What makes the writing relevant is Allen's very modern and exceedingly strange set of choices in subject matter, culled mostly from an eccentric jumble of news items and clippings that he cites at the beginning of each story. In the stories, he writes about futuristic fabrics, prayers sold on eBay, spiritual gurus and even a short misadventure featuring our favourite moustache-rack, Veerappan. What makes the book humourous, however? To answer that, one must examine what makes any writing humourous. And as this article is not really a review of Allen's book, as Allen's book is merely a McGuffin for our sordid purposes, we may now move onto the crux of the matter: the joke. Do you know how jellyfish commute? No? Wait for it.
The Cult of Laughter
The test of a seriously funny bit of prose (which phrase, given the context, is not so much an oxymoron as a guideline) is in how well it responds to the public transport's bilious eye. If your light reading for the morning's commute gets you guffawing like a nitrous oxide salesman – heedless of the many stares, affronted whispers and elbows lodged in your ribs – what you have in your hands, unless you are some manner of idiot, is a piece of A-grade clownery. It is often a misconception that the labels on library racks are efficient signifiers of their contents – the Commuter Guffaw Test is perhaps the only true indicator of a well-timed ticklebomb; indeed, the most reliable 'humour section' is that bus seat you just fell off laughing. Speaking of which. The one about the jellyfish? They travel via octobus. Hahaha. Octobus! Get it? Oh hahaha... Yeah.
So it turns out that Humour, as per leading encyclopedia-makers, is not classified under genre fiction, presumably because good writers of all dispositions must necessarily employ some element of wit in their works. Having said that, there are some among these writers who are funnier by far than others, and a comic elite among even that minority who are so explosively funny as to seduce you into disregarding your surroundings and startling your fellow passengers. Who are these lords and ladies of LOL, you ask? Here is a brief, severely non-comprehensive humour-fiction overview:
Early Days
It all began, roughly 0.25% of a millennium back in 1759, with Tristram Shandy, one of the greatest comic characters ever to... Ah, no, confound it. Let us begin at the beginning. It all began, Eeyore's years ago in 1605, with Don Quixote, a nutty geriatric given to impassioned daytime hallucinations. If the strength of a work of art is in its premise, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha is a tricep-flexing mural-painting windmill among a goggle of illiterate giants. Miguel Cervantes' picaresque novel, chronicling the misadventures of a childish imagination trapped in an old man's body, birthed several generations of pretenders and a few worthy heirs.
Chief among the latter was Lawrence Sterne's hilariously overtechnical masterpiece, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman – considered by many to be the greatest comedy novel written in the English language, and also perhaps the first instance of a postmodern literary technique. One of the central conceits of the novel is that it never really seems to begin, owing to the narrator's propensity to wander off into various tangents at the slightest whimsy. By the end of the book Shandy has, at considerable length, said everything about everything without really saying anything about anything. It is not hard to imagine an 18th century Londoner, having just read an embarrassing anecdote involving Shandy's emasculated uncle Toby, falling mirthfully off her horse-drawn carriage.
And Now for Something Completely Different
The idea of wit that gave shape to current day literature, a major revision on the earlier situational humour, owes much to the genius of one Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, the undisputed monarch of the descriptive sentence. By the time of his death in 1975, Plum, as he liked being called, had written nearly a hundred books, every one of them a master-class in creative writing, a body of work that includes novels, plays, short-stories and musicals. His influence on modern writing, humour and otherwise, is immeasurable, evidenced by stylistic echoes in the work of Douglas Adams, Woody Allen, Salman Rushdie and countless others.
Wodehouse's novels are usually built around farcical, increasingly complex plots involving a rag-tag bunch of characters with peculiar eccentricities, but the real magic of his writing is in imagery so unpredictable, and yet so appropriate (“The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G. K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin”), that the effect on one's ulnar nerve is instantaneous. If one were to draw a map of new humour, P.G.Wodehouse could well be the bright focus, with various comic luminaries, from Roald Dahl to Stephen Fry to Nick Hornby, radiating out from the center.
This history of sorts, of course, is by no means extensive, as conveniently disclaimed earlier in this article. There are several great names missing from our panorama: American humourists, ranging from Mark Twain to Robert Benchley to that one-man publishing army of the internet age, Dave Eggers; and Indians like the prolific R.K.Narayan and the forgotten G.V. Desani. Oh, and women humourists like Erica Jong, Mae West and our own Manjula Padmanabhan (may their tribe increase), who are more often than not unjustly relegated to the footnotes of humour writing. But my intention was merely to set up the joke. The punchline is in the reading.
