TIH 617: Jasper Bark on Dark Comedy, Horror Comedy, and The Origins of Gallows Humour

Michael David Wilson 0:28
Welcome to This Is Horror, a podcast for readers, writers and creators. I'm Michael David Wilson, and every episode, alongside my co host, Bob Pastorella, we chat with the world's best writers about writing, life lessons, creativity and much more. Today is another daddy's boy tangential episode, and on this occasion, we will be talking to Jasper bark about dark comedy. Now, Jasper bark is an award winning author of a variety of books, including the way of the Barefoot zombie stuck on you and most recently, draw you in. Jasper is a longtime friend of the show. He used to host a number of the This Is Horror Podcast, live events, and he's a dear friend. He's also one of the funniest and smartest people I know. So a tremendous pleasure to chat with Jasper. But before we get into that, a quick advert break.

RJ Bayley 1:45
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Bob Pastorella 1:53
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Michael David Wilson 3:06
Okay, without saying, Here it is. It is Jasper bark, talking about dark comedy on This Is Horror. Jasper. Welcome back to This Is Horror.

Jasper Bark 3:22
Thank you very much for having me. I'm very excited to discuss dark comedy and comedic horror. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 3:30
so, I mean, we actually spoke to you a decade ago now about horror comedy with David James Keaton and I thought, you know, we can kind of refresh this topic after 10 years, I feel it's okay to repeat a little bit in terms of what we're talking about. I was just

Jasper Bark 3:53
gonna say there's the famous quote that history always repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce. So I guess this is the farcical

Michael David Wilson 4:03
I guess it may well be. And, I mean, I wonder, in terms of, we were talking about horror comedy before we're talking about dark comedy. Now, I think they're linked, but I think they're definitely distinct. So I wonder, I mean, how would you go about comparing the two? And then, when you look at your own work, do you consider it to be more horror comedy or dark comedy, or elements of both?

Jasper Bark 4:34
With respect to my own work, I think that you do have elements of both. I do like exploring dark themes, but I have got a very long history, both as a stand up comic, as a comedy sketch writer, and as a comedy writer in general. But there's often there's a very, very dark theme. I mean, I think the difference between dark comedy. Uh, is that you're you're not specifically setting out to create a particular reaction within your audience, per se, other than perhaps a laugh or a chuckle or a wry smile with with horror comedy, you you are aiming for a sense of unease, and you are aiming, if you're really, really good, for a scare or certainly, to unsettle your audience. Dark fiction doesn't have to go for such a visceral response. It can make you, generally speaking, I think it's comedy that makes you very, very uneasy about the things you're laughing about, and you begin to kind of question yourself on your own moral values, but at the same time, if it's really well done, you can't help but laugh at it. So I would say that would be the specific difference. There's less of a visceral reaction, and also, to a degree, pure comedy or pure humor, also wants a visceral reaction in the way that comedy and horror are almost like two I don't say two sides of the same coin. Let's say they're two faces on like a Janus headed God, facing in opposite directions. But they are kind of like, you know, they share part of the same cranium, because humor wants a direct, visceral physical reaction from you. It wants to make you laugh, and horror wants to make you scream. Whereas dark fit a dark comedy, it can be more subtle, it can be have more layers, and it probably it doesn't want such a pure reaction as horror, which is just fear, or comedy, which is just laughter. It's It's unsettling and it's easy. You're looking at some very, very difficult subject matter which would normally disturb you, but at the same time, it's making you laugh and it's challenging your preconceptions. So I would kind of say, in a very general sense, that would be how I would that, where I would look at the demarcation lines between dark fiction, horror and comedy. But there are, of course, like, any kind of, like, you know, Venn diagram, there are overlaps. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 7:18
I think the horror comedy is certainly more kind of contained or more specific, whereas there can be elements of dark comedy in any genre, but horror comedy itself is a genre, and so when, when I think about horror comedy, I mean, probably evil, dead two is one of the first things that comes to mind in a kind of starter. And I think we mentioned them both before, but there were certainly elements in Robert plot Psycho and then also an American Werewolf in London, if we want to go really back to the kind of genesis of horror comedy. But then when you talk about dark comedy, it can really be comedy that's just laughing at almost these things that we shouldn't talk about laughing at the things that we shouldn't laugh at. And so there's dark comedy almost in everything, depending upon the the the lens in which you view the world through. And then there's also probably quite a large overlap between Absurdism and dark comedy. You know, if I think of Kurt Vonnegut, which, Which category do we even put Vonnegut in? I was reading breakfast for champions, and a lot of a lot of what's funny there is just how bizarre the kind of concept is. And it's also poking fun at like society, at America, at the way in which we just go about living. So I think,

Jasper Bark 9:12
well, that's also where dark comedy and satire also overlap, and where you go from the satirical to the sardonic, which is when you start getting really, really biting, really quite nasty, but also really quite dark.

Michael David Wilson 9:31
I mean, in preparation for this, I decided to have a little look at what are some books and some films that are considered dark comedy that I had yet to explore. So I kind of came up with a short list, and I started reading a book called mother for dinner by charlem Auslander. Wow. And I mean to this one really hooked me from the start. Because, I mean, the idea is that, and I realize, as I'm about to say this, and I didn't plan it deliberately, but both episodes that we've done for the status boy, kind of week, I've opened by talking about a story to do with cannibalism. This is not my thing, but maybe it is, maybe, maybe I'm kind of tapping into something. But, you know, the idea is that the family that this book follows, they are cannibal and I love and that there's something humorous that they talk about that they're not, we're cannibals. They're like, No, no, we are cannibal. And there's something humorous, even in the way that things are phrased. It's like, you know, someone can be Jewish, someone can be Christian, they can be Muslim, they can be cannibal. And they're like, this is the oldest world. These are the oldest people. And part of being cannibal is that at the end of someone's life, you eat them. This is very similar to the Sayaka Murata thing that I was telling you about, but, but it's a completely different book in terms of what it's going for, because it is, there is a lot of satire in terms of identity and tribalism and religion and how people categorize one another into into these groups. But I think why it's effective. And when I was trying to think, you know what? What do I think makes effective dark comedy. You take a topic or a subject that is either silly or shocking or both, and then you play it completely seriously. You don't do it necessarily for the left, but because of the way that it's delivered, or just because of what we're talking about, it's going to make you laugh. And they're, they're, they're always referring to people from history as well. So for example, that they mentioned Andre the Giant, and then it's like, Andre the Giant who is cannibal. And it's like, just makes me laugh that you're just referencing, like, oh, by the way, you know he was a cannibal. And then there's this running gag, how Jack Nicholson is the absolute enemy of cannibal people, because Jack Nicholson is cannibal. So Jack Nicholson, who is cannibal, he won an account Academy Award, and it was one of the best moments for the cannibal people. They all tuned in to watch it on television. He's thanking all the actors. He's thanking his family, and they're waiting for it. Yes, he's going to finally on the Academy Award stage, reveal that he is cannibal. It's going to be this big moment. It's going to put everybody into the spotlight. He didn't do it. So now Jack Nicholson is the enemy of the cannibal people, but all of this, everything that happens, it's all played completely dead pan and completely seriously. And that that's why it's effective. You know, there's no like, like, if we look at, you know, dad is boy. I've got a lot of jokes within the text in between the characters, but there's none of there's none of that. It's all very deadpan, but it's just this bizarre concept and funny concepts played straight, I think can be a very effective recipe for for dark comedy. I

