The Incongruity Theory of Humor in “Lady Lazarus” Anonymous College

After the post-humous publication of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, the poet exploded into the scene of second wave feminism, widely regarded as a victim of her mental illness and the men in her life. While the tragedy of Plath’s life is inseparable from her work, more subtle elements of her poetry are often discarded to suit the narrative of victimhood, especially her complicated use of humor. Plath used humor in her poetry as a way of both describing and reckoning with her everyday life, often including Holocaust imagery as an exaggerated depiction of her existence. The style of humor she uses falls neatly into the category of “incongruity theory”, a theory that posits people find things funny when conventional narratives, “scripts”, are broken or flipped. Every aspect of “Lady Lazarus” is incongruous, from its premise to its poetic details. While the poem isn’t something most people would find laugh out loud funny, Plath’s use of humor to draw false equivalents between her own life and the life of Lady Lazarus reveals an existence that is undeniably tragic but relentlessly tenacious. Even in life, Plath was well aware of the effect her confessional poetry had on her legacy, shown in “Lady Lazarus” when she speaks of a “charge/a very...