Rebecca
And Bec. Today we are chatting with author Jason Roeder, the former senior editor and senior writer at The Onion.

Natalie
Jason’s also a contributor to The New Yorker and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, so essentially his job has been to lean into funny. It might seem a little odd, then, to reframe dealing with grief with a humour writer, but new perspectives are what we’re after — so here we are.

Rebecca
We talk about his new book Griefstrike!, a hilarious how-to for getting through grief. We ask him about his book’s Sincerity Corners, his hilarious Grieving Visualization Power Postures (which all begin by standing nude in one’s sunroom) and Grief Archetypes (AKA the tough-looking Denny’s waitress) that makes us laugh out loud!

Natalie
So let’s get to it: reframing hilarious grief with Jason Roeder.

Jason
“Devastation perfected. I didn’t know your loved one. If I did, I probably would have liked them — and they would have liked me. Not more than they liked you, of course, but definitely as much, because I’ve written a groundbreaking, paradigm-exploding therapeutic resource. If you want to grieve like a champion, like you’re the Super Bowl MVP of your own sorrow, you’ve come to the right place. Sure, similar books exist, with squishy titles like Cozy Words for Crying, or A Casket Full of Sunshine, but this is the book your heart requires to truly, massively heal. This is loss like a boss.”

“If you’ve made the mistake of reading those other books before this one, you’ve probably encountered morsels of so-called wisdom along the lines of, “Healing is rarely a straightforward process,” or, “It’s unethical to leverage the death of your loved one into free teeth whitening services.” Ignore these experts. Their competence has blinded them to bold ideas. Their dependence on insights gleaned from years of intensive clinical experience have closed them off to newer and louder concepts. No, your recovery belongs in the hands of a man whose work is shelved alongside a colouring book for grownups and a compendium of Snoop Dogg haiku.”

“Therapeutic innovation, until it’s properly recognized, is often dismissed as a novelty. Other grief manuals are there to help if they can, tentatively submitting advice for your approval the way a gorilla tries out new words in sign language. This book is for everyone who has found themselves in a place of unfathomable sadness and thought, “If grief is a large hoop of fire, then where is my ramp and motorcycle?” In this dark chapter of your life, you want gigantic healing outcomes, and that’s what you’ll get.”

Natalie
We’re here today with Jason Roeder. We are reframing his experience of grief through humour. And Jason, you are the former senior editor and senior writer at The Onion, as well as a contributor to The New Yorker and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. So your job really has been to lean into funny. So what’s funny to you?

Jason
That’s hard to say. I guess it would be some weird intersection of absurdity and misery and connection, I guess? If you put those three things together in kind of a jar and you shake it up and you pour it out, I will probably find that to be funny. It’s hard to isolate it more than that — because, you know, like, seeing a cat sitting in a chair at a kitchen table looking like a human is also very funny to me, you know? So…

Rebecca
Yes.

Jason
The more sort of detail I apply to it, the more I find myself excluding things that are actually funny to me. Yeah, so you know, it’s some violation of, like, norms and dignity, but not in a hurtful way. I think once you start thinking about it abstractly, it’s very hard to get it right, or to be satisfied with what you just said. So, I mean, that sounds right. It doesn’t sound like I’m not telling the truth, but it also feels like I will see something later today that will make me laugh, and it will have no relation to what I just told you a few seconds ago.

Rebecca
Did you just say norms and dignity?

Jason
Yeah. I feel like that’s what slapstick is, right? I mean, someone falling over can be funny. It’s not funny if they’re carted off in an ambulance. It’s not funny if they have to learn to walk again. But it’s funny, you know, not to ring up my cat again, but she’s right here looking at me. You know, when she jumps from the couch toward her destination and misses by a mile and just eats it, that is funny to me, but it’s not cruel. Yeah, that’s the best definition I think I can give.

Rebecca
Has it just become second nature for you to think in bylines?

Jason
You mean like Onion headlines and stuff?

Rebecca
Yeah, kind of like just…

Jason
Yeah.

Rebecca
See cat and something comes to you, kind of?

Jason
Oh, for sure. I’ve worked there on and off for… I think I started there as, like, an editorial fellow in 2008, 2009. I haven’t been there throughout, but yeah, I think about ‘how can this be framed as a headline?’ constantly. Because when you sit down to write your headlines every week, it’s good if you come in with something. So yeah, you’re constantly reframing your world and your experience and what you see, and see if you can pack that into ten words that are funny and read as real to people — which is hard.