Jasper Bark 14:00
agree. And I think one of the you hit on cannibalism, one of the areas of dark comedy is to it's about not just challenging, but also puncturing and, in effect, disempowering taboos. We have taboos in society almost as like buffers on our behavior. They're lines which we shouldn't cross, and sometimes that's very, very healthy for our society, because we're not going to engage in activity which can be severely damaging to individuals, like forms of sexual assault or pedophilia or such for instance, there's a reason there's taboo about that, and particularly over behavior, but also anxiety. We build up anxiety, and we build up all sorts of negative feelings around these taboos, and occasionally society changes and things that we've held as being really taboo, such as sex outside of marriage, are no longer a taboo, and we so. Therefore, the shibboleths that we that we put up, these taboos that we build, these lines we can't cross, sometimes needs to be challenged. They need to be punctured and sometimes completely erased. And we do this through humor. We challenge the taboo by mocking it gently, or by showing its absurdity, which was a word you put up. And often, sometimes you can show its absurdity by simply just moving at a couple of meters in one direction or another, to show how absurd is to have this line in the first place. And then you can do that really, really dead pan. And the humor is implicit. It's inferred by the audience. They can pick up, they go, and that's, that's what, I think, what you're talking about with the cannibal, but moving on from that as well, also you you when we last spoke about daddy's boy, you spoke about the fact you wrote it in you when you were a very dark place in your life. So I'd kind of like to talk about the healing nature of dark fiction, because I think it's a way for us to to puncture and disempower our own personal taboos and and to do so can be personally very, very healing, both for the writer and for the reader. Oh, my God. He really went there. He really said that. Oh, thank God. That weights that burden of like you can't say, that you can't think that you can't be that has suddenly been lifted off me, and I feel like so much better of which is and that also kind of like that links us to things like whistling past the graveyard and making jokes because we're challenging our own fear of mortality, and even the phrase, I don't know if You knew this, but that we use the phrase gallows humor often to mean, like dark comedy. But did you know that in medieval times, when they had like public gallows in squares, that there was a certain breed of troubadour who were like a clown, who would leap up onto the scaffold once the the person had been hung or beheaded, which was another thing. And they would like do a series of slapstick, like buffoonery with the corpse. So they'd kind of bend it over and pretend to kind of like shag it, or they'd pull out and because, if it was a male, often he'd have a huge erection, because that's one of the things. And so they'd start slapping the erection about and hitting it over the head with it, knocking each other over. It was particularly big. If it was particularly tiny they don't like try and hang their hats on it, and the hats would fall off. And the audience from having witnessed this intensely horrible spectacle of seeing a human being have their life taken away from them by the state, arbitrarily, was suddenly transformed into a comedy that people they were challenging death, they were denigrating all the taboos surrounding death and corpses, and in doing so, it was actually quite a healing thing for this crowd. As bleak and bizarre as it sounds and all the weird things I've just described to you might sound this was freeing and healing for the people who watched it.

Michael David Wilson 18:03
Well, they certainly didn't do that after the Saddam Hussein execution,

Jasper Bark 18:10
no, although I bet you, they would have, like, doubled their viewing figures if they had.

Michael David Wilson 18:16
But I mean, what? What you're saying? Yeah, I did not know about that, but it, it kind of fits as well like it, I it's not unbelievable, you know, and goodness, I mean, I guess, like throughout history, like politicians and the state tried to find ways to distract and to obfuscate evil and wrong doings, and that was their way of doing it then, and I suppose, because there there weren't videos and there weren't kind of records in the way that There were are today. You could, you could do that, whereas now it's like, well, hang on a minute. Let's replay the video. Yeah, I'm, I'm not sure that Boris Johnson should have been like, slapping that erect penis during the post execution. So, yeah, then there would have been another inquiry, yeah,

Jasper Bark 19:22
well, it's time in Cambridge, I'm sure he slapped more than a few erect penises as part of his hazing ritual,

Michael David Wilson 19:29
just to a farm animal society. Yeah,

Bob Pastorella 19:31
you know, who was the like, the first person, like, when you like, you know, it's like, you know, it's like, what do they have, like, a fucking meeting or something. These hangings a little bleak. Maybe do little something to liven them up. It's like, what are you thinking? Have a parade, no. How about we have, like, a comedy troupe come up there? What do you mean? I can see this is almost like a fucking Monty Python skit,

Michael David Wilson 20:05
you know, yeah,

Bob Pastorella 20:10
just like this. This meeting is like today would discuss what they're going to do after the public executions, you know, yeah. And speaking of dark, you know, dark humor, Monty Python, you know, just probably most of what they did was, was very dark,

Jasper Bark 20:27
certainly Life of Brian, yeah, I'm particularly

Bob Pastorella 20:32
thinking like when Michael was talking about how they dead pan, like everything, um, the meaning of life, the tiger scene with, you know, Eric Idle missing the whole leg, and they just play it completely, like it's just another day at the office. You know, woke up this morning one sock too many, you know, like this night, notice my leg was sort of gone. Like, Oh yeah, well, that's fine. And it's like, what the hell man, this guy's leg is fucking gone, like, and it just totally just dead pan, the whole thing, I thought that was like, brilliant and extremely dark, because you could lose to your leg. That's, I don't think that's kind of funny, you know? So they turn something that's pretty nasty into something humorous, yeah,

Jasper Bark 21:28
that that particular sketch as well. Also, it has like a precedent in those because Monty Python were massively influenced, on the one hand, by the Goon Show, who were Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers and Harry Seacom. And, on the other hand, the beyond the fringe, which was like the beginning of kind of like modern satire in Britain. And there's a famous sketch between Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, where Dudley Moore is auditioning for the part of Tarzan, but he only has one leg, and the guy sitting behind the thing is, is, is, is chatting away to him, saying, You're not really suitable for this part. And Dudley Moore staying there hopping, saying, and why not? You know, I've got nothing against your left leg. Your left leg is beautiful. I've got nothing against it, have you? You have no right leg.

Bob Pastorella 22:22
I need to find that and see if they have that. That sounds hilarious. It's

Jasper Bark 22:27
another very classic sketch.

Michael David Wilson 22:29
Well, I mean in terms of your own work, Jasper, did you start writing comedy? Did you start writing horror? Or did you simultaneously start writing both at the same time? I'm kind of wondering which came first. And

