Navigating pain and grief looks different for everybody, and for many, comedy can be a source of light in the darkness. At the 2026 World Voices Festival panel, “Laughing Through It: Dark Humor and the Novel,” Katie Yee, author of Maggie: or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar, and Benedict Nguyễn, author of Hot Girls with Balls, explored how they use humor and satire to tackle painful topics.
Moderated by writer and educator Jared Jackson, the authors discussed the challenges of using dark humor in stories about divorce, hate crimes, cancer diagnoses, and fetishization. The authors explained that using dark humor is not easy, as a single joke can shift a story’s tone entirely.
On Committing to Writing Humor
At the start of the panel, the writers were asked when they realized that their books were funny and what led them to commit to writing through a more comedic lens.
Nguyễn: “I conceived of Hot Girls with Balls as a satire from the beginning. I think the protagonists, Six and Green, make a fundamentally dark humor, pessimistic choice at the outset of their careers by understanding the world as it is and choosing to play for the men’s league, even though they’re women. So over the drafting process and revision process, I was really attuned to finding different registers of humor.”
Yee: “My book deals with…a cancer diagnosis and a divorce and I was sort of like, OK, the only way that I will write this while having fun and the only way that people will read this while having fun is if it’s like, a little bit funny. And that feels kind of true to life. I think there are so many things to kind of laugh about in really dark moments.”
On Balancing Humor with Sensitive Issues
Integrating humor can be challenging when a story covers themes that may be sensitive to an audience. Nguyen and Yee described how they found moments for humor when addressing hardship.
Nguyễn: “Upvote to humor as a potentially transgressive mode of writing and how it flirts with danger, it flirts with harm, and hurt feelings sometimes. I mentioned some deliberate discursive violence that appears in my novel…I was conscious of what the purpose of that language was over the course of the novel, and how it articulates the structure of feeling of trans misogyny or racism.”
Yee: “I think anytime you’re able to elicit any kind of reaction from your reader, that’s never a bad thing… I think that’s part of the joy of comedy is you don’t actually know what’s going to strike a chord with people, and that’s part of the excitement.”
On A New Found Relationship with Comedy
Throughout the writing process, there is always the possibility of discovering something new. The writers were asked how their relationship with comedy has evolved and what their books taught them about writing with humor.
Nguyễn: “I relate to satire as a mode of social and structural political critique, and figuring out how I wanted that to jab and operate within the novel without being too heavy-handed—while also being very on the nose in some parts and other parts—was a fun creative process for me.”
Yee: “I think, now, that I was so lucky to have a book come out and to have people say that it was funny. Now I am very conscious of looking at other people who are funny, and being like ‘How’d they do that?’, ‘What can I steal?’, ‘Why was that funny?’…I think realizing that you can do something is so funny and is for me the whole reason why I write.”
Want more?
Check out the panelists’ books:
- Hot Girls with Balls by Benedict Nguyễn
- Maggie: or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar by Katie Yee