Rebecca
My husband and I were in Canadian Tire (which is a box store here in Canada) last night getting a Christmas tree, and there was this sweet older woman humming Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer to herself, in a really serious… she was seriously enjoying humming Rudolph. I felt like…that’s a gift I offer you, Jason. I felt like something there was very infervant. Simon, my husband, was kind of freaking out. He’s like, “I can’t be around this. This is, like, too awful that this is happening.” He was offended. Whereas I just found it so adorable, and I think she was going to hang out for a while.

Jason
Well, sure.

Rebecca
Just looking at detergents, just humming Rudolph — like, at quite a pitch.

Jason
I mean, it’s hard, because…

Rebecca
Do you have a byline for me?

Jason
Absolutely, yeah. You’ll get your contributor’s fee. Sometimes I’ll write a headline and I will think, “Oh, this is so funny and it’s so universal, and I can’t wait to bring it into the room.” And a lot of times they’re like, “Oh, yeah, I can relate to that.” And sometimes they’ll be like, “Oh, no, that’s just you. That’s just your weird world, and no one is going to understand what is happening if we print that.” So it’s a good way of seeing how grounded you are in the world of other people.”

Rebecca
Ok. Well, your new book, Griefstrike!, is a manual of sorts — a hilarious how-to forgetting through grief. So in many ways, it’s a reframe, and so perfect for our show. So why did you write this book?

Jason
I wrote it because, well, my mother passed away in 2019 — August 2019. And in the months after that, I wanted to find a way to process it — you know, how I was feeling myself, and also be, you know, of use to people. And I wanted to help people kind of engage with their grief in a way they might not have been able to before. So if you read a manual, or you go online, there’s a certain tone that you encounter over and over and over, a tone of comfort. Which of course you would — why wouldn’t you? And I think after a while, when you spend too much time in this sort of grief universe, you know, it could start to feel a little suffocating for some people. And so this book is a way for people that weren’t necessarily ready to leave the sort of grief space, but wanted to engage with it in a different way — just to get, like, a break from the weight of it all, you know?

And so I wrote this book. I’d written self-help parodies before. It’s just something I’d fallen into over the past, like, 15 years. And this seemed like something that could actually be a service to people, to have an opportunity to laugh at something that you didn’t think you’d be able to, or you didn’t think it’d be appropriate to, and to have a companion who had been there and who is sort of coming along with you on this journey and understands those feelings, and is going through them as he’s kind of writing this book. So it’s really not meant to be full of insight. It’s not meant to take the place of a book that a therapist might write, because I am not a therapist. I have a bachelor’s in psychology, and that was enough. But it is meant to give someone an opportunity to laugh at a time where they didn’t think they’d be able to, but they could really, really use it.

Natalie
And you really play with form in this book. Like, you have sections throughout called Sincerity Corners, which I found very helpful because I think just in terms of my own read of humour, I like how you present throughout the text, it’s very… I wouldn’t say flippant, but does the word laconic kind of work a little bit? Like it’s deadpan, right, kind of all the way through. Which really resonates for me because I find that funny. I’m married to a Brit, so maybe there’s just something about that. But what’s interesting in those Sincerity Corners is that you actually really get real. I mean, like, the whole thing is real, but in those moments, the real Jason kind of pops up for a second, but not in an over-the-top way. And I really found that one point where you mentioned visiting your mom’s grave and actually not having done that, right — like, beyond the funeral.

Jason
Right — after the funeral, yeah.

Natalie
Yeah, that was really powerful to me because — and I don’t know that Becca, you even know this, but I’ve never gone back to Grandma and Grandpa’s grave sites since they’ve passed. And it’s been a number of years, and there’s just a lot of feeling attached to it for me, and I haven’t really wanted to go there. So there was something really just immediately like, “Oh, ok, so when we have this conversation tomorrow, Jason and I have a point of connection.” It felt very real.

Jason
Oh, good.

Natalie
So, yeah, I just wondered then, like, were you doing that for you, those Sincerity Corners, or were you doing that with a reader like Natalie in mind? What was the thinking there?

Jason
I think I was doing it primarily for the reader, because I thought I kind of owed them a glimpse into who I was in this particular topic. Like, if I’d written a book on dating or looking for a job or something, I don’t know if I’d feel as sort of obliged to offer up my own experience. You could have just written it without the sort of footnotes. But people who are reading this book are probably coming into it feeling, you know, a bit isolated, alienated, which is what grief does to you. And so I wanted to provide that to give the reader a sense of companionship, and that behind the sort of dry and arch tone of most of the book (which is, like, packed with jokes) that there is actually a human being who wrote it. And I don’t think it’s, like, a comedy crime to show that in this instance, you know? And I didn’t want to write a memoir. I didn’t want to write 200 pages on my life. So this is a way of writing what I know best and what I’m best at, but also connecting with people in a somewhat authentic way — at least, I hope so.