Jasper Bark 22:48
yeah, that's interesting, if you obviously, I'm guessing, because all three of three of us are writers, and I'm guessing you're a bit like me, and that you've written for as long as you were literate. So I've been writing things about five years old. And, yeah, I think I've always written comedy, because I've always been very into different comedy things. Certainly the early part of my career, I was like writing sketches for BBC Radio four and BBC Radio two for like, because they in Britain, there's more of a tradition of like, what would be called Old Time Radio. Over in the States, there's a lot more radio drama and there's a lot more comedy shows. A lot of comedians break in to the BBC the radio first, and then get a TV program if their thing is successful, and there's there were lots of openings, particularly in the 90s, to get on as a sketch writer. So, but prior to that, had been like a playwright, and I'd also been a stand up, which was my way into doing sketch comedy. So that was probably the only part of my professional career was probably writing more comedy than horror, and terms of writing horror professionally, came to that probably a little later when I decided I wanted to concentrate more on prose. But then also I was writing a lot of comics. And again, there's always been a blend in in horror comics between I think horror and comedy, and comedy is almost like the kind of the seasoning for a lot of horror, in the respects that a tiny bit of humor sharpens the more horrific imagery, in the same way that little bit of salt and pepper brings out the flavor of the meat or the vegetables depending on your dietary preferences, and also a laugh is also often very carefully placed, and laughter, like scares, are based on a different form of timing in the way that you think about how you time a jump scare. And the way you build up to it, the tension that you build and then you release tension, is very, very similar to the same way that you time a joke, you build tension expectation in the audience, and then you release it, and either the Audience screams or they laugh, but it's essentially the same kind of tool, and sometimes you get them to laugh before you get them to scream, in order to heighten the scream with a little bit of laughter. And often when people scream in when They're Watching horror movies, they scream and then they laugh at themselves, because both are physiological releases of tension. So I've kind of segued away from your question, probably professionally, I started on comedy that I moved to horror, and then somewhere along the way, I realized they were kind of, they were kissing cousins. They were part, I know, they were fellow travelers, I think, in the same way as well, also the other genre, which is very, very similar to both horror and comedy, or should we say, dark fiction and humorous fiction would be erotic fiction or porn, because it's the only other genre which is specifically geared to getting a physiological response from its audience. A comedy you want people to laugh that isn't an explosive physical reaction involves if you're laughing too much, you're spraying, you know, like spittle, so there's a slight release of bodily fluids. If you're screaming again, you're releasing, like you're making a large noise, you're releasing bodily fluids, in terms of, like, a bit of spittle. And if you're watching porn, depending upon your your gender, you're definitely probably screaming if you're having a good orgasm, and you're probably releasing some bodily fluids, you know. And people laugh until they wet themselves, you know. And people can squirt when they orgasm as well. So I think those three kind of genres of fellow travelers, and they're also, like, the least respected amongst all of the fictional genres. You know, porn is, like, just considered to be totally like, it's still a taboo, which is why it works quite nicely, I think often with humor, because humor can be quite sexy. Horror is kind of like, it's like, half a step above porn. It's almost allowed in the house, but you don't have it in the parlor with the polite people and the good china. It has to sit like you know, in that comes into the trades entrance and it sits in the back parlor with the servants and humor is allowed occasionally into the parlor, but it has to leave quite quickly if it gets too full of itself, but nobody particularly talk praises people for their humor. Or humor is a genre which is has a great deal of critical study, not in the same way that say crime has far more literary cache. And of course, literary fiction has much, much more cache because it's terribly serious and extremely dull and very, very, very, very, very good for you, which is why you can't enjoy it. Yeah,

Michael David Wilson 28:07
it's always been puzzling and interesting. How you know those three genres have widely had disdain, and, I mean, we've all had these conversations too, where, you know, we tell someone where we're a writer, and they're like, oh, okay, they're very interesting. Oh, I write horror. Oh dear. Oh, yeah, yeah,

Jasper Bark 28:40
yeah. It was the same thing as well. For many years, when I wrote comics, I said, and you try and tell people, well, I write graphic novels, no one knew what you were talking about. They thought you were talking about porn. So they go that, oh, oh, how jolly brave of you. I just, I think I just have to go over there to check on something, which is kind of the other response, if, if you tell them you write horror, they always say, Oh, I really don't like horror. It's always it's one of these genres, like porn, that has a huge amount of prejudice surrounding it. People think they don't like it. Until you begin to have a conversation, you ask about the things that they read and the things they watch, and they go, but that's not horror. And you're saying kind of is, yeah,

Michael David Wilson 29:23
and then we have to have an almost semantic rebranding, or it's like, well, they don't like horror, but they'll admit to liking dark fiction, because that doesn't sound ghastly now, does it? I don't really watch porn, but I I want to

Jasper Bark 29:41
erotica.

Michael David Wilson 29:44
Like, I don't know physical romance. You call it, you know, just looking over these labels,

Bob Pastorella 29:54
I don't like horror, but I love Stephen Keene, yeah, I was like. Really,

Jasper Bark 30:00
that's nice. Yeah, you get the kind of the demolition people who don't. Horror fiction has its own in the way that porn has erotica. Erotic is kind of all right, because it might have a few literary kind of, like merits to it, but porn isn't horror fiction has weird fiction, which is, and it's like, what is weird fiction. Well, it's not horror. I write weird fiction, you see, because I'm literary, like Mr. Lovecroft,

Bob Pastorella 30:28
who wasn't literary, but yeah,

Jasper Bark 30:31
exactly,

Michael David Wilson 30:33
yeah. Well, we don't need to get into the scope of what is and isn't literary, what is and isn't literature, but I will say it's a lot wider than a lot of people assume it is. You know, it

Bob Pastorella 30:47
wouldn't say in a modern age, though, that you write erotica, because somebody's gonna say, what? Like Lady Chatterley's Lover, like no more, like penthouse forum. But, yeah, and I'm

Jasper Bark 31:04
wondering as well, we've sort of, we've sort of, we've identified that there are slightly more respectable ways of ways we dress up one like we don't call them comic or funny books anymore. We call them good effort novels. You know, you can say, I don't write chorr, I write weird fiction. You could say I don't write porn, writer erotica, but does anybody? Is there, like, a posh, kind of more literary, acceptable form of humor, like, I'm a humor writer, I'm a comedy writer. No, no, I'm not a comedy writer. I'm a, would you say satirist?

Michael David Wilson 31:34
Or Yeah. I mean, sometimes people would say, for some reason, like, humorist is then it takes it to a level above humor or comedy, and then there's the satirist as parody. What they will do is they'll just try to find essentially Shub sub genres or more specific terms to describe the type of comedy. And it's like, yeah, but it, it is a comedy, yeah, but, but even, I mean, with comedy itself, you don't really see a comedy section in the bookstore. No, it's kind of lumped in with other things. And then if there is a comedy section, it will actually be non fiction. It's like, well, he's like, you know the Yeah, exactly, so, yes,

Jasper Bark 32:31
drowned out into the book, right? Yes, spare time.

Michael David Wilson 32:36
I've found, you know, because I'm gravitating, almost accidentally, more into the comedy genre. It does then create the issue where it's harder to sell and it's harder to market, because there isn't a defined section, you know, it's way easier to sell horror, which we've already said is is disparaged, but at least there's a kind of clear expectation. And so then, I mean, I wanted to ask as well. So we spoke about your beginnings. But what does your writing look like at the moment in terms of the specifics, in terms of what you're doing, how you're structuring your your day and your projects, and, I mean, has the type of stuff that you're writing shifted? Are you having to be, I guess, more concerned about certain aspects and topics than than you were a number of years ago? Because, I mean, comedy has always been a place where we can speak about the unspeakable, but But even now, there are some things where it's like, well, that you're gonna have to be really careful about.

