The Irish are quite deft in the art of dark humor. The grim jokes run freely through Ulysses, and you always have the feeling that it is not only possible to laugh at almost anything, but that you should laugh at everything. In hard times, it does seem to be a great sanity saver.
In my years working in New York, there were many moments when times got tough, and I mean life/death, insanity, love/loss, fear of starvation kind of tough. Pretty much immediately, I learned to embrace my love of dark humor and wield it as a weapon against self-pity and sorrow.
I was pretty miserable slugging away at Ruby Foo’s in Times Square as a waitress after graduation. It was definitely the worst job I have ever had and, let’s pray, will ever have. However, my coworkers were a hilarious bunch and we always came up with some pretty evil jokes to pass the time. Some were on customers, like when my friend served a child a pint of pure grenadine syrup after his mother complained in a rude manner that there wasn’t enough in the previous Shirley Temple. We then watched the child burst into frantic hyperactive shenanigans, and then crash into a kiddie puddle on his insufferable mother’s lap. Entertaining. Another time, we convinced a few unsuspecting waiters that our cocaine addicted manager (who later was fired for doing coke in the office, stealing money and liquor, and left amid a sobbing tantrum) had overdosed. When he showed up to lead our meeting, he was very confused at the reactions from a few of his staff members.
When I worked in the publishing industry, life was better only in that I was a little closer to literature, and because it was a job I actually needed to have graduated from college to obtain. Our office could be a bit crazy at times, and we all kept ourselves from jumping out the window by concocting ridiculous situations and making sure everything was fair game for jokes, including suicide, heart attacks, and serious illnesses like tuberculosis and pneumonia.
New York is a fantastic place for dark humor, and in my next two jobs, I easily discovered macabre minded individuals to share a cackle with me.
Barcelona and Santa Fe, on the other hand, are not really friendly shores for this kind of comedy. Certainly, I have found kindred spirits in both places, but there is something about the plentitude of sunshine, the relaxed pace of life, the focus on things like living rather than working, the mañana attitude, that keeps people from finding it amusing that you would tell an annoying man hitting on you at a bar that you would like to take him home, chop him into pieces and store his body parts in your freezer, and that this would actually entice him further rather than scare him off.
