Bombs Away

The nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once wrote that “the life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy.” He was neither the first nor the last person to note the stubborn intimacy between the tragic and the comic, but his insight suggests that these seeming opposites are just two ways of characterizing life’s vicissitudes. The years one might spend at a dead-end service job may be sad if taken as a whole, but the shifts one spends with co-workers tending to unreasonable customers might be pleasurable in their own way. One’s perspective is very rarely adopted voluntarily or through sheer force of will. Just as we live through the inevitable, so too are we fated, it seems, to see those experiences as alternately or maybe even simultaneously laughable and lamentable.

Viewed as a whole and in general, Jean-Christophe Réhel’s All Kidding Aside is a tragedy. Louis, the protagonist, is heartbroken. His ex-boyfriend won’t even return his texts. He spends his days working at Tim Hortons with co-workers who irritate him. He passes his evenings attending local comedy shows where the sets hardly merit a smirk, let alone a laugh. “Why can’t I be that drunk dude over there?” he thinks one night. “I want to laugh uproariously, be lighthearted, feel I barely touch the ground.” Instead, the misanthrope realizes “everyone’s getting on my nerves” and leaves the bar.

Louis devotes the rest of his time tending to his brother, Gui, who lives with schizophrenia, and their father, Sylvain, who is undergoing cancer treatment. The brothers have been evicted from their apartment and are staying with Sylvain. Moreover — and perhaps most tragically of all — the thirty-two-year-old narrator navigates his troubles while aspiring to be a stand‑up comic. Sadly, he isn’t funny at all. Rather than performing or working on jokes, Louis spends his idle hours rewatching celebrated entertainers and paraphrasing their bits (thus killing them for the reader).

Louis’s situation is familiar. He is torn between societal expectations and personal desires, between normative demands and creative urges. He’s written to be a post-pandemic, millennial everyman who is relatable, for better or for worse. He is a petulant, cantankerous, and sometimes sympathetic dude who spends too much time in front of screens and does little to actively improve his lot. If reduced to its major plot points — or the significant features of Louis’s life — All Kidding Aside could be read as a story of frustration, aimless ambition, and quiet desperation. It is a tragedy writ small.

Gone through in detail, however, All Kidding Aside is a comedy that borders on farce. The small, silly annoyances that Louis encounters here and there — convoluted orders at Tims, obnoxious audience members, teenagers doing TikTok dances in the park, even the sunshine — yield sardonic exasperation. Everywhere he goes, Louis is confronted with irritating matters beyond his control. Gui, a man-child if ever there was one, alternates between listening to old-school rap at ear-bleed volumes — the lyrics of which are rendered screamingly in all caps — or freaking himself out over ghost videos on YouTube. Sylvain spends his ailing days swiping through dating apps and going on bad dates (for the most part) in questionable outfits: “Tinder is the only thing in his day that brings a smile to his face.”

Even at its most bleak, the particulars of the novel are frankly silly. When Sylvain dies, it is because Gui unthinkingly turns off his bedside ventilator. Not only is their father’s death preventable, but it’s nearly incomprehensible to the brothers. When they attempt to recover his body from the hospital, the staff can’t seem to find a record of him in their computer system. The funeral turns absurd when Louis discovers that, due to more questionable decisions made by Gui, there is no room available for the ceremony and the cremains of his father sit in a slowly melting “ice urn.” The brothers get evicted again and this time decide to go on a road trip — ultimately to spread their dad’s ashes — where they seem to get into ridiculous and avoidable altercations with nearly every person they meet. The latter half of the story is essentially As I Lay Dying — except that we’re stuck solely with Louis’s disgruntled perspective — by way of Dumb and Dumber.

All Kidding Aside is rigorously situated in Pointe-aux-Trembles in the east end of Montreal. Louis does not just take the bus but grabs the 189. He does not simply walk in the park but cuts through Parc du Vaisseau-d’Or. Instead of a nearby liquor store, there’s an SAQ. Réhel’s fierce commitment to the specificity of a part of the city that — certainly in anglophone circles — is little known or explored adds an extra dimension to the otherwise cartoonish characters. This specificity also helps anchor the affective extremes of the plot. The dedication to setting and the decision to retain some of the particularities of Québécois French — swear words and place names appear in notes at the back — remind the reader that the unrealistic mawkishness and zaniness of All Kidding Aside persist in a very real world.

This combination of melodramatic tragedy and slapstick comedy coheres largely thanks to Réhel’s concise chapters and dialogue-driven narration, which is rendered smoothly in English by Neil Smith. The choice to change the title — whether Smith’s, Réhel’s, or the publisher’s — is unfortunate, though. The original La Blague du siècle reads as something like “the joke of the century” if translated directly. That would be far more fitting. Ultimately, life as it is depicted in the novel — aspirations to fame, miserable service jobs, rampant nostalgia, homelessness, inadequate mental health support, loneliness, dating apps, YouTube hoaxes, and being ghosted by an ex — has all the beginnings of a good joke, one unique to our present moment. However, there’s not an obvious punchline, and the book offers little in the way of catharsis. Beyond the tragic and comedic elements of everyone’s lives, twenty-first-century North Americans (and Canadians in particular) seem to be living through a uniquely tedious and ceaseless tragicomedy. Whether you focus on significant world events or the minutiae of your day-to-day, you really do have to laugh or you’ll cry. Or maybe it’s the other way around?