Rebecca
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So you’re a writer, so words equals jokes.

Jason
Words. Words, jokes.

Rebecca
Words, words. Is that very different than being a stand-up comic, by the way? Side note, total side note — like, could you be?

Jason
I have tried. So the answer is: to be good at anything, you have to do it a lot. And so when you write for The Onion or any sort of outlet or show that has any kind of provenance, you get opportunities that you may not deserve. And so I have done stand-up. When I’ve practiced and really worked at it, it’s gone really well. But when I have just assured myself that writing for The Onion makes you good on stage, it’s gone horribly, because I’m not practiced as a performer and it’s a performance. And so I’ve gotten on stage and I’ve written good material, but I’m, like, robotically reciting it. The 600 words that I wrote, I’m just kind of scanning it and reading it into a microphone, and it’s not working at all.

So there are people who can do both very well, and maybe if I put the work into standup, I could do it really well, but I can’t pretend that I can do it really well right now. My toolkit is incomplete. I have certain things, but there are other things, including just comfort on stage, that I do not have. I have very distinct memories of freezing on stage, taking out a piece of paper from my pocket, unfolding it from like, eighths — you know, it’s like 30 seconds, but it feels like 100 years. The crinkling sound into the microphone, scanning it to figure out where I was, and then folding it back up and putting it in my pocket. About 30 seconds, it felt like 100 years. So, yeah, so there is a connection. And you know, there are people who write stand-up and have tried to write for The Onion and who can’t. Everything is a distinct sort of dialect that you have to learn.

Rebecca
You have these Grieving Visualization Power Postures that you kind of open the book with — which they all begin by standing nude in one’s sunroom.

Jason
In your sunroom — right, of course.

Rebecca
So much about that’s funny — that we would all have a sunroom, that you have to start them all by standing nude.

Jason
I just assume all my readers have a sunroom. I don’t know if that’s going too far, or…

Rebecca
No, they do. All of them. So does humour for you often kinesthetic — involve the whole body? Can you walk us through one of those poses?

Jason
I think it might have been on my mind because I moved to LA a couple of years ago, and I’ve taken up yoga, and I just see these poses in front of my face. And also just to tip the fact even further that this is a humour book, and so I figured if you have five nude silhouettes within the first three pages of your book, that will let people know that this is a book of jokes, and that you should proceed, you know, accordingly. So that’s why I did that. But no, I mean, humour is not kinetic for me. Generally, it’s sitting on my gross couch, looking into my gross keyboard, and just typing words until I can’t stand myself anymore. That’s about as much motion that’s involved.

Rebecca
Ok, how did you come up with the Grief Archetypes? Ok, I just want to tell the listeners some of them, because they’re just… I was trying to figure out where I am as a griever. I guess it changes. Is it griever? Is that a word?

Jason
I think it is.

Natalie
It is now.

Rebecca
It is? Ok, so for example, one could be a tough-looking Denny’s waitress.

Jason
Right.

Rebecca
Or a different kind of griever, a concerned teacher kneeling before crying eight-year-old. Or one might be a gladiator who doesn’t really leave the house anymore.

Jason
Right, exactly.

Rebecca
Well, how did you think of those? Just, like, was it through watching different people’s reactions — or, I mean, connected to the idea of maybe your different archetypes at different stages of the grief process? Or what were you thinking?

Jason
Yeah, I think it’s more of that. I think it’s more, you know, examining yourself. As you kind of go through it, you cycle through these different emotions, and this was just sort of making note. You know, so if I’m feeling like I really want to help other people who might be in pain because of my mother’s passing — like, that impulse. Ok, so what is that impulse? How could you blow that up into an archetype and make it funny? Or if your impulse is just to kind of endure stoically, ok, well, how can you make that funny?

Rebecca
That’s the Denny’s waitress?

Jason
That’s the Denny’s waitress, right.

Rebecca
Enduring stoically, yeah.

Jason
So that was the idea. And, you know, I mean, obviously I think people feel more than one emotion, but I think it’s very possible that people are characterized by one thing generally, even if other emotions are sort of evident. That was the idea of the quiz. You can decide which one you are, and I think I have six overall. Yeah, look, it’s science, that’s all it is. It’s sound science. So, you know, you can see your therapist if you want, but if you want the real answers, you could take my ten question quiz at the end of the book.

Rebecca
What kind of griever were you? A serious question. Did you find yourself in one category?

