Humor, Pain and Expectation

Irby’s Wow, No Thank You features the ideas of self-deprecating humor and relatability, which she masterfully uses to present her life in a comical way. The early philosophers (specifically Plato and Hobbes) present two concepts which seem to interweave with Irby’s work perfectly: finding pleasure in pain and finding pleasure in disappointed expectations. The combination of these two ideas results in a deep-dive in Irby’s work, which allows the reader to understand why they are able to fight through the painful subjects and find hilarity in the eighteen chapters of her work.

            Looking first at Plato, he believed that, “The most common kind of joke is that in which we expect one thing and another is said; here our own disappointed expectation makes us laugh” (Plato 18). This relates perfectly to Irby in the way she compares her life to that of a celebrity (Jennifer Aniston in the first chapter, for example) but then provides a more brutally honest description of her life immediately after. In two sentences, Irby goes from the lavish lifestyle of eating out at five-star restaurants to sitting in her cluttered house eating out-of-the-box pasta and roasted vegetables, and the reader finds this funny. It is combination of this disappointed expectation the reader gets from Irby’s constant references to a higher lifestyle with the idea of relatability that makes the reader put down her book and burst out laughing.

            The idea of relatability leads into Hobbes’ idea: men laugh at the pain and misfortune of others. He writes, “That it consists in wit, or, as they call it, in the jest, experience confutes: for men laugh at mischances and indecencies, wherein there lies no wit nor jest at all. And forasmuch as the same thing is no more ridiculous when it grows stale or usual, whatsoever it be that moves laughter, it must be new and unexpected” (Hobbes 19-20). While Hobbes brings up an opposing point to Plato in that humor must be new and unexpected, he also mentions that it revolves around the mischances of others. This relates perfectly to the ideas which Irby presents in her work. When she reminds us that a five-star restaurant is out of reach for her and a more realistic picture includes her wife coming home to a pile of unopened mail on the table, cheap pasta and vegetables fried in a pan, and yelling at the cats over whatever soap opera is playing on the television that night, Irby leaves us no choice but to laugh. It is the combination of pain and realism which makes her work one worthy of much praise and leaves the reader on the floor in stitches.