Recommendations
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
If you don't have the patience to sit through the unabridged Don Quixote, here's an equally satisfying alternative. Toole tragically committed suicide before he could see his first and only novel in print, but his lead character – Ignatius J. Reilly, the fat, flatulent philosopher from New Orleans – still freely roams the humour hall of fame with hot dog stand in tow and a certain Myrna Minkoff watering the brain.
Leave it to Psmith - P.G. Wodehouse
Two of Plum's favourite franchises mash up at Blandings Castle – the droopy Lord Emsworth plus family plus the Empress, Emsworth's prize pig, match their collective wits with the prolix Psmith ('p' silent) – and much hilarity ensues. A book that courts many many a re-read.
Nonsense Novels - Stephen Leacock
A series of fun short fiction parodying the classics of literature. If you've had it with pulp detectives or think Russian writing is for tossers, Leacock's absurd comedy will have you unbound and off the page before you can say “Karamazov”. Books by this great Canadian humourist are increasingly difficult to find (except, in this rare instance, on Project Gutenberg).
Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated – James Thurber
A collection of early flash fiction, American fables with punchline substituted for morals, for the morally ambiguous. Seething with Thurber's trademark cartoon humour.
All About H Hatterr – G.V. Desani
Out of print, out of sight, and just about out of mind. But you would have to be out of your mind not to read this book if you can, by some miracle, manage to get hold of it. Salman Rushdie, who compared Desani's book to Tristram Shandy, thusly described it: “Hatterr’s dazzling, puzzling, leaping prose is the first genuine effort to go beyond the Englishness of the English language... My own writing, too, learned a trick or two from him.”
My Uncle Oswald - Roald Dahl
A host of early 20th century celebrities, including Picasso, Freud, Einstein and Joyce, among others, get duped into participating in one of the most ingenious scams ever thought up. Instruments of torture: chocolate truffles, sex and the Sudanese Blister Beetle. From the insidious mind that also gave us Henry Sugar and Willy Wonka.
Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth
An extreme Jewish sex comedy. 'Nuff said.
The Colour of Magic – Terry PratchettIt all began, roughly 0.25% of a millennium back in 1759, with Tristram Shandy, one of the greatest comic characters ever to... Ah, no, confound it. Let us begin at the beginning. It all began, Eeyore's years ago in 1605, with Don Quixote, a nutty geriatric given to impassioned daytime hallucinations. If the strength of a work of art is in its premise, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of La Mancha is a tricep-flexing mural-painting windmill among a goggle of illiterate giants. Miguel Cervantes' picaresque novel, chronicling the misadventures of a childish imagination trapped in an old man's body, birthed several generations of pretenders and a few worthy heirs.
Chief among the latter was Lawrence Sterne's hilariously overtechnical masterpiece, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman – considered by many to be the greatest comedy novel written in the English language, and also perhaps the first instance of a postmodern literary technique. One of the central conceits of the novel is that it never really seems to begin, owing to the narrator's propensity to wander off into various tangents at the slightest whimsy. By the end of the book Shandy has, at considerable length, said everything about everything without really saying anything about anything. It is not hard to imagine an 18th century Londoner, having just read an embarrassing anecdote involving Shandy's emasculated uncle Toby, falling mirthfully off her horse-drawn carriage.
And Now for Something Completely Different
The idea of wit that gave shape to current day literature, a major revision on the earlier situational humour, owes much to the genius of one Sir Pelham Grenville Wodehouse, the undisputed monarch of the descriptive sentence. By the time of his death in 1975, Plum, as he liked being called, had written nearly a hundred books, every one of them a master-class in creative writing, a body of work that includes novels, plays, short-stories and musicals. His influence on modern writing, humour and otherwise, is immeasurable, evidenced by stylistic echoes in the work of Douglas Adams, Woody Allen, Salman Rushdie and countless others.
