I. The Comedy of Dialect and Malaprop
The most immediately audible register of Mulhern’s humor is linguistic: the collision between elevated or borrowed language and the untutored, immigrant-inflected speech of the women who deploy it. Aiden’s dead grandfather, appearing as a ghost, offers his grandson a piece of Transcendentalist wisdom with an error that becomes, on inspection, one of the most quietly perfect comic beats in the entire cycle: “’Goodness is the only investment that never fails.’ A smart man by the name of Toreau said that.” The misspelling — Thoreau rendered as “Toreau” — asks to be laughed at and immediately complicates the laugh, because the grandfather, dead and generous with his wisdom, is also a man who “never went to college,” who “couldn’t afford it and wasn’t allowed admission because he was an Irish immigrant.” The comedy of the malaprop and the pathos of its cause arrive in the same half-sentence; Mulhern does not let the reader enjoy one without absorbing the other.
This linguistic comedy recurs relentlessly and is one of the most reliable engines of scene-level humor across the corpus. Catherine mangles the Letter of John into something closer to travel commentary: after the priest reads aloud “See what love the Father has bestowed on us,” Aiden later asks what “tribulation” meant, “And where were ‘Repapah’ and ‘Kadiddle,’” his own mangling of Rephidim and Kadesh, itself an echo of his grandmother’s earlier, equally confident mispronunciation of the same verse: “It came out of you like the water that gushed from the rock at Rephidim and Kadesh.” Catherine’s Biblical citation is impressively specific and totally unbothered by its own probable inaccuracy, delivered with the same breezy authority she brings to inventing a chalice’s provenance on the spot: “A friend of mine loaned it to me. . . . You could call Joshua that. He works for a reputable institution. Started it from the ground up. The building is as grand as a temple.” “Where is it?” “Jerusalem, New York.” The joke is a small, perfect structure: real place name (Jerusalem), absurd modifier (New York), delivered with total conviction, punctured by her daughter’s gentle disbelief (“Jerusalem? . . . I think you’re telling me a fib”), and then simply left standing, unresolved, because the scene has other business to attend to. This is comedy as compression — an entire personality (confident, improvisational, contemptuous of scrutiny, devoted) delivered in eleven words and a place name.
The malaprop tradition Mulhern is working in has deep roots in American immigrant fiction — one thinks of the linguistic comedy in Farrell’s Studs Lonigan novels, or the dialect humor running through generations of Irish-American and Italian-American storytelling more broadly — but Mulhern’s particular refinement is to make the malaprop never purely a mark of ignorance to be condescended to. Catherine’s “Toreau,” her invented geography, her confident mangling of Scripture, are consistently paired with an intelligence and resourcefulness that the novel takes seriously elsewhere on the same page. The comedy invites a laugh at the error and then, almost instantly, withdraws permission to feel superior about it, because the very next line is usually doing something that reveals the character’s shrewdness, her love, or her grief.
II. The Comedy of Incongruous Register: Sacred Meets Scatological
Mulhern’s second great comic engine is incongruity of register — the collision of the sacred and the bodily, the liturgical and the vulgar, executed with what can only be described as impeccable comic timing. The single most sustained set-piece of this kind in the corpus is the Margie sequence in “Keep Calm and Carry On,” a scene that begins in devotional anxiety and detonates, within two pages, into an extended riff on incontinence, adult diapers, and the space program:
“I don’t know how I feel about all those miracles Father Tom was going on about.” . . . “He raised Lazarus from the dead,” Margie said. “And then He healed the deaf and dumb men. Oh, and the blind man, too.” She lifted her hand and accidently splashed my grandmother. . . . “Why aren’t there miracles today?”
The scene has, to this point, the register of a genuine theological conversation between two working women wrestling honestly with belief. Then, without transition, the tonal floor drops out:
“Sorry about that. Good thing they came up with adult diapers. I wear them all the time. It seems I always have to pee when I get nervous. If I sneeze or laugh. Even when I fart.” . . . “Honey, it’s a fact of life. Older people lose control of their bladders. I saw on TV that astronauts wear MAGs during liftoff and landing.” “What are MAGs?” “Maximum Absorbency Garments. Something to do with gravity makes the astronauts have to go. I have a whole different perspective of John Glenn.”
This is comedy built on velocity and specificity rather than crudeness for its own sake: the joke is not merely that an old woman discusses diapers, but the swerve from Lazarus to John Glenn’s bladder inside a single paragraph, the acronym delivered with bureaucratic precision (“Maximum Absorbency Garments”), and the deadpan non-sequitur of a “whole different perspective” on a national hero achieved entirely through urinary sympathy. Rita’s attempted restoration of dignity — “We’re not here to talk about urination and the United States space program” — is itself a perfect comic sentence, its false gravity (“the United States space program,” stated with the full weight of a diplomatic communiqué) colliding with the ridiculousness of what it is trying, and failing, to dismiss. Margie’s rejoinder completes the joke’s structure by refusing embarrassment altogether: “Urination. Rita, you make everything sound so intellectual. The way I figure is we all shit and pee. Nothin’ to be ashamed of.”