Jason
I think I said I was more of the stoic Denny’s waitress, I believe. I think that’s a little note in there. But, you know, I was all things, but I feel like it’s probably what, in a way, enables me to write the book — that I was sort of walling myself off to be able to write jokes. I did think about that. I think that’s what it would be. Of course, on any other given day, I could have been The Wrathful Circus Elephant, which I think is another one. It depends, but I think everyone will find something to identify with. And if you don’t, I think there’s one if you don’t identify with any of them. So I covered all my bases.

Natalie
We found a Rolling Stone article where you actually talk about a famous headline that you wrote about mass shootings in America. And for me, when I read that article, I actually made a link back to your book. And I’m just curious if you have any thoughts that would sort of link the two, because I think Griefstrike! is bigger than just one’s very personal experience of grief. I’m curious to get your perspective.

Jason
It is. I’m very wary of connecting the two only because, you know, my mother died of natural causes, and I can’t begin to inhabit the world of someone who lost someone in a shooting, suddenly and violently. So I would never presume to think that they could get something from my book. It’s possible, and that would be great. I mean, if someone had endured the loss of someone who was, you know, murdered and somehow found something valuable from my book, that would be fantastic. But I know they are going through things, you know, that I didn’t, and that I won’t. So it is strange that they both deal with dying. But, you know, that headline first appeared, I think, in…

Natalie
2014.

Jason
Oh god, 2014. Right. It’s been coming and going a long time.

Natalie
Yeah.

Jason
And unfortunately, there’s no sign of it stopping. But the book didn’t occur to me until my mother died, and I thought, “Ok, so people who’ve been through what I’ve been through might find something through it.” I don’t know, maybe I’ll hear from someone who lost someone in a shooting and found something, a moment of distraction from the book. And if that happens, that would be great.

Rebecca
Or perhaps resonating with the absurdity of the things that you’re bringing up — that you watched a PowerPoint presentation at the funeral home when you’re picking a casket or whatever. That kind of thing, that you still, even if you’ve been in tragedy…

Jason
Yeah.

Rebecca
If death has happened through tragedy, you still have to go through those insane parts.

Jason
Absolutely. And it’s possible that someone who’s lost someone violently can bring something to the book and maybe get more out of it than I ever would have considered. But just from my point of view, I would never presume that they would. But hopefully I’ll be surprised. That would be great. If the book could be of use to people that I never would have imagined it could be useful for, that would be really gratifying.

Rebecca
You write — I’m just going to read this funny little section: “Here in America, we’re too busy forging our destinies and telling ourselves we can be anything we set our minds to being, no matter how much logic begs us to accept the limitations of our strength, intelligence, or ability to sexually perform in front of a camera crew. Then someone we love gets sick, so sick that there’s no motivating it away. They’re still with us for now, but they’re going, even though we read some inspirational story on the internet about how someone with a very similar condition survived and went on to heroically climb Mount Everest. (Eight sherpas carrying his luggage were killed.)”

So that was funny to me, but it also just brought up for me, like, I guess we do deny death here in North America. Were you also wanting to confront that a little bit?

Jason
I think so. I mean, I guess the book is, like, implicitly a confrontation — and I know we haven’t integrated death in this culture the way other cultures do. We don’t see it as part of the life cycle. We think of it as a scary thing that will one day show up and ruin our plans. You know, that kind of thing. But on the other hand, me personally, I’m not sure what kind of relationship I want to have with it. Like, death sucks. I’m not sure I want to be on good terms with it. You know, maybe I just want to not think about it. And then one day it will show up, I will get a knock from downstairs, and I will go downstairs and open the vestibule door, and death will be there. You know, like that kind of thing. So I don’t know. But I do think the book is maybe an effort to very, very gently get people at least thinking about it — and I know I’m contradicting myself, but just not fretting about it as much because it is something we all share. It can be bad, but it doesn’t have to be lonely when you consider that it’s something we’re all going through, and we’re all going to do. It’s hard, but, you know, humour is… I know this is kind of cheesy, but it is a way of connecting. And so maybe this book allows people to connect with each other about a pretty terrible topic.

Rebecca
I think it did for me. It’s kind of funny. When I started reading it, I was laughing out loud, and then I came back in a different mood, and then I was a bit annoyed because I was like, “Oh, this is for this moment that I’m in.” I’m, like, a little bit tired now, and I’m like, “Now it’s feeling flippant.” And then I come back and I’m like, “No, this is exactly what that moment is. It’s hilarious again.” It kind of revealed myself to me, so I felt that it opened up something different about grief for me. You know, resisting it doesn’t help.

Jason
Right.

Rebecca
I hear what you’re saying, that when grief or when death comes knocking again, you’re not like, “Hey!” — you’re going to be excited to see and participate in grief again. But at the same time, it is coming for us all. So how do we meet it? How do we meet death, how do we meet the grieving that comes with it?

