The Drone, Doom, and Laughter

            Tommy Orange starts his novel, There There, with one of the main characters describing his identity through trauma, humor, and history. Tony Loneman has fetal alcohol syndrome or The Drome. I found the structure of Orange’s initial exposition of Tony very interesting. 

Orange begins with the pain that Tony has felt when he sees his reflection and the way others look at him. Tony says, “The Drome first came to me in the mirror when I was six”, he continues, “It was the first time I ever saw it. My own face, the way everyone else saw it” (Orange 15). Nothing about Tony’s situation is funny and leaving this passage without further development lends itself towards rendering pity from the reader. The way Orange changes pity to reality is remarkable. 

Intertwined with Tony’s trauma are small moments that Freud would consider “release”. These moments would not be considered classically funny, and they likely will not render as much as a chuckle from an empathetic reader. However, Orange includes them to show how Tony can cope with his reality. Tony says things like, “Getting drunk in there, a drunk fucking baby, not even a baby, a little fucking tadpole thing, hooked up to a cord, floating in a stomach” (Orange 16). This blunt way of coming to terms with reality reminds me of Samantha Irby’s style of unapologetic realness. In Tony’s mind and Irby’s work, this train of thought style presents the reader with a pathway to circumvent ego suppression and find a path towards healing. 

The structure of the exposition takes the reader from trauma and pity to humor and a certain level of acceptance and leaves them with final closure. This arc of acceptance closes with Tony talking about MF Doom and how he has integrated The Drome into his identity in a positive way. He says that MF Doom’s music made him feel, “Not slow. Not bottom rung. And it helped because the Drome’s what gives me my soul, and the Drome is a face worn through” (Orange 18). Orange uses humor as the conduit to get from pain to this point of acceptance. 

The idea of acceptance being achieved through humor is applicable to service as well. At the beginning of my tutoring sessions this spring, there was a sense of hierarchy and structure between my tutee and me. This was not intentional, rather it was a product of our circumstances. However, I knew this did not mean it could not be changed. The way we broke down those walls was through what I will call reality humor. I would make a small math mistake and laugh at it, or she would have to get her younger sister and I would make sure we laughed at the situation rather than fixate on the challenges we were faced with (covid, family, living situations, etc.). Laughing in the face of the inconveniences of the world not only allowed a release valve for each of us, but it also conveyed the messy humanity that we both share. Instead of seeing her as a high schooler that needs school help and instead of seeing me as a college student who knows all (although that’s far from the truth), a more effective relationship was forged with the help of laughter.