[the_old_crowd] Funny, that. (OT)

[Kat Macfarlane]

Your place sounds just like my place. Let's put my books up against your books and see if we can get some spontaneous regeneration. Although I may have it already. I swear I keep finding things in my bookshelves that I have no recollection of having bought.

I'm with you on modern humorists. I adore P.G. Wodehouse, also E.F. Benson (the Mapp and Lucia books), have a whole bookcase full of him. You already know I'm a Thurber fan. I still crack up over My Life and Hard Times. Then there's Our Hearts Were Young and Gay, written back when "gay" didn't mean what it means now. And I'm embarking this weekend on E.M. Delafield's Provincial Lady, whom I seem somehow to have missed. And of course I should reread Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. I found those funny even when I was a kid in high school. To say nothing of Puddinhead Wilson.

There is hope. Connie Wilson writes some devastatingly funny stuff. Bellwether is fiction and is about science and still manages not to be science fiction; but everyone who has ever worked in the high tech industries has had a Flip in their lives. And if you haven't read To Say Nothing of the Dog, run, don't walk, to your nearest library or bookstore.

And I've learned not to keep Steven Pyle's The Incomplete Book of Failures on the back of my toilet. Too many social gatherings have been brought to an ominous silence by howls of laughter issuing from behind the closed door. And I can't help feeling that "I have a fun bathroom" is a rather feeble excuse.

Giggly purrs,

--Gatta

  Been up to my ears in stuff over the past few months.
  Stuff to the left of me, stuff to the right of me, stuff accumulating 
  until capillary action threatens it'll eventually invade my chuff.

  Such is reality.
  Seriously in need of some light relief I browsed my bookshelves, book 
  piles, book stacks, books-as-carpets - well, you get the idea. I've 
  got a lot of books - around 2,500 after the last charity shop 
  donations clear-out, which was sometime last year, and a lot more 
  have been bought since.

  Shelf-fulls of history; shelves of political philosophy; on the 
  sciences; on cookery; on wines; whodunnits; criticism (no, not the 
  deconstructionist sort); whole bookcases of SF and odd handfuls of 
  other subjects/authors that caught my fancy at the time. But light 
  relief seemed thin on the ground.

  Which was a bit of a surprise. I pride myself that I can make a joke 
  of even the most inappropriate subject matter, construct the most 
  God-awful puns, play around with words to produce the unexpected 
  punchline, yet the number of genuinely amusing books around the place 
  were at a premium, let alone the laugh-out-loud variety. And those 
  that I could find were mostly old, some written before I was born, 
  hell, before the Great Depression, some of them.

  Sure, there are a few modern writers with an intelligent comedic 
  touch - Tom Holt, Jeffrey Fforde and the like, but my word, they seem 
  thin on the ground. And yes, there're authors that throw in a joke or 
  slapstick episode to change the pace, but part-timers are not what 
  I'm on about, nor writers that use humour to make a point, P. J. 
  O'Rouke for example.

  And don't trust the reviewers. So-called laugh-a-page classics 
  aren't, in my experience. Lucky Jim, Catcher in the Rye and the like 
  swiftly made their way from my bookshelves to the charity shop. 
  Breach of the Trade Descriptions Act IMO.

  Interestingly, apart from the two authors above, those I did find 
  were peculiarly English. Whether most of them would travel or 
  translate well is problematical. If I give you a list you'll see what 
  I mean.
  The Molesworth books by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle, 
  brilliant, as ane fule kno.
  The Misleading Cases series by A. P. Herbert (all hail Haddock!),
  Tales from a Long Room (and sequels) by Peter Tinniswood - for 
  cricket buffs only. The Brigadier, esconced in the rural paradise of 
  Whitney Scrotum, beneath the lowering fastness of Botham's Gut and 
  the pee-wits twittering among the water-meadows of Cowdrey's Bottom 
  spins the most outrageous cricket tales full of puns and mischievious 
  character assassinations. You need a fairly comprehensive knowledge 
  of first-class cricketers to understand it. A joy nonetheless.
  England, their England by J. G. McDonnell (more cricket there),
  A few classic SF stories, mostly shorts, though Eric Frank Russell 
  managed some book-length stuff.

  Eventually I settled on the Master. The one and only. Wodehouse.
  Not a novel, but his golf stories.
  Yes, I know - golf, how boring.
  Not with P.G. it's not.
  Cheered me up no end.
  In the collection is what I consider to be the perfect humorous short 
  story - The Clicking of Cuthbert. Written (I think) in 1919, love 
  conquers all while taking the piss out of middle-class pretensions, 
  Russian literature and communism. Pretty neat for a story about golf. 
  And his foreword to the collection - written when he was in his 
  nineties - is a demonstration of the writers craft at a level very 
  few will ever aspire to while appearing to be nothing special - until 
  you analyse it.

  When I was younger, P.G. was on my rubbish list. Dated, trite, 
  repetitive. But in my 40s I tried him again and have never looked back.

  Still, one does wonder why there are so few genuinely funny 
  accomplished writers. And why no women writers in the genre? Or are 
  there? Does Helen Fielding count? Or Muriel Spark with The Abbess of 
  Crewe? Hmm.

  Mind you, if you include unintentional belly laughs the field widens 
  enormously.....

  Kneasy



   

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