Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened

The literary techniques of simile, metaphor, and hyperbole are common across a great deal of creative writing. They are used to exaggerate or to enhance the impact of a text through vivid imagery. Brosh uses these techniques across chapters of her graphic memoir Hyperbole and a Half. Primarily, Brosh uses these techniques to create tension and conflict in what might otherwise be a humdrum anecdote about her everyday life. Many of the pieces in her book are reliant on these techniques for both their humor and their narrative momentum.

Brosh often uses simile in descriptions to underscore some dimension of a character. For example, she describes one of her dogs as “uncoordinated in a way that would suggest her canine lineage is tainted with traces of a species with a different number of legs—like maybe a starfish or a snake” (20). In describing her dog as like a starfish or snake, Brosh uses simile (note that she is not declaring that her dog is, in fact, actually a starfish or a snake). Yet in this example, Brosh is also using hyperbole: her dog is not displaying a regular level of lack of coordination; rather, her dog is uncoordinated to such a level that Brosh wonders whether her dog’s very genes are tainted.

Similarly, Brosh uses these literary techniques to describe her own behavior. She says that with the help of procrastination, she can delay responsibilities to a later date “while hurtling toward failure at eight hundred miles per hour” (42). Eight hundred miles per hour is a hyperbolic speed achievable only with the assistance of a spacecraft. Rather than simply describing her behavior as normal procrastination, she depicts it as “hurtling toward failure”—vivid imagery that connotes a speedy trajectory toward an unfortunate conclusion. The humor comes from how fast she hurtles toward failure as well as her frantic attempts to convince herself to behave another way.

In addition to using these techniques to describe herself, Brosh uses them to provide context for her behavior. For example, when she tells a childhood narrative about stealing and eating her grandfather’s birthday cake, the cake itself is no ordinary specimen. Rather, she waxes poetic about the cake decorations; she describes it as “slathered in impossibly thick frosting” (54). Clearly, the thickness of the frosting was indeed within the realm of possibility, seeing as Brosh managed to eat it. Yet this hyperbole serves to underscore how delicious she perceived the cake to be, hence providing a reason for her obsession with eating it.

Throughout the book, as well as the eponymous web-comic on which it was based, Brosh uses these literary techniques to turn ordinary life events into humorous episodes. The extent of her hyperbole is more than usual—so much hyperbole, in fact, that it is hyperbole and a half.