Dry

The adage that comedy is tragedy plus time is appropriate in Burroughs’s case. Few comedians would have a career otherwise. Emotional distance creates perspective through which we can examine past trauma through a fresh lens, and that lens for Burroughs is humor. Certainly, he is not lacking in raw material. His childhood was bizarre and abusive enough to send anyone to the therapist’s couch. With an abusive father addicted to alcohol, and a mother who abandoned Burroughs to her unethical psychiatrist when the boy was 13, Burroughs existed on the fringes; he lived in chaos and squalor, never attended school, fended for himself, and survived the abuse of a 33-year-old sexual predator who lived on the premises. The author’s stories—vividly recounted in his memoir Running With Scissors and synopsized in Dry—are grist for Burroughs’s tragic mill, and yet his tone throughout both memoirs is detached and comic. During the intervention at work where he tries to defend his indefensible behavior, his humorist’s eye can still observe his co-worker: “Rick is doing his best imitation of somebody who is not a psychopath” (21). His vision of rehab is woefully out of touch with reality. He imagines a “discrete Frank Lloyd Wright-ish compound shrouded mysteriously from public view by a tasteful wall of trimmed boxwood trees,” rooms with “firm mattresses and white, 300-count Egyptian cotton sheets,” and a diet of “small, restrained portions of their steamed local trout and seasonal field greens” (37-38). His fantasy is a deliberate setup for the disappointment to follow. While Burroughs’s disillusionment was no doubt real and visceral in the moment, he chooses to spin it into humor—following an appropriate passage of time.

Burroughs’s humor, however, also masks his very real pain in the moment. For someone with an addiction, the first few hours of sobriety can be terrifying, especially when the rehab environment does not boast “holistic” nurses wearing “tailored hemp smocks” (37). Using humor to cope with trauma is well documented. In a study from Standford’s Psychophysiology Laboratory, post doc candidate Andrea Samson argues, “If you are able to teach people to be more playful, to look at the absurdities of life as humorous, you see some increase in wellbeing” (McClure, M. “Stanford psychologists find that jokes help us cope with horrifying images.” Stanford News, 2011). Burroughs has instinctively internalized this strategy, bringing his caustic wit to the tragedies of his past abuse and to his present self-destructive behavior. The strategy not only helps Burroughs survive rehab and relapse but also makes for a distinctive reading experience.