Jasper Bark 33:55
Yeah, I I've been in situations like that before. I remember when Lady Diana died, Princess Diana died, sorry, and up to that point, she'd been kind of similar in the press and in the public view to Meghan mark how Meghan Markle is seen now, she had her many admirers still, but she was, she was somewhat disparaged by mainstream culture, and then she died, and there was this weird thing happened, particularly if I was living in London, so it was a large urban setting, and I remember the day after she died, I got off the tube, and I was walking through the streets, and complete strangers were crying on each other's shoulders over this person who, a few days ago, they were probably tutting about, how dare she running around with an Arab Dodi fired off terrible beyond the pale. Think a woman like that would do that, and then suddenly she dies and becomes this martyr figure, and all this compassion is released. But, um, at that time, I. Was a lot of my stand up pack was free forming, and I had to cancel a whole bunch of gigs because I was aware that at some point my whole thing was, my whole act was about pushing the audience up to its like acceptable limit, and finally, what the limit is, and then maybe sometimes pushing him a tiny bit over, and seeing how far I could push it. I knew I was going to say something, and I knew that they were going to lynch me, that I have literally been physically threatened, that had occasionally happened to me in Acts, and sometimes that was quite exciting, but I had to just cancel out and explain to promoters, I'm going to say something. This is not a time that I want to be doing it. And I was part of a sketch show with a bunch of people who went on to be part of Horrible Histories. And we used to end every night on a song, and we'd slightly change the lyrics every time the song was called the end. And it sort of started like the final sheet of bog roll or the toke that hits the roach like the kamikaze pilot as he makes his last approach. And we had one line like a frog kissed by a princess in a dodgy fairy tale, and the whole audience booed that line. We didn't think had anything at all to do with Princess Diana, but they were like, Whoa. So that that was a line of like, woof. So it's nothing new to suddenly find the entire social political sphere changes, and some things become so taboo to talk about, we do find ourselves in the middle of a culture war, and I think the problem with that is we're lacking a sense of irony. One of the kind of great things about 90s culture was it allowed a lot of behavior that previously in the 80s, had been decided to be a very anti social unacceptable behavior. There were certain areas of misogyny, and things which were very much became taboo, and anything sexual was just instantly completely that was totally and politically correct for some reason. And then the 90s came about, and suddenly everybody could indulge in all these, like, really cheap NAF things, and all these areas really weren't, weren't actually particularly skeptical, because we're all doing it ironically. Yeah, I'm into, like, you know, the these terrible old porn movies, but I'm, I'm really liking them ironically, and this gave a wonderful license to all kinds of bad behavior, because we just accept that we knew it was wrong, but we're lacking ironically, and if you think about the whole culture wars, what we've lost is any sense of irony, any sense that we can appreciate someone else's opinion, ideas and loves, and yet at the same time, we can accept there are elements of it that aren't acceptable, but we can ironically enjoy it, and it's that, it's that total lack of irony that is, I think, fueling the culture wars and causing us because this inability to talk from one side, to talk to another, and that whole group of people who aren't really interested find themselves in the middle of kind of being forced into two extreme camps against their will in many ways. So yeah, you do have to be careful, obviously. Because if you want to unsettle people, you want to do it for the right reasons, and if you want to confront people, you want to do it for the right reasons, not just, and there are good reasons for doing that, and occasionally there are bad reasons. There are things you can culturally appropriate somebody else's culture's beliefs, ideas, and misuse or misunderstand them, and do it from a position of privilege, either because of your gender or because of your race or ethnic background, and that's maybe not a taboo that's yours to puncture, so you have to be careful about that. But then, because there are so many taboos, because there are so many straw men flying around, you've got more targets, and so you have to be more careful about your targets and more careful about how you take aim. But there's never been a more important time to go after de boos, to look at the things we can and can't say, and why we can and can't say them. And just as we said, dark comedy, dark fiction and horror are perfect vehicles to do that, because we do go there. We do speak the unspeakable. We say the unsayable. That's why, a, why they're funny and B, why they're horrific. And again, tension builds up around these things. You can't say that. Oh my god, you can't say that. And comedy and horror are all about building tension and puncturing it, which is why taboos are very, very important, both to comedy and to to horror. We go after those sacred cows, and sometimes that's highly important.

Bob Pastorella 39:59
I. Was gonna say that if you look at the two main shows that have been going for a long period of time in the United States, the Simpsons and South Park and, to some degree, Family Guy, the reason why these shows are successful is even though that they tend to to lean left, they skewer everything. No one is safe. No political alignment is safe, no, no. In other words, like they they take the taboos, the things that you shouldn't talk about, and poke fun of them, at them, with them in a way that anyone can laugh at it. So to me, it's like, if you're gonna do comedy, then you can't, you can't be you can't, you can't go in one direction. You, you, you have to continuously, I guess what they call punch up. You don't want to punch down, so you want to and so, and it's like everything that they tend to put on a pedestal is what they're skewering. Celebrities, celebrity worship, religion, politics, business, everything that the typical American would actually, in a sense, worship because that they want this thing. They want, all this stuff. They want all this if you can make people laugh about that stuff, then you're safe. It's, it's, which is, in a world of comedy, you want to, you want to be, you want to be as edgy as you can without getting fucking canceled. You know, you're in talking about, we don't have the degree of irony. There's a lot of things that are missing in society, in general, irony, shame, empathy. These are, these are things that we, we've seen fall by the wayside, and now it's, it's everything is based around social media and and social media purity test and and all this stuff. And where, do you end up? On the, on the, on the, on the scale of things. And so it's, it's almost like you don't want to say anything publicly, because no matter what you say, you're fucked, you know, and so, but at the same time, you have people who make these shows who can say whatever the fuck they want to say. And it's like, Ha, yeah, I picked on your group too, because y'all all suck. So which is, like, South Park basically, like, hey, you know what? If you, if you put it out there, we're gonna fuck with you about it. And if you don't like it, that's just too fucking bad, you know? And I've always liked that approach. That's pretty cool.

Jasper Bark 42:59
I think that's back to healing. That's and it's healing the fractures within society, as you said, by being in very bipartisan or tripartisan. And it goes back to what I was saying about the importance in dark fiction of actually being a very healing genre, which would also like, I think take us back to daddy's boy, because was it therapeutic for you to write that, to go to those dark places and those almost kind of like sick, sick, humanist places when you were quite dark place in your life?

Michael David Wilson 43:35
Yeah, daddy's boy was more cathartic than I even realized, until I really got into it, because I was, you know, at this really dark place in my life, and then I'm just writing this book that is bringing me joy every day, every day I'm smiling, every day I'm laughing. And you know, that's exactly what I needed. You know, because I, despite what was happening, I I was trying, and I do try to kind of live in the present moment and be like, Look, anything that's happened in the past, I can't change anything that will happen in the future. That's not for now, but but for now. I can enjoy this moment. I can be here. I can be present. And so to write daddy's boy, which was the, the absolute most fun I've had writing any project. It just meant that every day I got up, I'm infused. I'm excited about it. But also you know that there are for those who choose to look deeper. There is, as we said before, commentary on parenthood, on fractured relationships, on rekindling the. Relationships between fathers and sons, between parents and children, and really looking at the limits in terms of what you would and what you wouldn't do for your children, what, what are perhaps the hard lines where it's like, you have to say, Dad, I can't condone that. I can't do that. And you know, there's a moment, particularly at the end of daddy's boy, where it's like, Look, I'll take, I'll take that picture, but I won't do that little extra movement to give it a bit of character. So you got to get you. But I guess really, it's, it's talking about the seriousness, but it's couching it in terms that almost makes it safe and approachable, you know, rather than just presenting it in a really sad way, in a way that is devoid of light. And that brings us back to horror as well. Because, I mean, if you think about a lot of the slasher films, they started because people wanted to talk about and to present what they couldn't, which was like this epidemic of serial killers in America, but if they put a mask on, and they had almost some kind of Carnival, we can now explore and we can comment on that. So, I mean, I think a lot of great fiction is talking about the things we shouldn't talk about and couching them in terms that make people feel safe and that, that's certainly what Chuck Palahniuk has done throughout his career. He is a master at that. So, yes, that his boy was cathartic. But, you know, I think it's important as well, you know, as a way of expressing things that I just couldn't in any other way, the fact that I got to do it with some des lion and John fashion knew and Andy Peters references just makes it a bonus. I

