Bewildering Stories welcomes...

Michael C. Keith

Professor Keith teaches communication at Boston College and has won awards for his scholarship and criticial praise for a memoir. He has published a young adult novel as well as many short stories on the Net and in print.

“Growing Fame” is an extremely disturbing story. At one level it bitterly satirizes TV “idol” shows; at another, it recounts the tragedy of a character who disregards a life-threatening illness in a single-minded pursuit of his proverbial fifteen minutes of fame. At the end, his infirmity grows to egregiously grotesque proportions.

But is the character’s affliction comic? Tragedy and comedy differ in degree, not in kind. “In a tragedy, you die; in a comedy, you get married.”

Or put another way: if the Three Stooges hit each other over the head with chairs and the chairs fall apart, the audience laughs as Larry, Moe and Curly go on with their antics. But the comedian Red Skelton was once rehearsing a skit using a breakaway chair. It had been insufficiently sawn through, and Red Skelton was seriously injured. A comedy takes events harmlessly awry; in a tragedy, someone gets hurt.

Michael C. Keith’s bio sketch can be found here.

Welcome to Bewildering Stories, Michael. We hope to hear from you again soon and often!