What makes this more than mere raunchy comic relief is what the scene is doing structurally: it is the immediate prelude to the household’s most audacious crime, the theft of Margie’s jewelry from her own bedroom while she sits, oblivious and trusting, in the next room. Mulhern places his broadest, most crowd-pleasing comedy directly against his darkest moral material, so that the reader’s guard is down — laughing at bladders and astronauts — at the exact moment the narrative pivots to Aiden quietly pocketing diamond earrings. The comedy is not incidental to the theft scene; it is the mechanism by which the reader, like Margie herself, is disarmed.
III. The Comedy of Physical Comparison and Grotesque Description
A third recurring comic device is Mulhern’s use of extended, almost baroque physical description pushed just past the border of realism into caricature, always delivered with a straight face by a narrator too young or too accustomed to recognize the exaggeration as exaggeration. Peggy Fleming’s introduction in “Assumptions” is the clearest instance of this technique in the entire corpus, a paragraph that builds a comic edifice out of pure descriptive excess before pulling the rug out from under its own joke:
“Her face was swollen and pasty, with broken capillaries that sloped down the sides of her nostrils, flooding the arid plain of her skin, like some dreary river and its tributaries eking over a delta of nasolabial folds to terminate in the red seas of two droopy cheeks. Spindly, awkward limbs stuck out of a round body, like you might see in a kindergartner’s rendering of a person.”
The passage is doing something technically sophisticated: it deploys the vocabulary of epic, geographic grandeur — rivers, tributaries, deltas, seas — in service of describing a woman’s ordinary, aging face, a mismatch of scale (continental geography applied to broken capillaries) that is the essence of mock-epic technique, the same comic machinery Pope used in The Rape of the Lock and Fielding used throughout Tom Jones. The “kindergartner’s rendering of a person” simile completes the joke by collapsing the elevated diction back down to childlike simplicity in the very next sentence — an adult narrator’s retrospective irony bleeding through a child narrator’s naive observational voice. And then, in the paragraph’s final beat, the joke pivots on a single word into something else entirely: “like many ugly people, she had a heart of gold, and oh could she sing!” The comic description of Peggy’s face is not undercut or apologized for — Mulhern does not walk it back — but it is recontextualized, so that by the story’s end, when Peggy dies and the narrator imagines her transfigured and “altogether beautiful,” the earlier comic grotesquerie becomes retroactively poignant rather than retroactively embarrassing. The joke was never really about Peggy’s ugliness. It was about the distance between how a community describes a woman and what she actually is, and comedy is the vehicle that establishes the distance the story will spend its remaining pages closing.
Margie receives similarly exuberant comic treatment throughout “Keep Calm and Carry On” — “a smelly fat lady with a big white cat that hissed at everyone,” whose “bum hung over the seat” of a kitchen chair, whose sweater is perpetually covered in cat hair “especially the ledge of her belly where Arnold sat” — description built from repetition and accumulation rather than cruelty, each detail small and specific (the cat hair, the sweater, the belly-as-ledge) rather than a single blunt insult. The narrator’s own aside — “I thought, why do fat people always wear sweaters?” — is a child’s genuinely puzzled, genuinely comic observation, delivered with the total lack of self-consciousness that makes child narrators such reliable comic instruments; an adult narrator making the same observation would read as mean-spirited, but a child wondering aloud reads as simply, disarmingly true to how children actually think, which is the source of the laugh.
IV. The Comedy of the Con: Timing, Performance, and Deadpan
Because so much of Mulhern’s plot machinery involves elaborate deceptions, a great deal of the humor is structural — comedy of plot and performance rather than comedy of language or description. The extended chalice-theft sequence in “Blindfolded” is, considered purely as farce, a small masterpiece of comic engineering: the staged collapse at the altar rail (“Fall,” she whispers, “Remember our plan”), the accidental toppling of an innocent bystander (“I fell hard, shoving myself against the old guy. He toppled over as well”), the theft executed under cover of manufactured chaos, and the getaway conducted with the crisp, over-the-top diction of spy fiction — Rita even dresses for a parallel caper “in a black pantsuit with a beret, as if she were starring in a spy thriller.” The scene’s comic peak arrives in its aftermath, when grandmother and grandson invent an entirely fictional redemption narrative on the spot to return a different chalice to a different parish, and, in the getaway, adopt spontaneous aliases with the panache of vaudeville performers: “I’m Elaine, and this is my grandson Galahad.” An elderly parishioner’s plaintive, old-fashioned cry — “Yoo-hoo. Come back. We want to speak with you” — followed by Catherine’s deadpan reply, delivered while fleeing the scene of a crime she has just successfully laundered into a miracle — “Yoo-hoo,” my grandmother answered and waved. “We’ll be right over.” — is comic writing of real precision: the joke depends entirely on the gap between the words spoken (a friendly promise to return) and the action performed (accelerating away at speed), and on the specific, dated period slang (“Yoo-hoo,” promptly mocked by Catherine herself: “Who says ‘yoo-hoo’ anymore? He must be demented”) that signals both character and era in four syllables.