Jasper Bark 47:10
think so. And I think one of the the you mentioned earlier on in the conversation, the word absurd and the absurd is really important, both to horror and to comedy, with the ideas you say, of taking something really, really threatening, like the human capacity to kill and to take great pleasure out of out of pain and torture and degradation is something that's almost impossible to face until you put, as you say, like something really, really absurd, like a badly sprayed William Shatner mask, or a hockey mask on someone's face, or, you know, you have him, like Freddy Kruger, make a series of really bizarre wisecracks, and then the Absurdism makes it able to, makes it able to deal with that specific horror and to look at daddy's boy, for instance, this he was talking about, like, dark subjects. You missed two, I thought from the book, one was, which is the suicidal ideation of Wentworth, which is actually it's that's almost like a step too far, but you were able to actually confront that and with the absurdity of the situation you find himself in and his attempts to end his own life. And the other one, of course, is there, there's a custody battle going on. And I'm presuming that's that was a reflection what was going on in your own life at the time. But you make it a custody battle over a cat, and you play it dead pound, because Wentworth feelings towards that cat are those, like for many pet owners, those towards a child that he still wants a part now in that child's life, but he's been and again, you look at the ridiculous cost on both a personal and a financial way that people in custody battles go through, but we're able to kind of look at that, and then safely disempower it, because it's absurd, because he's fighting for a cat and it, you know, it's seen as a weakness by the people around him, yeah,

Michael David Wilson 49:09
yeah. And I should certainly say that, you know what I said, that wasn't meant to be the exclusive commentary on everything within dad is boy. But yeah, you're absolutely right. And I did feel if we could do it this custody battle for a cat, then it became a safer place to talk about the things that I really wanted to talk about. And you know, just, just add, adding that extra seasoning as well by having the neighbor, Alex, walking her cat on a lead just to add something, something extra there, but it meant that I could say all the things I wanted to say without saying them absolutely directly and and that I could have a little bit of. A laugh over something that I really, you know, isn't funny at all. And I think I said this before too, like I I'm not good at just, you know, in my real day life, talking about a serious and a sad situation without cracking a joke or making an absurd analogy, because I don't, I don't like people to feel bad. So then if I'm telling them something very serious about, let's say, a custody battle, or about being separated from my daughter for a number of years, then I have to, I have to make a joke because, because I know there's nothing, there's nothing that they can say that is going to make things better. So instead of putting that burden on them, let's diffuse the situation with a dick joke. It works in most situations, you've got to use your own discretion. There might be some situations when that wouldn't work. I can think of some certain groups where it wouldn't work. I'm not going to say them. You can decide that for yourself. But by and large, don't, don't say anything. Gone ahead, don't get us canceled by a dick joke will diffuse most situations. And yeah, we've with the suicidal ideation. I mean that. I think most people who have been in you know, situations like I was in, and hopefully, and it's not a lot of people, but they, they will have considered suicide. And, you know, there were sometimes, some moments where I absurdly thought, you know, thank goodness this is me in this situation, and not somebody else, because I don't know if they would still live like whatever happened I there was always a little light that I could focus on. And it was almost like this, this test of years of stoicism and philosophy and me preaching all these things. And it's like, okay, well, it's easier to it's easy to say, let's see if you can live it, motherfucker. And, you know, here I am. So I did. I got through that. And it's, you know, some people say, Oh, well, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger? And they try and put some Tony Robbins spin on it, how all kind of adversity and pain is actually good for you. And now, if I'd agree with that, I don't think I fucking needed to go through what I went through. So like it has made me stronger, it has made me appreciate all sorts of facets of life and people in life is also, I think it's also made me forgive people more too, and I think it's made me a better, more compassionate person. But in spite of that, I'd still rather I hadn't fucking gone through all of that, I don't think I needed to, so

Jasper Bark 53:23
that what's fascinating is just picking up on three words that have come up in the conversation before, the word strength and the idea that suffering makes you strong. We tend to think that's more like tempering steel, and we tend to think it's like physical strength, like that's not going to kill me, therefore I am stronger. But I think perhaps the strengths that we find under extreme adversity are to use Bob's word empathy and to your words compassion. Those are the real strengths that we find and the abilities to connect with other people, particularly as when you were in the absolute depths of depression. The one thing you can't do is empathize or connect with other people. That the kind of the isolation that that mental, emotional state puts you in is one of the worst tortures. But once you've gotten through it, what it teaches you about your own compassion and empathy, or priceless in many cases,

Michael David Wilson 54:17
yeah, and you know, when Bob read daddy's boy and he was giving me some early feedback. And if I get this wrong, then Bob can jump in and correct me. But he was saying to begin with, he was like, what? Why the fuck is Wentworth putting up with all this shit? Why is he just going along. You know that there seemed to be on the surface, perhaps something a little bit weak about Wentworth, or like he's just accepting a lot of shit that that he shouldn't, you know from Norman, why hasn't he just punched him in the face? But I. You know, it was taking an awful lot of strength for Wentworth to just fucking be alive when you're fighting your own internal battle, to survive, to be there. There's only so much energy you have for other things. And he, he does, you know, verbally lash out at Norman, and there's even, you know, as the story gets deep, some physical altercations between the two of them. But you know when, when somebody doesn't fight back on the surface, maybe you think it looks weak, but maybe they're just fucking tired of this shit. Maybe they're choosing the battles that they want to fight, and you know, some prick in a naked attraction t shirt pay us in comparison to a custody battle for a cat that you you fucking love that cat. You fucking loved Rory, there

Jasper Bark 55:57
are literary precedents as well to Wentworth. I don't want to sound too pretentious in saying that, but there is the kind of the literary ingenue who finds themselves at the mercy of a very, very cruel fate, and thinking particularly of the character of Candide in the eponymous hero of Voltaire's Candide, which was a satire on the kind of the restoration view that we're living in the best of all possible worlds for the best of all possible reasons. And he wanted to completely subvert that view. So Candide suffers silently and with the best with the most amount of optimism to the worst possible situations. And he's quite a passive character. We might even go back to the Bible as well to look at job. I mean, why did Job go like you effing mother humper? Why didn't he wave his fists at the heavens and curse God? He doesn't, and that's actually what he gets rewarded for in the end, stoically accepting all of that and he becomes, you know, like a moral lesson through that suffering. So I'm not obviously putting daddy's boy on the kind of Big Boys High literary or religious shelf, but there is literary precedent for characters like Wentworth accepting all of that that crap, and not necessarily to use of the biblical term kicking against the pricks. Quite so much.

Michael David Wilson 57:19
I mean, I'm very happy for, you know, Waterstones sometimes have if you like this book, then you will like this one. I am perfectly happy for next to the Bible. If you like this book, you may enjoy daddy's boy. By Michael David Wilson,

Jasper Bark 57:38
can you imagine all the evangelists carrying out the book shop alongside the life of Billy Graham,

Michael David Wilson 57:46
you might then get like, you know, sometimes people inadvertently have this like movement or this takeaway that they never intended. I mean, you know, if we even think back to the Life of Brian, like he's not the Son of God, he's a very naughty boy, but he got all of these followers, and then, you know, you got Fight Club, particularly with the idea of people being snowflakes. This was a commentary on toxic masculinity, but then there were a certain group of people that got the complete wrong message, and the opposite that Chuck had been trying to convey. So now I'm just kind of imagining, you know, all these evangelists they pick up daddy's boy, and then suddenly that there's a revival and naked attraction, and it becomes like a generation of young men's mission and life dream is to go on naked attraction. And I would love that. I would absolutely love

Jasper Bark 58:58
Can you imagine, if it's like in Utah, it really takes off. And it kind of, they the church of, like, the latter day, naked saints.

