Irony and Humor Theme Analysis

In spite of its grave subject matter and sprawling lyricism, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is in many ways a deeply funny book. The irony of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s situation is not lost on him—once a wealthy, charismatic man with the world at his fingertips, Bauby is now confined not just within a hospital, but within his own body. As Bauby uses humor and irony throughout the book to stave off pain, anger, and hopelessness, he suggests that even in the bleakest of situations, there is light to be found.

Bauby is a gifted writer and a witty, canny thinker. These natural proclivities served him well in his life before his stroke, allowing him to rise to the position of editor-in-chief of the French fashion magazine Elle, sustain several romantic relationships with a series of women, and enjoy a bustling social life. Once “locked-in” after his stroke, though, Bauby needed to be able to deploy his wit, humor, and keen observational eye not just to advance his career or further his social and romantic life—but literally to save himself from misery and revive his will to live. Throughout the book, Bauby uses both humor and irony at key points in the narrative in order to bring levity into the pain of his situation and draw readers’ attention to the fine line between cruelty and comedy, in everyday life and extraordinary circumstances alike.

Throughout, he feels a profound sense of loss that he can no longer make people laugh through conversation—for example, while spending a day with his former partner Sylvie and their children, Céleste and Théophile, he wishes he could laugh at their jokes and deliver some of his own. In order to combat this loss, perhaps, Bauby doubles down on finding the humor in the more cruelly ironic aspects of his memoir, hoping not to lose his relationship to his sense of humor entirely. He states in the vignette “Bathtime” that he has lost sixty-six pounds in just twenty weeks in Berck-sur-Mer; ironically, he’d gone on a diet in an attempt to lose a few pounds just a week before his stroke. Bauby is forced to confront how small the problems of his old life seemed—and examine how cruelly his own wishes have been twisted in the wake of his terrible accident. In “The Empress,” Bauby catches sight of his face in a reflective surface covering a bust of Empress Eugénie (the patroness of the hospital and the wife of Napoleon III), seeing himself for the first time in weeks. He is amused rather than repulsed by his own foreign, ruined face—he sees the superficial deformities which have resulted from his stroke as a cruel “joke.” He begins to laugh, and imagines Eugenie laughing alongside him. He is trying to make light of his own situation—but it is too much to bear without the help of an imaginary friend sharing the burden alongside him. Bauby also notices several other strange ironic coincidences throughout his stay in the hospital. Bauby’s father sends to the hospital a picture of the young Jean-Dominique, healthy and lithe and playing at the beach at Berck-sur-Mer; Bauby begins to feels his stroke may have been a “punishment” for having been considering writing a novel which reimagined the paralytic Noirtier de Villefort from The Count of Monte Cristo in a modern context; he is forced to watch a commercial for a personal computer in which an offscreen voice asks “Were you born lucky?” as he lies inert in bed, drenched in his own urine after his catheter breaks. As these cruel—and sometimes deeply comic—ironies pile up, Bauby finds a sardonic kind of light in each of them. He’s unable to change his fate or his circumstances, so he might as well laugh at the twists his life has taken and revel in the paradoxes that surround him.

Jean-Dominique Bauby uses humor and irony to cope with his seriously unlucky situation. In moments when he finds himself in physical or emotional turmoil, facing down the deep well of sorrow he could plunge into at any moment, the only thing that pulls him back from the brink is the almost comical horror of what has befallen him. Bauby doesn’t shy away from those uncomfortable, frightening moments—instead, he chooses to lean into them and use them to challenge his reader’s conceptions of the line that exists between tragedy and comedy.