An Anatomy of Humor: Heidi Julavits

How can a book about one of America’s greatest fears be considered funny? Most people wouldn’t consider being hijacked and taken hostage a totally hilarious situation, but humor is not always obviously laugh out loud funny. Freud says that depending on how the humor is delivered, is how funny it is. According to the philosopher Monro, there are ten situations that can create laughter. In The Effect of Living Backwards there are many things masquerading as something that they are not. There are also many shortages of knowledge and/ or skills.

The book starts out in one of the main character’s views. Her name is Alice, and she is trying to get into the International Institute for Terrorist Studies in Lucerne. As Alice tells the admissions officer of her life, she gets asked the question “How can you be so certain?”. Right away one of the situations that Monro mentioned that creates laughter, something masquerading as something that they are not, comes in to play. The first sentence of the novel is “When I arrived at the Institute, my name was still Alice…” and at the end of the prologue, she ends up making out with one of her professors and thinking to herself “ It was not the sort of thing that ‘Alice’ would ever do, and therein lay its singular appeal.”

At the beginning of chapter one Alice and her sister, Edith, are flying to Morocco for Edith’s wedding. Hobbes said that laughter is mean spirited, and throughout this chapter, Alice makes fun of how “blond” Edith is. She tells Edith that she is losing her “spark”, that ever since she got engaged, she hasn’t been the same sexy promiscuous woman that she knew. Then Alice admits that saying that was a “mean and petty sibling maneuver” which made her feel better about herself because she humiliated Edith.


All of the shame stories are narrated by the person whose shame it is. In “A Mother’s Shame”, Alice and Edith’s mother is on a trip to Machu Picchu with her aunt. This story is funny because it seems like whenever Alice and Edith’s mom isn’t around her aunt, both of them are having sex. According to Monro, indecency is one of the criteria of laughter.

In chapter Two Alice tells of how she is not yet a very observant person. She learned to be very observant when she was taking an exam at International Institute for Terrorist Studies in Lucerne. Alice had been up all night studying for the exam and being interrogated, as had everyone else in her class, and the professor walked in forty-five minutes late and informed everyone that the exam had been moved to another room. The exam had been moved because the professor said that the room was being painted a “brighter shade of ecru”. The last question on the exam was “What color were the original walls in the Curtis Fishbeiner Lecture Hall?” the answers they could choose from were “Shell Pink, British Khaki, Petit Beurre, and Ecru”. The true original shade of the walls were Petit Beurre, and since the majority of the students trusted the professor when he said that they were ecru, everyone failed the exam. This would be an example of any shortage of knowledge or skill, that Monro explains.

In Cyrus’ Shame, Hobbes’ theory is put to work when Cyrus is on the train and sees a fat woman running to catch up to the departing train. Before she saw him staring at her, I think he was amused. When she yelled for help, he decided to help her, but she did not make the train. The only thing he had of hers was her handbag, which he stole her money out of.

The humor in chapter three can be seen through a scene where Bruno is interrogating Justin about his girlfriend. Bruno is telling Justin about his girlfriend and how un-catholic she acts, “but those girls are only ever catholic after the fact” he says. Bruno uses this humiliation to make Justin feel that he is inferior to Bruno. According to Hobbes, humor is a way to show judgment or power over someone else. Bruno does this well by pointing out to Justin that his girlfriend is still with him for herself, not for him.

In the fourth chapter, Smythes uses a Freudian type of humor by pointing out the sameness in two very dissimilar things. During a lecture at the Institute, he points out how the ideal way to hold hostages in a terrorism situation is much the same as holding a dinner party. “If the terrorist assembles his guests with sagacity,” he says, “the party will run itself. He can sit back and let ‘humanity’ dictate the behavior of his hostages; he need barely posses a gun.” Later in the chapter another Freudian type of humor was used by Alice. She defined “fright distance” as a way to measure fear. This is a play on words; the phrase flight distance is used when describing the distance of a specific flight pattern.

During “Winnie’s Shame” we see a type of humor as defined by Henri Bergson. Bergson believed that humor was a way of self policing through humiliation. In this chapter Winnie sets out to find her father, and when she finally does, she lies to him about who she is so that she can interview him. When she does meet him she is disappointed by who she finds. Her father is not a great man, he is merely a bad poet. After this humiliating experience Winnie is not likely to question her reality again the way she did by trying to find a person who was not in her life for a reason.

Situational humor and scenarios – Alice and Edith’s father questions the girls on moral dilemmas.
Choices and reasons- whether Alice would use the wire cutters to end the hijacking. What was her reason to not cut the wire?
Imaginary love- Alice’s unusual attraction to Pitcairn.
Bruno’s wife- afraid to disabled people. Bruno tried to see her reaction to his fake blindness. She actually left him.

