Comedy & Tragedy: How Humorous Illustrations Help Tell Difficult Stories
In addition to visuals for marketing and social media campaigns, I do editorial illustration.
Some of my most interesting assignments are for The Rumpus: stories that relate difficult personal journeys. I like the challenge. And I think my humorous style works to advantage.
Why?
Because comedy and tragedy complement each other. The best playwrights know this. Jerome Lawrence, best known for Inherit The Wind, put it this way:
The best playwrights– Tennessee Williams, for instance– will puncture the most serious moment with an outrageous laugh. The audience delights in it.
They need the relief. They need laughter– or what Norman Cousins calls “inner jogging”– for the joy of life.
The more an audience laughs, the more it feels.
Shakespeare knew this– there’s comedy in his most serious plays.
I did 5 illustrations for a first-person essay titled, My Body Is A Bill To Pay. It’s about a young woman who graduates from college with $130,000 in student debt, and her ongoing struggle to pay it off.
Here are excerpts, along with the illustration each inspired.
My identity changed when I opened that envelope. I stood in my dusty kitchen, pantries bare, blinded by all those zeroes in the sum I owed.
I received that first bill on the day after I graduated. I was living off a few spoonfuls of peanut butter a day, working multiple jobs, paying rent myself.
After this first one, these student debt bills were sure to arrive on the fourteenth of every month…
The student debt bubble started before I got to college and persists today, but I also had the distinct bad luck to graduate at the start of the 2008 Great Recession.
Before the recession, student debt amounted to $671 billion in the US. It has since risen to $1.5 trillion according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York…
The degree I earned should never have cost $130,000 before interest. It certainly hasn’t helped my earning potential…
I have always been paying. There is no one else who will pay the monthly bill for a cool thousand dollars. Every month, no exceptions.
I worked, sometimes three official jobs (meaning I was on the books, paying taxes) while juggling other ventures: cleaning houses for cash, freelance writing for earnings over PayPal…
My body rebelled—I had stomach bugs, coupled with weight gains, upper respiratory infections, and on-the-job sprains and bruises without legal recourse.
I once cracked my ribs (working at a food co-op) trying to move a plastic tub of organic kale from one fridge to another… (but) I finished that shift and clocked in the next day.
(At the) food co-op, I spent most of my time threatening to call the cops on leering older hippies who wouldn’t stop hitting on college-aged volunteers.
One bandana-wearing degenerate would rattle the gates after hours, slip dollar bills under the door, then insist I had just sold him chocolate so I’d better unlock the gate to hand him his goods…
That is the phenomenon of having to hold on to a job you hate but cannot afford to quit.
Then after months of nausea, vomiting, and dizziness, I gave in to dental pain so excruciating I couldn’t sleep for a week… a wisdom tooth I had been too poor to get pulled was infected, and the infection was spreading…
I maxed out a credit card to pay for that extraction. There was just enough credit left for the antibiotics. Nothing left for the painkillers…
I wrote a suicide note and downed too many pills. It didn’t work… It was then that I knew there would be no easy out.
I had to keep working and keep paying because my stubborn body wouldn’t die, and as long as I had a body I had a bill to pay.
With a stitch still in my gums and my latest attempt to quit smoking a failure, I met a friend of a friend at a bar… He read my physical and emotional numbness as cool…
I introduced him to basement shows and dive bars… I let him shop for a new subculture because being rich and successful can be so dull.
I became an outfit for him to try on and discard at the end of an evening… I would sell out anything, if I thought it would get me free of debt in the end.
He earned and saved for our future wedding and then he wanted to break up. I wasn’t interesting any more. Only starving, nihilistic girls on antibiotics could be fascinating…
The story ends on a semi-hopeful note, along with a warning:
Reader, I have achieved it—an entry-level staff job at a university. Cadillac health insurance, holidays off, vacation days I accrue with no plan on spending. Because I don’t have the money to travel.
I earn a salary and more than half of it goes to student loans. The other half goes to rent, groceries and my used and failing car— a requirement for the job.
So often I feel defeated by the dissonance: I was encouraged to earn a degree to strengthen my future job prospects and to take steps to enjoy financial independence; instead I find myself ensnared in the morass of student debt…
I’m tired now, too tired to keep up appearances. So here goes:
Attending university ruined my life! Avoid student debt like the plague!
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About Mark: I’m an illustrator specializing in humor, editorial, branding, social media, and content marketing. My images are different, like your brand needs to be.
You can view my portfolio, and connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Questions? Send me an email.