This is comedy built the way a heist film builds comedy — through the pleasure of watching a plan executed with confidence, punctuated by near-misses (the police stop for running a red light, resolved by an instantaneous fabricated cover story about religious distraction — “I was saying a prayer with my grandson. He gave me this gold cross and I got distracted” — that the investigating officer accepts without difficulty) — and it depends for its full effect on a deadpan narrating consciousness that reports each escalating absurdity with the same even tone it uses to report breakfast.
V. The Comedy That Turns: Bathos as a Tragic Hinge
The most sophisticated dimension of Mulhern’s comic technique, and the one most likely to be underappreciated on a casual read, is his use of comedy specifically as the hinge on which a scene turns from lightness into grief — not comic relief followed by pathos, but comedy that becomes pathos within a single exchange, without any signal that the turn is coming. The clearest instance occurs in “Arise and Go Now,” in the scene where Margie and Rita discuss Margie’s decades-old heartbreak:
“Suffers from a broken heart, but I wish she’d get over it. Arthur was the love of her life.” “Who?” “The guy that dumped her when she got fat.”
This is bald, almost cruel comic economy — a life’s grief compressed into a single crude sentence, delivered by children relaying secondhand gossip with the casual insensitivity children bring to adult tragedy they do not yet understand. The reader laughs, if at all, at the bluntness of the phrasing rather than at Margie’s pain, and the joke evaporates almost instantly, because the same scene, only a page later, will require this same Margie to help stage a jailbreak of a psychiatric patient, waddling down an institutional stairwell with real physical difficulty and real courage — “Margie moaned, easing her fat body as rapidly as she could down the stairs” — the comic vocabulary of her earlier introduction (“fat,” her wheezing effort) now doing double duty as evidence of loyalty and sacrifice. The joke about Arthur has not been forgotten by the time Margie proves herself; it has simply been recontextualized, the way Peggy’s comic ugliness is recontextualized by her death.
The technique reaches its most concentrated form in the single line that closes the diaper-and-astronaut sequence in “Keep Calm and Carry On.” Immediately after the extended comic riff on incontinence, Margie is asked, almost as an afterthought, how she is doing, and answers: “I’m alive.” Two words. No elaboration. The line lands as comedy — deadpan understatement in the mode established by the whole preceding exchange — and simultaneously as something considerably darker: a woman in genuine physical and emotional decline, describing her own continued existence in the flattest possible terms, immediately after a scene that has mined her body for laughs. Mulhern does not soften the line or explain it. He simply lets the reader’s laugh catch in the throat, which is, this essay would argue, the single most reliable signature of his mature comic style: the joke is real, and the grief underneath it is also real, and the prose declines, at the exact moment of maximum comic payoff, to tell the reader which one it actually wants.
VI. Comedy as a Structural Argument About Mercy
What unifies all of these techniques — the malaprop, the mock-epic description, the farcical heist choreography, the bathetic turn — is that Mulhern’s comedy is never separable from his fiction’s larger argument about mercy and the sacred, an argument this essay’s companion pieces have examined at length elsewhere in other contexts. Comedy in this fiction functions as a leveling device: it takes women whom the social world has already discounted — the alcoholic, the toothless and bald, the incontinent, the obese, the widowed, the lonely — and, instead of asking the reader to pity them from a position of superiority, forces the reader to laugh with the community that loves them, in language calibrated to their own idiom, before that same comedy pivots to reveal the dignity or grief the laughter had, for a moment, obscured. This is a considerably more difficult trick than either straightforward comic relief (jokes that exist to relieve tension before returning to serious material unchanged) or straightforward pathos (grief presented without any comic interruption to complicate it). Mulhern’s characteristic move is to make the joke and the grief coextensive, so that a reader cannot fully register one without also, on some level, registering the other — Peggy’s grotesque comic introduction and her eventual transfiguration are not two different depictions of the same woman separated by narrative distance; they are, on inspection, the same depiction, read twice, once for the laugh and once for the ache the laugh had been quietly carrying all along.
It is this simultaneity — not merely the presence of humor alongside tragedy, but the structural fusion of the two at the level of the sentence — that distinguishes Mulhern’s comic sensibility from the broader tradition of ethnic urban comedy it otherwise resembles, and that rewards a reader willing to slow down at precisely the moments the prose seems, on its surface, to be inviting the fastest possible laugh.