“Gesina’s Shame” is the shame story of Gesina, the hotel worker who is in cahoots with the hijackers. In “Gesina’s Shame” we learn that when she was a young girl, her mother took a job in Switzerland as a private teacher for two young boys in a wealthy family. Gesina and her mother move to Switzerland and move into the estate of the wealthy family. As far as we know the family consists of a father and two sons of somewhat similar age. Gesina and her mother are forced to live above the carriage house. Gesina’s toys are confiscated and she is forbidden from interacting with the two boys. The narrator tells us that this is because the father feared that if the boys had any kind of distraction from study then they would become competitive and attempt to kill each other. As the story continues, the young Gesina attempts, several times unsuccessfully, to gain the interest of each of the boys and get them to play with her. Then, Gesina finds a red rubber ball. With this ball Gesina is finally able to manipulate the boys into playing with her. She convinces each of them that the other is sneaking out to the carriage house to play with her and the red rubber ball. They each become intrigued and end up sneaking out to the carriage house to play. On the day that Gesina and her mother are set to leave she invites each of the boys to come out and play with her at separate times. They both end up being there at the same time and the ball is destroyed. The boys begin to fight one another and there is a terrible storm outside. The boys fight near the fence and Gesina sees their father outside with a rifle. She hears a loud boom and then she sees nothing by the fence. As she leaves she thinks she sees a ghost rapped in bandages in an upper window of the house. She later sees the older brother many years down the line. We are led to believe that this older brother is the now blinded Bruno, who tells Gesina that he lost his eyes while playing with his younger brother, who we are led to believe is Pitcairn.

As the rest of the main story continues, Alice is at the hotel, with the rest of the hostages, along with their captors. While eating yet another meager meal, an argument erupts and Bruno, out of what seems to be an overwhelming sense of failure and frustration, proclaims that everyone is free to go. Alice goes upstairs to retrieve Winnie, but discovers she is bleeding. They call an ambulance and everyone is loaded in. They are all driven far from the city to a helicopter and while they are loading into the helicopter Winnie has her baby. Everyone, with the exception of Bruno and Edith, gets in the helicopter, and as Alice attempts to board she falls out and the helicopter takes off. So, Alice returns to the hotel to try and find Edith. When she returns, Edith is there with no sign of Bruno. Edith is tearing up the floor searching for her engagement ring. Alice convinces her that they must leave. Alice evacuates first, and while she is outside “falling stars”(bombs) bombard the hotel and it goes up in a blaze. Alice, while attempting to reenter the burning building, is confronted by Bruno who tells her with extreme jubilation that he has won and Pitcairn has lost. He also informs Alice that Edith sold her out and has been selling her out from the beginning. Alice ignores him and saves Edith anyway, even though she knows Edith had been working against her. The story continues into the future and Alice is the guardian of the now deceased Winnie’s daughter. Edith is married and living overseas. Alice is not sure of the point of the entire hijacking experience. She finds herself dreaming/fantasizing about the nonexistent life between her and Pitcairn. And at the very end of the book, in an imaginary letter for Pitcairn, we learn that perhaps all of the shame stories had been told by alice. “if you could tell him, please, tell him when you see him next, that I am alone again and just my plain old self, not Cyrus, not Sad or Winnie or Bruno or my mother.”[350] These of course are the names of most of the shame stories.

The humor in this story or at least this section of the story is somewhat hard to find. After all, the story is not exactly full of all kinds of laugh out loud humor. However, there is one part in particular that is quite humorous or comical. During “Gesina’s Shame” when she first plays with the younger brother and the ball in the carriage house crawl space. The whole scene plays out like a kind of awkward first-time clumsy sexual experience. “This isn’t fun. I thought this was supposed to be fun. It’s never fun the first time, I said. Nor the second nor the third. But it is intriguing how it makes you feel dirty and that is why you will do it.”[286] Of course she is talking about playing with the boy and the red rubber ball, but it sounds like she is talking about something completely different. This is why it is humorous. According to Freud there are several reasons why something is humorous. First, the naïve, Freud contends that an instance of the naïve is comic. It is because the naïve is a difference between inhibitions. Gesina does not have the same inhibitions as the younger brother. This is comical. Also, this is an instance of a conceptual joke, and Freud contends that these jokes are examples of faulty thinking and diverging from what is actually being said. In this instance we are somewhat forced in to the faulty thinking and diverging from what is actually being said. Gesina is talking about playin with the ball but the way it is said sounds a lot like a first time sexual encounter.




There are a lot of instances in this novel when many of the theories that Freud, Hobbes, Monro, and others that we discussed in class were used. As we said in class, however, it is very hard to dissect humor without taking it apart so far that you lose the humor.



Alisa, Jonathan, Jeanette, Caitlin

Works Cited

Julavits, Heidi. The Effect of Living Backwards. New York: Berkley Trade, 2004.

Freud, Sigmund . "Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious"
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