This is a week for arthritic pain, fatigue, and wondering what makes “funny” things funny in Dungeon Crawler Carl (which I wrote about last week).

I’m pretty sure I’ve got Lyme disease. I’m already on doxycycline. I don’t yet have a positive test for Lyme disease, but I’m not waiting for one either.

I have enough circumstantial evidence. I walked through scrub forest and near tall grass in a high risk area—Cape Cod—while on my way to the beach. Two days later Ley noticed I had a weird bruise. About a week after that, stiffness and pain started spreading through my left leg and up my left side. I also got even more sleepy.

Weirdly, some part of me is relieved.

I’ve spent so much time working outdoors, alongside so many friends who’ve gotten Lyme disease multiple times, that finally getting what I think is Lyme feels like a balancing of the karmic scales. I know, I know: tick-borne illness isn’t transmitted by karmic justice. But I’ve wondered before whether I was getting too lucky, whether I was just missing the signs. Having my tick-luck run out, feeling like I finally recognize the signs that I’ve been infected, is oddly reassuring.

Of course if these symptoms aren’t resolved by doxycycline and if all my Lyme tests come back negative, then I’ll have a real puzzle.

But speaking of puzzles, why the hell do people (myself included) find Dungeon Crawler Carl funny? Where is the humor?

By so many different measures, DCC is supremely unfunny. It is grim, and gory, and ought to be depressing—there are enough sad moments and painful circumstances to leave one in a funk. Heck, we see characters in the story falling into that sort of funk often enough, and that seems like a reasonable response.

Yet time and again people would recommend DCC  to me, saying, “it’s funny.” I too find it funny while I’m reading it (with some exceptions). I notice myself smirking or snorting or chuckling, even when the situation takes a dire turn. I want to understand why this works, which pieces detract from the comedy, and which pieces just balance it out. 

To misquote Mark Twain, let’s dissect this frog.

I see several sources for Dungeon Crawler Carl’s humor. Very minor *SPOILERS* follow.

First, there’s the juxtaposition of finding levity amidst awfulness. Carl, the narrator, often recognizes that something is goofy or funny even when everything else is bleak. For example, a goblin wearing a pot as a helmet and making a funny face while it tries to run him over with a giant motorized turf aerator.

I suspect that specifically because DCC is so full of unrelenting badness, the little moments of comedy that Matt Dinniman incorporates feel more impactful. I’ve written before about tonal depth, and pauses giving your audience breathing room, and creating space in your story for variation in intensity and tone. Those comical moments wouldn’t feel as impactful if everything in the story were funny. Similarly, the inclusion of comedy amid the story’s horror lets us experience the badness without simply becoming numb to it or completely checking out.

But more importantly, Dinniman makes space in the story for finding those moments of comedy in the horror and sadness—and he doesn’t try to separate the humor from whatever bad things are going on. The funny and the sad and the bad are all entwined. Thus even little moments of Carl’s amusement feel bigger and funnier than they might were this story’s setting less depressing.

Hand in hand with finding levity amidst the awful, Dinniman often introduces or highlights the absurd, with the POV character lampshading the absurdity in his narration (like an all-powerful AI craving foot-fetish snuff porn). Sometimes this absurdity arises from tonal whiplash in that juxtaposition of the awful and the amusing. Sometimes it’s from a comedic reversal of expectations. Sometimes this comes from gross exaggeration (with emphasis on the “gross”), usually going hand in hand with grotesque gore (like nearly drowning in a spray of blood and guts) or a disgusting description that embraces the shocking and ludicrous. In this last case, I suspect it’s the shock itself which is entertaining—more disbelieving guffaw than amused chuckle.

Yet even amidst that absurdity, characters (for the most part) feel like they’re treated honestly. This means that even as situations feel unhinged, the people in them feel (mostly) like people. I’m not talking about realism, but verisimilitude—even when the characters are utterly mad, they’re usually believable or even relatable. Princess Donut is a prime example. Scenes with her vary significantly in tone. Her scenes oscillate between her being a lovable egotistical jerk (she’s a cat, after all), her revealing the ways in which her life as a cat gives her very strange ideas about the world (often played straight for comic effect, without it always being clear whether she’s honest or performing for an audience), and her being very earnest and emotionally vulnerable. Sometimes she does all those things at once. But again, each of these variations fleshes out and augments the larger whole—without the variation, Princess Donut wouldn’t have the same character depth or tonal range. The funny bits and emotional bits and mean bits would each wear thin.

Speaking of which, some elements which I think are supposed to be humorous feel ‘meh’ to me. Either they were funny once but have lost their shine, or they didn’t get a laugh from me in the first place. I notice this most in the story’s repeated needling of Carl for having been cuckolded (which feels like a potentially interesting character element that is squandered via use as a repeated punchline), and in the emphasis on aesthetic descriptions of female characters. Dungeon Crawler Carl doesn’t drool over all the ladies like a Dresden Files novel, but there’s a bit of that same old fixation (and imbalanced representation) present. Female characters’ descriptions are more likely to be sexualized, and those descriptions are also more likely to dwell (with comedic intent) on ugliness and excessive or terrible makeup. I didn’t find this overwhelming, but once I saw it I couldn’t unsee it. There are probably some people for whom both of these elements continue to work as comedy, but that ain’t me.

I’m sure there are other details, other components to DCC’s humor. Maybe I’ll revisit them another time. For now, take care, enjoy, and check yourself for ticks.