Bob Pastorella 59:09
It's the same group that got Fight Club wrong. Would get daddy's boy wrong, you know, it's like, and which says a lot about this, that group, you know, it's, it's like, Oh, you, you. It's like they read a book that someone told them to read. They powered through this. It took them four years, because they don't typically read. It's this the group, and it's like they've been empowered by a work of fiction that they and they take everything out of context, you snowflake, you know. And it's like, why did you even read the book? Can

Jasper Bark 59:49
you imagine them saying about having like, kind of like discussions over and we're gonna take these verses now written by the prophet Colin. What do you think. What do you think the high Prophet Michael Wilson was trying to tell us through the song of Colin? How similar is it? It's the Song of Solomon. Do you think

Michael David Wilson 1:00:11
the song of Colin? And, you know, it is interesting too, that like, I mean, if you were to really scrutinize that is boy, like, if, if, like, people were to take some of the jokes just that, you know, face value, then they could come up with, like, a very right wing interpretation. It could empower this group of Collins that we're talking about. And if you actually look deeper, though, there's a lot of progressive messages within dad is boy, there's certainly, like a lot about gender and sexuality, but you have to dig pretty deep, but it's there if you look for

Jasper Bark 1:01:01
it. Yeah, and feces. There's a lot of feces.

Michael David Wilson 1:01:05
There's a lot of feces. I'm not sure what the takeaway is. Apart from, it's important to mark your territory,

Jasper Bark 1:01:11
I was gonna say, but it'd be interesting. Do you think you might start in the same way that people actually love the idea of, let's actually set up a real fight club? Do you think people will start breaking into people's houses and laying like a fat log.

Michael David Wilson 1:01:23
I think it could go either way. They either do that as like, this is the new kind of gang territory and the new drug war. So it's like, not not only are we gonna nick your heroin, we're gonna shit on your carpet, but it way, and they're just doing it like Norman does in their own house, to say, This is my yard now, my fucking log. So when you come in as a guest, you're gonna smell it and you're gonna like it, and that's just how it is. It's a

Bob Pastorella 1:01:52
reverse Alpha Dog, but it was just, and it's like that That scene is like, and it's embed and embellish my brain. And I thought that was like in a scene that probably was supposed to be funny, is actually funny. I'm talking about Alpha Dog, but yeah,

Jasper Bark 1:02:14
do you think in the same way you know that it's quite fascinating. My kids are generate zeds, and people like who are quite younger than me, still millennial was talking about the fact that they don't understand Gen z's. And the Gen Z's have started talking about the fact that they really don't understand generation alpha and their kind of humor, do you think? And all the kind of weird things they say in the weird social customs they have that make no sense to Gen Zs, and there's a Gen X so that I bought out two generations ago. But like, if Chitta brick Rick really catches on, like with Gen alphas, do you think it'll be kind of like, become like a social thing to be able to like spot whose territory is by the kind of gastric smells given off by shit? Is that, like, I got a touch of burrito. Yeah, this is definitely, this is definitely a Latinx territory, guys, I think we should leave it one alone. This is not people will be like sharpening their sense of smell and that their scatological kind of like analysis social trend. And I began good, just all supposed to sound to me, and he got you Gen Xers, boomers,

Michael David Wilson 1:03:26
Jesus Christ, this is what you were talking about, about, kind of like, testing the limits of the audience, and like, are they gonna go along with with that? And you know, I think when you said that probably about 20 minutes ago. Now, it's like, I do think that, you know, a number of decades ago it was certainly easier to kind of slave safely test where the limits are. You know, you could have this live comedy show if you get booed off. Okay, that was a little that that was beyond the limit. But of course, you know it's gonna differ from where you are in the UK as well, and certainly what country you're in, but perhaps now it is harder to test the limits without permanent damage to your career, because everything is kind of being scrutinized, and everything is being recorded. And even worse, a lot of things are then being taken out of context. I think perhaps the the only response is kind of what Bob had said. It's the South Park response. It's like, right? We're going to poke fun at absolutely everyone and everything. But beyond that, we're not going to give a fuck, because we know where we are, authentically coming from. We know what we believe. We know that we actually have, you know, good values. Uh, so kind of if we upset someone through their misinterpretation, whether deliberate, through taking something out of context, or, you know, just through, through ignorance and misunderstanding that that isn't on us, that isn't for us to be upset about,

Jasper Bark 1:05:21
until people start throwing bricks through a window and dropping gloves,

Michael David Wilson 1:05:27
especially if covered in shit. Then Malcolm

Jasper Bark 1:05:29
Gladwell, in one of his books, I think it's outliers, tells a story about how he trained as a long distance runner, and he was out on one run with his friends that he trained every single day, and they came to this incredibly steep hill that they used to run up. And then his two colleagues said, Do you know what we need to turn around and rock this hill backwards and then run down again, and then run up again forwards and Mark and went, I can't do that physically. And that was the point he realized that he was not going to compete at the same level professionally and go for the Olympics that his two trainers were. It's like, I like to run. I'm very good at running, but you're now moving to different league that I just I don't want to do that. I don't want to be that good and do the things necessary to make me that good. And sometimes, with our talents as well, we realize that I can go so far. I can get to this professional level, but to get to the stage that really makes you legendary. Not only don't I have the talents, I don't want to develop the skills to do that. And then other things that we've all like landed in writing and gone this is the one thing I can do that no matter how much it demands. I will go there and meet that and I will continue to grow, and I've yet to necessarily find the limits to my talent. But I was always aware as a performer that I was aware of the limits, and I would try and circumvent them or accommodate them on my thing, whereas I like to think as an author, and this is we've gone way beyond just like talking about dark comedy here, but as an author, I think I still get to find my limitations, all of them that is I'm aware of. There are some, and I still accommodate those, like I did as a performer. But there are other areas where I still pushing, and I've yet to see the kind of the end of the frontier. I don't know if you find the same thing, both of you,

Michael David Wilson 1:07:27
and English continuously growing. Yeah, if I got to a point where I felt there was no room for growth, or that I'd kind of peaked, then I'd stopped writing, because what's the point? If I've just stagnated, if I said everything that needs to be said. So if I think I can keep getting better, I'll keep doing it. If I think you know what, this was the limit. This was peak MDW, then okay, in a way, great. I'll stop doing it, because now I can get better at something else. Now I can find something else to obsess over. But I doubt that that will happen, because I have far more story ideas and curiosities and things that I want to explore than I currently have time. And I think that's a good problem, yeah, to have. And you know, at the moment, I'm very much writing in this mode that kind of combines dark fiction and dark humor and turns it up in one direction or the other, depending on each project. But even if I felt like I was done with that, I could pivot to a different genre. There's a lot within writing that that could be explored. I mean, occasionally I try to write a piece that has no humor, or I try to write a humorous piece with no horror, and I can't, I can't do it or or maybe it's not that I can't do it, but I don't enjoy doing it, and so, you know, part of this is about the enjoyment and the fulfillment. So if I'm not getting joy from the pursuit itself, then I'd rather be doing something else with my time.

Jasper Bark 1:09:20
I think that's also part of finding your unique voice, what your voice sounds like on the page, and that you can't necessarily, you know, kind of go through a purification process and distill it so the humor rises and separates entirely, you know, from the comedy like oil and water or cream and milk. And it doesn't happen. It's always going to be part of the mix. That's part of the unique MDW voice,

Michael David Wilson 1:09:45
yeah, wherever fluids mentioned in that

Bob Pastorella 1:09:51
is part of it's part of brand. It's like Joe Lansdale, Joe. Joe Lansdale writes, he writes this kind of. Dark comedy. It's hard to explain, but he really does. There's and he it's a sliding scale. You can go Hap and Leonard, and you can go thicket, and there's, it's, there, it's, it's, it's, it's organic. It's part of his voice. It's, it's brand. So it's like, that's the Joe Lansdale genre. He can crank it up to 11, or dial it down to two. You have the Michael David Wilson genre. Of there's going to be, there's going to be some, some dark humor in there. I think that any when you look at like Elmore Leonard, another great example. There's always something funny, yeah, in Leonard, in Leonard's movies, I mean, in Leonard's books, Quentin Tarantino, um, has this knack for doing crying with with snappy dialog that's gonna that, that lifts it and takes it to a different level. Whereas you have people like David man may who, when he does crime, it turns it into this really kind of bitter, sour, you know, it's like, this is really kind of grimy. I wouldn't want to get involved with these people at all. So there's crime, doesn't can pay if you do comedy with it, though it's funny shit.