Jason
Right — and to be fair, to be honest, this book provides not great answers. But I think the idea that we’re all sharing this confusion, I think, can be helpful in its own right. And, you know, people will approach the book at different times in their grieving process. Like, you talked about coming back to it and feeling about it differently each time you did. And, you know, some person will pick it up and they’ll read it, and it will be just what they need at that moment. And some people, they’ll read it and they’ll like it, but they’ll say, “You know what, I’m not quite ready for this world yet. I’m going to keep it, but let’s check in in another couple of months.” And some people will never — and that’s fine. And some people will be ready to read it earlier than I would have been able to read a book like that. But I do think there’s a time for it for most people if you have the sort of requisite dark sense of humour — which you have to have that much going in, I think.

Rebecca
Yes, as a baseline.

Jason
Yeah, I think so. I think you have to be able to find things that aren’t funny. Funny, if presented in the right way by a skilled person, and I hope I am a skilled person. I don’t know. I will wait until Amazon tells me, “I would have given a one-star if I could.” You know?

Natalie
Those might be like the ones that actually go, “You know what, I did my part.”

Jason
Yeah.

Natalie
Because that’s when you know you’ve sort of hit a whole different sort of cross section of readership. It’s funny, you know. In my household these days, my son is eight, and he is death-obsessed. Like, he really wants to know how somebody died, why they died. That means the trolls (because we’re watching Guillermo del Toro’s Trollhunter right now) — so, like, “Why did Deya the (whatever her name is) die, mommy?” And, you know, questions that almost can kind of come out of nowhere because it’s sort of like, “That’s not what this one’s about — she’s very much alive on the screen.” But he’s like, “No no no, at the end of this show, how’s she going to die? What’s going to happen?”

Jason
Right.

Natalie
It’s an interesting one, because Becca and I grew up in a household where we had a sense of God that was very much a part of our story. But my husband’s an atheist, so for him, it was just a very different… so my son doesn’t have sort of, like, a quick answer when it comes to us as a family talking about death. So it all kind of comes back to, “Well, you know, we’re all going to be a flower, and at some point…” So I actually think, as a parent, this book is quite helpful, because in adding some levity to the death component of what is a part of grief, right? I mean, like, there is loss, there is end.

Jason
Yeah.

Natalie
I mean, we’re going to have eight-year-olds asking big questions, and so we have to somehow engage with it from different angles. And it was interesting, because Judd Apatow has said, “This is the hilarious and informative grief handbook that I didn’t know I needed, and hopefully not too soon.” So I like that he added that one at the end. So is there sort of like a little section from the book that you think would offer our listeners just a bit of a sense of your voice coming out of this text?

Rebecca
Channel all your stand-up comic skills.

Jason
Oh, no. Oh, no. I’m going to find some other skills.

Rebecca
Ok.

Jason
Ok. So, yeah, I’ll read a little bit. This is a section called Supercharged Healing: “Before this birk…” Ok. Birk — birk is not a word. Let’s go with a better word.

Natalie
Birk is a really good shoe.

Jason
Yeah, exactly. Let’s go with a word that exists.

“Before this book turns its full attention to grieving, chapter one provides a brief look at hospitals — those merry, sterile fortresses where sometimes doctors heal people, and sometimes they say things like, “Sorry, but that pitbull knew what he was doing.” The next chapter dives into the aftermath, to the weeks and months you’ll struggle to put your heart back together like a baby assembling an entertainment center, to the years you’ll be mostly fine, but never quite. What challenging feelings might you be experiencing, and how can you eliminate them with minimal time-consuming introspection?”

“If you’ve spent your life in loving relationships with family and friends, it’s finally going to pay off in the discussion of getting the most from your support system. The chapter also explores how to best break the news to coworkers, social media acquaintances, and a Lyft driver who immediately regretted [asking] how you’re doing this fine day. Of course, you’ll ultimately have to do most of the emotional heavy lifting on your own, and the section on self-care will give you guidance on being kind to yourself, as well as diet and exercise tips especially designed to keep you piling on the muscle mass throughout your bereavement.”

“Once you’ve fortified your mind and body, you’ll be ready for advice on keeping your loved one close in a way that’s beautiful and meaningful, but stops well short of wearing a fanny pack filled with hair clippings. Then, finally, you’ll take the Informal Grief Archetype Assessment — the IGAA. With the help of this self-diagnostic test, which the American Psychological Association has hailed as, quote, “Unfamiliar with,” and, quote, “You’re not using our logo, are you?” You’ll understand how you grieve better than you ever dreamed you would as a child.”