About
Bitter Humor is a column about the small indignities, large absurdities, and general bewilderment of being alive in the present moment.
Graham Bellamy
I'm Graham Bellamy. I started Bitter Humor because I needed somewhere to put the things I noticed that nobody else seemed to find alarming. Turns out, plenty of people find them alarming. They just hadn't said so out loud.
The column covers life, politics, technology, culture, and people — which is to say, it covers everything, because everything is currently a problem. Each piece starts with something that bothered me. I still write a fair amount of it. I also edit all of it. A few other writers send me notes, drafts, and the occasional fully formed complaint. I keep the ones that are true and throw out the ones that are merely angry. This has turned out to be a productive arrangement, mostly because the world does not run out of material and I do not run out of opinions about it.
New essays publish daily. If that seems like a lot, consider how much the week provides, and that I am no longer the only person noticing it.
On the writing
The goal is not to be funny. The goal is to be honest, and if honesty happens to be funny — or bleak, or both at once — that's the reader's problem.
Satire without a point is just cruelty with better timing. Every piece here is trying to say something true, even when — especially when — the truth is ridiculous.