The Rubber Chicken Stress Test

Adjusting the Funny Levels

 (Or: How Not to Murder Your Own Story with a Joke)

If you’ve been following along over on Foxxfyrre Writes or Medium, you might be under the impression that I am a very serious writer. You’d be wrong.

I can be serious. I’ve talked about trauma, obsession, and what I lovingly referred to as the “physics of hatred” while writing Astral Rob. I even made it sound like I had everything under control. I did not.

At one point, in a moment of questionable judgment, I tried to give my antagonist Glenn, a calculating, manipulative, genuinely unsettling human being, a humorous beat.

Just a small one. A tiny crack in the darkness.

I brought it to Cg.

Now, Cg doesn’t have a face… but if it did, I’m fairly certain it would have slowly removed imaginary glasses, stared directly at me, and said: “We are not doing that.” And Cg was right.

  

The moment I gave Glenn even a hint of quirky humor, something broke.

Not loudly. Not dramatically.

Just… softly wrong. Like a door that used to close properly and now doesn’t quite latch.

He stopped being dangerous. He became… interpretable. And that was enough to kill him as a character. Hands up. Back away. Idea scrapped.

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But Glenn wasn’t the real problem.

The real problem… was the funny guys.

Monty and Marcel.

These two are naturally funny. Effortlessly so. Drop them into a room and something is going to go sideways in a way that makes you smile.

Which sounds great.

Until you realize the room they’re in is full of murder, obsession, and a man who can literally hollow out a human being from the inside.

Now try being funny there.

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Comic relief in a dark story is not relief.

It’s a controlled detonation.

Too little? The story suffocates.

Too much? You’ve just turned your thriller into a haunted house ride with a guy in a rubber mask going “boo.” And if it gets really bad?

Congratulations. You’ve summoned the Rubber Chicken.

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The Rubber Chicken Rule

If your character’s reaction to a serious moment could be replaced by a neon-yellow rubber chicken without changing the emotional weight of the scene…

You’ve gone too far.

So I did what any reasonable person would do.

I stress-tested the jokes. Hard.

I would take Monty and Marcel and throw them into situations that were absolutely not funny:

• life-or-death tension
• emotional collapse
• moments that should not be interrupted

Then I’d tell Cg: 

     “Something ridiculous just happened.

     They react. 

     But the scene does not lose its teeth.”

No punchlines. No winks. No “comic relief music” playing in the background.

Just reaction.

And here’s where it got interesting

The humor didn’t disappear. It changed shape.

Monty and Marcel didn’t become comedians. They became men trying to function in a situation that made no sense, using humor the way people actually do:

• to deflect
• to cope
• to avoid looking directly at the thing that might break them

And the key? They never thought they were funny.

That’s the line.

The moment a character knows they’re being funny, you’ve lost them. The moment they treat something absurd with full, grounded seriousness… you’ve found something better.

Not comedy. Not drama. Something in between that feels real enough to hold.

What I learned (the hard way)

You don’t protect a serious story by removing humor.

You protect it by making sure the humor obeys the same rules as everything else:

• it has to belong
• it has to hold under pressure
• and it cannot break the reality the story is asking the reader to believe in

Because the moment it does… You don’t just lose the joke. You lose the story.

Final note from the edge of disaster

Glenn never got his joke. Monty and Marcel kept theirs. And somewhere in the background, a rubber chicken quietly did not make it into the final draft.

Which, in hindsight… was probably the right call.

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P.S. I made them sing.

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TTFN

Frank aka Foxxfyrre