Detective comedy 1: Setting up the shabby detective

It was curtains for us

If the list of bad luck stopped at the last snippet, it would have stayed as drama. But the next part moves the passage into comedy.

We had just $2.37 and about three teaspoons of instant coffee to last us the weekend. The wallpaper was peeling, the carpets were fraying, and the curtains… well, whichever way you looked at it, it was curtains for us.

The Falcon's Malteser(2004)

The humour is in the contrast between the simple start to the passage (‘The day it all started was a bad one’) and the massive list of things that are actually wrong, way beyond what would be normal for this kind of story. It’s using exaggeration for humour.  

Can you see the comic escalation in these examples?

We got no responses to any of it, except for one couple who arrived at a meeting thinking we were going to talk about immigration and left laughing. Our website had no hits, our business cards were ignored, and the pamphlets we made… well, we often saw them in cat litter trays.

We’d had one client who wanted us to get his daughter to call him, and when we did, they had a fight and he stiffed us. My parents were mad at me for wasting my summer, I smelled of floor cleaner, and my office chair... well, it was two stacked packs of toilet rolls.

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