Jasper Bark 1:11:27
Yeah. Again, what we're dealing with like the worst of human behavior, and one of the ways you have to deal with that is through humor. It's ultimate forms of anti social behavior, which are in themselves, occasionally quite funny, and do involve the best and the worst of human behavior, tremendous amount of bravery on the one hand, a tremendous amount of kind of like greed and avarice and self serving selfishness on the other well,

Michael David Wilson 1:11:55
we're going to be talking to you again At the end of the month, and really specifically diving into your work. But I did want to know, and we kind of started talking about this earlier, but because this is such a kind of, I guess, a conversation with so many facets, we got distracted from it. But what are you working on at the moment, and how many projects are you working on?

Jasper Bark 1:12:26
Well, this is interesting because I've just handed two books into my publisher, Crystal Lake entertainment, and I've just last year they published a trilogy draw you in, which I hope to chat with you about more in more depth. But a lot of those projects, the projects I've been working on, the Trinity, took a very, very long time to write. It was supposed to be one book. It became three. And the other book I've just handed in was a book I was working on while I was working on those. So I've kind of got to a point where I've spent like three years working on four novels, and there was a bit of planning and preparation, and the ideas sat around for a long time, for about 10 years before I started them. So I finally got to this point where I've put to rest these projects which hung over me like a sword of Damocles, and they took a tremendous amount of work to actually get to the stage where I could release them into the wild. So now I'm actually plotting. Obviously, while I'm doing this, any number of ideas have been building up. So I'm kind of like opening the ideas closet. I'm going like, oh shit. I've got all these ideas sitting there which be desperately coming, ping me, ping me, me, next me. And so I'm in the process of seeing which ideas want to run themselves and kind of take off and desperately I could just throw up the page and they'll start writing themselves, and which ideas which ideas need to be carefully plotted. So I'm plotting out a few things. I'm setting up some things. There's been lots of little accidental projects and projects which have grown out of projects which have more wings than I realized. So what am I working on? I'm at that stage where I'm about it's a little bit like when you're you come out of a very, very long term relationship, and that you've actually got quite a few options, and you feel like playing the field, and maybe one of the people with whom you're tallying might be a long term relationship, and you can commit to them, but you don't quite know yet. So that's kind of where I am with a lot of my projects. Really, I'm being a bit of a slut, kind of like as a writer, just as a writer, and I'm playing with a lot of these projects affections, and I'm kind of working out which one I'm going to commit to for the next six months, or perhaps a year. Mm. So, and yeah, and they're all, they're all, again, still within the horror genre, but they're very, very different types of horror. And again, they're very, very different takes on horror fiction. And there's a little bit which sometimes slightly gets a bit exasperated with myself. It's like, oh no, like you've started with an idea that was slightly just to the left field, and you've just kept going, haven't you? Here it goes again. It's just like, was no Jasper. But it seems I can't, kind of write very traditional, normal, ordinary horror. So that's the unifying thing amongst them all. You know, I start dropping them in the Jasper petri dish, and they grow into completely unexpected, unusual shapes that have never been seen before, which then makes it very, very hard to kind of sell both to my editors, my agent, the general public. What is this? What is you've never seen it before? Yeah, but what's it like? It's like nothing else it's ever been. Why would I like it? Well, you just have to try it and see. I

Michael David Wilson 1:16:06
relate that so much that you're saying here, and you know, particularly the the kind of frustration that it's like, Oh, finally, I'm writing a commercial book. This might actually make me a good amount of money. This could be the one. Oh, there's a calisthenic sex cult. Why did you do that? Could the story continue to work if you were to remove them? Well, probably there's another solution. But when you open the door to a calisthenic sex school, you can't shut it again. That's the problem and and creative curiosity always trumps commerce. And it goes back to what I said, where it's like, well, maybe I could do it without it, but I'm gonna have more fun if I include it. Therefore we're going for fun. I

Jasper Bark 1:17:10
agree. And when we first met, I was kind of, this is about 2010 I was kind of in a very transitional phase in my career, because for about 10 years, I'd stopped being a journalist, which is a very commercial form of writing, and I'd gone into writing fiction, comics and books, but I was pretty much, I was still a hack. People said to me, we want this book. It's got to be this length, it's got to be these things. And often it's like, it's this franchise. You've got to take this film and replicate it and make it exactly the same as it on the page, or take this Saturday morning comic strip and tell us these stories again, but not a cartoon in this form. So I was very much replicating other people's voices, and it was lucrative to a degree, but it was a bit soul destroying. So yeah, when we first met, I was just, you particulate, one story. I think it was end of the line, which is almost kind of like a watershed, where I'd gone effort. I'm going to write the sort of fiction I want to read, not the type of fiction that I'm getting paid to do. And since then, I've kind of spoiled myself in that I don't want to go back to writing stuff that fits a commercial template. I've kind of done that, you know, it destroyed my soul. My soul is now risen. My writer soul has risen like a phoenix from the ashes of that genre of fiction, working away those fiction minds, grinding it out to a deadline. And now I want to do something different, follow that creative

Michael David Wilson 1:18:39
curiosity. Yeah, the end of the line was such a standout story in that anthology, literally titled end of the line. So you had the titular story that was edited by Jonathan Oliver, not the comedian popular in the US. But of course, the head of Solaris books and Abaddon books at the time, but it, it almost wasn't typical of, you know, the Jasper bark story, I mean, but you've got such a variety, then it's like, well, what is typical? But I guess if you looked at way of the Barefoot zombie, and you looked at stuck on you, which also, I mean stuck on you, happened a few years after way of the Barefoot zombie, possibly a year before. But they were much more in the comedy genre, whereas the the end of the line was this terrifying, almost Twilight Zone esque nightmare. It was like nothing that I'd read, and there's still nothing where I'd be like, Oh, that, that's the partner to that story. So it's a spectacular achievement, really. And, yeah, goodness, that that, that is literally. I shouldn't say it, but I started saying it now that is the one story from the anthology that has stuck with me. Oh,

Jasper Bark 1:20:07
good, and hopefully it's kind of nice as well. Obviously, when you appear in anthologies, there's often a reviewer upon Goodreads who picks out a story that I've written that's that is like that, and says that very same thing. It's not every reviewer, but I always say, Oh, that's my man there. When I say that review, because they go, this is the one that's totally memorable. It's not like anything else I've ever read before. Like, what the fuck is it doing in this anthology? Those are the comments that I am particularly appreciate. So thank you for saying that. The other, the other comment that comes up a lot, that I also really appreciate, is people say I opened this book and I read the first chapter, I thought, Oh, I know exactly where this is going. And by the time I was half with the book, I had no clue, and it couldn't have been more wrong.

Michael David Wilson 1:20:55
Yeah, yeah. Which is daddy's boy is

Jasper Bark 1:20:58
probably very similar that respect as well. I don't think you guess whether guess where that was going to be going for the first few chapters or even halfway through

Michael David Wilson 1:21:06
the book. Yeah, I do seem to be getting that recently, particularly, you know, since just really doubling down and doing what the hell I want to do, it seems to be a kind of common feature, a common comment that people will say they didn't know how it was going to end. They didn't know where it was going to go, but almost, almost to the point now where that is becoming an expectation, that if you read a Michael David Wilson story, you don't know how the hell it's going to end. And I'm okay with that expectation, because, I mean, I I don't want to do something that's predictable or formulaic. And often I'll ask myself, well, how, how might one expect this would end not necessarily do the opposite, because, you know, the things I do can be so off the wall or unexpected that's not really the opposite of what was expected that this didn't enter one's mind. And you know, I'm good with that, because, like, you know, I might not be technically the best writer. I might not be the most poetical, but God damn, I can work hard and I can surprise you.

