Margaret Atwood’s Humor

One of the greatest storytellers of modern times, Mark Twain, remarked that “there are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind - the humorous.” He differentiated the humorous story, which he claimed to be truly American, from the comic story and the witty story, which he classified as respectively English and French. Like Twain, and like certain Canadian writers who preceded or followed him, Margaret Atwood anchors her playful writing in the motifs and mindset of North America. While her novels, stories, and short fictions can be poetic, biting, or even grim, they are almost invariably suffused with the humor that Twain identified as being indissociable with the manner of the telling, as opposed to the comic and the witty story which rely on the matter (Twain, How to Tell a Story , p. 7). Also investigating the mechanisms of humorous writing, Atwood herself has classified it into three commonly acknowledged genres: parody, satire, and “humor” (although her writing thoroughly blurs these artificial boundaries). In the characteristic way of postcolonial writers promoting their distinctive national culture, she has set out to identify British and American humor and distinguish Canadian humor from the two metropolitan forms. Yet the discrete dimension of Canadian humor in her analysis rests not on techniques of production, but on notions of reception, or the complex relations between what she terms the “laugher,” the “audience,” and the “laughee” ( SW , p. 175).