “F for Fat” to “N for Nazis” and “O for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder”), Demers creates a moving account of his 35 years on Earth so far, building subtly but steadily around his greatest loss: the death of his mother from leukemia when he was just a kid of 10.

The Straight spoke to Demers amid a flock of well-behaved pigeons on Granville Island. 

And be sure to catch him at this year’s Vancouver Writers Fest, where he’ll be a guest at three events, on October 21, 22, and 23. See The Vancouver Writers Fest website for details.

Georgia Straight: If someone unfamiliar with your work picked this book up, they might assume it’s a series of riffs on various topics. But it’s actually something much closer to memoir.

Charles Demers: It did end up being a kind of fractured memoir, like a kaleidoscope memoir. I haven’t led an interesting enough life to sit down and write it all as one story or one narrative sweep. But by the time I finished writing this book I realized there was very little that I left on the table. I mean, we did all the editing and snipping and all that kind of stuff, but in terms of secrets from my life, or stories of my life, most of it’s here. So, yeah, it does end up kind of being in a way the story of my life so far—all the things that I think about the world basically filtered through comedy and filtered through catastrophism and pessimism and, you know, all the awful stuff, but ideally in a way that’s funny and in a way that’s entertaining, but that hopefully doesn’t diminish the things that I’m talking about.

For instance, the essay “M for Motherlessness”—for me, it was really important early on. If this kind of experiment had anything to it, I would know from that essay, because I didn’t want to write something about the worst thing that ever happened to me, the kind of defining trauma of my life, and play that for cheap laughs. I didn’t want to be evasive with it. The question of the book is “Can humour let you look at things that terrify you without pretending they’re smaller than they are?” So that essay in particular was a real test, for me, of that premise.

GS: Your mother shows up in many places, many very different essays. Was she part of the inspiration for the whole project?

CD: Yeah, she’s the fount of the whole sensibility of the book, which is the idea of this relationship between comedy and pain. My mom went through a lot in the course of a very short life. I mean, I’m four years younger than my mother was when she died, which is a sort of terrifying and sobering thought. She had a really rough go of things. And yet—or maybe “yet” is the wrong way of framing that—she was the funniest person that anyone who knew her had ever met. She was really, really funny. Even as a little kid, I understood that she was very funny. People wanted to be around her….So she definitely shows up throughout the book, because in a way, really, I’m very much my mother’s son in all the respects that relate to this book. The book’s dedicated to my dad, and I don’t think I would be a writer without my dad. But the dedication says that my only reason for ever questioning my dad’s paternity is just how positive his outlook on life is. He very much is that guy, and it’s one of the ways in which I’m least like him and, I think, most like my mom, who was very funny but also had some real anger about the way things had gone in her life.

GS: There’s something about the spirit of the book that’s quite different from the common idea that “If I didn’t laugh, I’d cry.”

CD: Yeah. I’ve never really seen laughter and crying as so much an either-or. You can do both—I have. I think that for a lot of people, making jokes or making comedy is a way of making light of something, and that’s really never been how I view or feel about it. A lot of the time, a joke is just the sound that pain makes while it leaves my mind or leaves my body. It’s the shape that thinking about it takes.

I think this is one of the big disconnects between comedians and civilians, is that a lot of times people get offended by a comedian making a joke about something—and it’s just kind of the way we think things through. I don’t mean to suggest that everybody who makes a joke about an offensive or sensitive subject is doing so out of good faith—some people are just being assholes. But a lot of the time it’s just this is how we process the information and process the feelings.

GS: There’s a lot of politics-laced humour around now, especially in the American sport of Republican-Democrat baiting. But what’s striking about The Horrors is how tightly politics is integrated into who you are, all parts of your personality.

CD: When I sat down and started writing the book, I thought, “Ah, there’ll be a few political essays and there’ll be some more personal ones.” And then I realized, when I looked back on the finished product, that all the political essays are personal, and half of the personal essays are totally political. It’s never really resonated with me, that idea that politics is this thing that’s somehow outside of us or distant from us. People tend to think of life that way—that there’s the real core of you as an individual, and then there’s family and friends, and you move out through these concentric circles to finally get at society and politics. Which is bullshit, right? I mean, we’re all absolutely shaped and conditioned by the society in which we live, the ethics of those societies, the way that imbalances of power and cruelties and kindnesses play out socially and politically. So, for me, my political identity—it is an identity, and there are certain kinds of tribal or partisan loyalties that I guess come out of that, but it really is about a core moral and philosophical commitment, I think. And I do find it hard to extricate those questions from any kind of corner of my life.

GS: In your opening essay, “A for Adolescence”, you describe what it was like to discover leftist politics at the age of 15—how it seemed like an adventure that was “genuinely outside of everything else” in your life as a white, lower-middle-class suburban kid, because so many other parts of your life had been absorbed by “the forces of commerce”. Is this kind of adventure still open to 15-year-olds, even when, say, large social-media corporations are looking to be involved in all aspects of personal life?

CD: It’s like the circuit has been closed between any possibility of resistance and anger and dissent—you know, “There’s an app for that.” And, yeah, for a 15-year-old today, in some ways it’s a lot easier to connect with the kind of adventure that I was trying to connect with politically in that moment. And then in some ways I think it’s a lot harder for all the reasons that you lay out, with this tendency to commodify and to create these little data gardens around everybody and know exactly then how to sell them everything you want to sell them. Imagine being 15 years old and trying to work your way through that kind of disorientation and confusion.

If you want to feel optimistic, though, talk to a 15-year-old. I don’t talk to a lot of kids that young, but I do talk to them when they’re at UBC three or four years later. I mean, they’re really literate, they’re savvy in a way that previous generations haven’t been.

GS: They seem way more poised.

CD: Totally….It does seem like the young people who are growing up in these exceedingly, for us, depressing circumstances are handling it with real confidence. And they’re starting to weigh in.

It’s this really interesting thing where I live in this hammock place of having been born in 1980, at the tail end of Generation X. And older than me are these baby boomers who know that the world can be better, because they lived through it. And then there are these young people, these millennials, who are like, “Well, who’s to say we can’t make the world better?” And then those of us who are sandwiched in middle, those of us who are 35 to 50 years old, we sort of need them to pull us along in terms of hope and in terms of letting us know that maybe things will be all right.