Jasper Bark 1:22:29
Well, that's the key thing. And it's interesting, because often, when I reach those Crux points in stories, I do ask myself, what actually okay, what is the very last thing you expect to happen here? And if you take that as a starting point and go, Okay, let me think the plot does go in some very exciting unexpected directions. And it keeps your interest going in it as well, keeps the spontaneity arising, and it makes you more excited about telling it because, oh, wow, you did not expect this. Did

Bob Pastorella 1:23:01
you right? It follows a lot of the cool things. Daddy's boy is organic. It is unpredictable yet logical. And I have a feeling, even though, that you like to write with an outline, you kind of pulled the Stephen Graham Jones and wrote yourself into a corner, which I think that if we think about what, what Stephen Graham Jones does with his stories, is that that's, that's probably the best place that you want to be as a writer, is you want to write yourself to where it's like, how in the hell am I going to get myself out of this situation I've Got my characters in, and it has to be organic, it has to be logical, and it has to be unpredictable. So yeah, and you did it, yeah, yeah,

Jasper Bark 1:23:51
I would agree. And those, that's a very good acid test for, I think, the health of the story.

Michael David Wilson 1:24:01
Well, I mean to kind of conclude, do you have a dark comedy recommendations, either books or films that we haven't mentioned during the course of this conversation? I

Jasper Bark 1:24:15
might bring up in terms of films, I might bring up an Alan Tudyk movie. I think that's how you pronounce his name, or tudick maybe too is probably better. We're called Tucker and Dale versus evil, which subverts every single one of the Redneck cliched tropes that exist in horror fiction, and it manages to be hysterically funny, incredibly dark and also very, very gory. It's a brilliant asset most things that you'd want from a comedy film and a horror film. It does. It does incredibly well in terms. A fiction. There is a writer who actually wrote the script for Easy Rider called Terry Southern, and he's massively underrated these days, but he wrote one of my favorite satirical dark comedy books called the magic Christian, and it's one of these. It was made into a film with Peter Sellers. And the films a fabulous like late 60s, weird oddity, like, Oh, lucky man. But it's not a patch on the original source material, the novel, which is just hysterically funny and kind of laugh out loud, but also times of punching the air. And it's so funny that you actually forget how clever and how brilliant the satire is. And it's just as fresh now as when it was written in the beginning of the 60s. So the magic Christian by Terry southern. I simply recommend that.

Bob Pastorella 1:26:05
Yeah, fiction wise, I'd recommend, you know, any, any of the books about like Barry Gifford, who wrote, you know, wild at heart. That's definitely some. There's some, some dark humor in there. You can also go to the classics. When I say classics, I'm talking about like Ira Levine's Rosemary's Baby, which is actually got some quite funny stuff in there. Also The Stepford wipes is also very humorous. Film wise. They're, I mean, golly, there's, there's a ton of dark comedy films out there, some of which that I've started to watch and never finished after the first 15 minutes, which that would be the most recent one will be the coffee table. I watched about 15 minutes of it and said, Nope, I'm out. And it is basically a dark comedy, a comedy of errors. And so I'm, that's all I'm gonna say. But one I will bring up that I did, that I do love, is called the way of the gun. And this is a Benicio Del Toro, Ryan Philippe, crime film from the early 2000s got James con in there. Um, the opening scene with Benicio Del Toro and and Ryan Philippe and Sarah Silverman is to die for. It is probably one of the funniest fucking things I've ever seen, and it is a absolutely violent scene. Jeffrey Lewis from Salem's Lot is in it he, he plays a basically like a suicidal hit man. It's like, whenever, when they call him, to call him in the job, he is literally putting guns and putting bullets into a gun. So it's like in the phones ringing, and he's just staring at it, and finally, he's like, hello, you know, because the phone keeps ringing, and I guess they just give him one more reason to keep on going. But yeah, it is, is very, very dark funny movie. Juliet Lewis is in it too. So yeah, I mean, it's, there's some dark stuff in there, but it's also some stuff that, like, you shouldn't be laughing at some of the things that they do. But yeah, I liked it.

Michael David Wilson 1:28:36
Yeah, I think over the course of this conversation the previous one, and then we had a conversation with danger Slater. We've mentioned so many dark comedy books and films that I'm trying to think, is there something in what must be like a culmination, what five or six hours that we haven't mentioned yet? I mean, anyone

Jasper Bark 1:29:01
mentioned a confederacy of dances, which is an absolute effing classic? It's the only the author's name has temporarily escaped me, and He only wrote one book, and unfortunately, he committed suicide, and the book almost got published during his lifetime, and then it was only thanks to his mother, who read, read it in manuscript form and said, This is a work of genius. And she went and tracked down a university press and handed over and said, You've got to read this book. It's amazing. And they were like, Yeah, we get told that every single day. And she said, No, really is. And they read it. Oh, my God. This is a classic, and it was published posthumously, and it's gone on to be an absolute classic. It is. It's a working comic, dark comic genius. So confederacy of dances, I would also recommend and

Michael David Wilson 1:29:54
see now you mentioning the confederacy of dances has somehow i. Unlocked, like, loads of recommendations, because it's like, well, then, if we're going that level, then we need to mention Mark Twain as well. I mean, it's that kind of, oh yes, classic era and innocent abroad, yeah, yeah. And then, like, I'm also thinking, I mean, a little bit more subtle on the comedy and, like, I guess, more kind of comedy of situation, but there's little bit of Martin Amos and definitely Kingsley Amos as well. If we want to kind of talk about humor, if we're going way more modern, then I don't think we've actually mentioned Max booth, third, who, alongside dangerous later, I would say, is one of the best, you know, working writers in this kind of dark fiction with humor Today, particularly Max's carnivorous lunar activities, I think is a standout, possibly their best book, I would say, in terms of in terms of the humor side. Because the interesting thing with Max is Jasper and I are talking about how it's very it can be very difficult for us to separate horror and comedy. But with Max, I feel like they have almost two modes. They'll have things like Indiana def Sun, which is mostly pretty bleak, although there's some very Jim Carrey reference, some very funny Jim Carrey references. So there is comedy, even within the kind of darkest stories. And also the same with we need to do something, but then you'll have almost like this larger than life horror comedy with things like maggots screaming. So yeah, Max booth is certainly someone, if, if, somehow, there's a person listening to This Is Horror who hasn't read Max booth. You need to do that. And as a kind of final recommendation, I mentioned at the start, reading mother for dinner, and that that is like more kind of literary and a sharp, satirical commentary, which then also brings to mind Augustine burrows and specifically their I think it was more like a kind of fictionalized memoir running with scissors, and it's just in in The delivery of these fucked up situations and this tragedy and this trauma, but there's something about the lens in which it is presented that makes it really fucking funny, and I think that links into what you were saying when you're asking me about, you know, kind of Writing about the custody about or writing about the suicidal ideation. These are not things that we traditionally laugh at. But you know, where there's a will, there's a way, where there's a lens, I will look through the world with that lens, and yeah, so I think you can joke about anything, just make sure that you're punching up and make sure you know that you're not making, let's say the victim or the marginalized as the the kind of subject of the joke. But in terms of, like, a topic or saying, you can never joke about that, I don't think that's true. You can always joke about anything. The more sensitive the topic, the more you might want to be mindful how you frame the joke.