Jokes and the Unconscious by Daphne Gottlieb & Diane DiMassa BUY THIS
Cleis Press: 2006
This graphic novel is a collaboration between performance poet Daphne Gottlieb & Hothead Paisan creator Diane DiMassa. It is a unique, powerful and blackly comic look at a slice of 19 year old Sasha's life - the part where her father dies of cancer.
While her doctor father is sick, he persuades Sasha to get an admin job in the hospital in which he worked, thereby exposing her to the morbidly funny world of the sick and dying and the people who care for them. Sasha records her day to day encounters with these people with a dry wit and a sense of "what the hell am I doing here?". And when her legitimate admin work runs out, she spends her time looking up the medical records of everyone she knows. At the same time she tries to make sense of the fact that her difficult father is dying.
The title is from Freud's "Jokes and their Relations to the Unconscious", in which he states, "laughter mediates between us and our discomfort with mortality, sexuality, ethnicity or any other touchy subject", and indeed interspersed throughout the story are single frame panels in which Sasha is a comedian telling tasteless jokes while sitting on the edge of someone's coffin, or in a savage bear's lap. These moments are unsettling and weird, and convey the confusion, sadness and hopelessly ridiculous nature of dying much clearer than a straightfoward account would by tapping into our discomfort. As a reader, you aren't quite sure what you are meant to feel, like Sasha herself.The drawings are trademark Diane DiMassa, kind of grotesque, shadowy and sharp, contributing to the darkness of the story. Throughout the typography changes, making this seem a bit like Sasha's personal journal.This graphic novel is hard to classify in terms of genre. I highly recommend you read it, I think it will surprise you and it will linger in your mind for a long while, because it's likely you've never read anything like it.
MS 06/04/07