Wodehouse's novels are usually built around farcical, increasingly complex plots involving a rag-tag bunch of characters with peculiar eccentricities, but the real magic of his writing is in imagery so unpredictable, and yet so appropriate (“The drowsy stillness of the afternoon was shattered by what sounded to his strained senses like G. K. Chesterton falling on a sheet of tin”), that the effect on one's ulnar nerve is instantaneous. If one were to draw a map of new humour, P.G.Wodehouse could well be the bright focus, with various comic luminaries, from Roald Dahl to Stephen Fry to Nick Hornby, radiating out from the center.
This history of sorts, of course, is by no means extensive, as conveniently disclaimed earlier in this article. There are several great names missing from our panorama: American humourists, ranging from Mark Twain to Robert Benchley to that one-man publishing army of the internet age, Dave Eggers; and Indians like the prolific R.K.Narayan and the forgotten G.V. Desani. Oh, and women humourists like Erica Jong, Mae West and our own Manjula Padmanabhan (may their tribe increase), who are more often than not unjustly relegated to the footnotes of humour writing. But my intention was merely to set up the joke. The punchline is in the reading.
Recommendations
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
If you don't have the patience to sit through the unabridged Don Quixote, here's an equally satisfying alternative. Toole tragically committed suicide before he could see his first and only novel in print, but his lead character – Ignatius J. Reilly, the fat, flatulent philosopher from New Orleans – still freely roams the humour hall of fame with hot dog stand in tow and a certain Myrna Minkoff watering the brain.
Leave it to Psmith - P.G. Wodehouse
Two of Plum's favourite franchises mash up at Blandings Castle – the droopy Lord Emsworth plus family plus the Empress, Emsworth's prize pig, match their collective wits with the prolix Psmith ('p' silent) – and much hilarity ensues. A book that courts many many a re-read.
Nonsense Novels - Stephen Leacock
A series of fun short fiction parodying the classics of literature. If you've had it with pulp detectives or think Russian writing is for tossers, Leacock's absurd comedy will have you unbound and off the page before you can say “Karamazov”. Books by this great Canadian humourist are increasingly difficult to find (except, in this rare instance, on Project Gutenberg).
Fables for Our Time and Famous Poems Illustrated – James Thurber
A collection of early flash fiction, American fables with punchline substituted for morals, for the morally ambiguous. Seething with Thurber's trademark cartoon humour.
All About H Hatterr – G.V. Desani
Out of print, out of sight, and just about out of mind. But you would have to be out of your mind not to read this book if you can, by some miracle, manage to get hold of it. Salman Rushdie, who compared Desani's book to Tristram Shandy, thusly described it: “Hatterr’s dazzling, puzzling, leaping prose is the first genuine effort to go beyond the Englishness of the English language... My own writing, too, learned a trick or two from him.”
My Uncle Oswald - Roald Dahl
A host of early 20th century celebrities, including Picasso, Freud, Einstein and Joyce, among others, get duped into participating in one of the most ingenious scams ever thought up. Instruments of torture: chocolate truffles, sex and the Sudanese Blister Beetle. From the insidious mind that also gave us Henry Sugar and Willy Wonka.
Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth
An extreme Jewish sex comedy. 'Nuff said.
If Wodehouse and Tolkein had an evil lovechild, it would bear a remarkable similarity to Terry Pratchett. The Colour of Magic is the first in Pratchett's hugely popular Discworld series, in which the world is not only flat, it comes attached to four ginormous space-elephants and a galactic superturtle named the Great A'Tuin.
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - Douglas Adams
Take your favourite flatfoot thriller and throw in quantum cats, dodos, time travel and electric monks. Sci-fi comedy at its finest.
An edited version of this article appears today in the 'Lifestyle' section of DNA, Mumbai. Embedded below is a pdf of the article as it appeared in print:
11 comments:
good to see Desani/H.Hatterr get some love.
Isn't it? And what a book. It's a shame that it isn't in print anywhere. Bugger the Indian publishing industry, I say.
it isn't? (well, as your post and your comment attests to it, i won't question it) - my copy was sourced from an uncle's collection; he bought it 30 years ago.
i notice by the way, that while you lament about women humourists (curious - though warranted for being ignored - as a category too - americans, indians and women. heheh) being relegated, none of your recommendations are by women. :)
oh, and woody really namechecks Veerappan in his book? my, globalization.. i didn't think he looked past Jersey (recent Spanish/English set films be damned)
My dad owns a copy too, which he bought some decades back like your uncle. Mad trippy book, love it.
Shite, I just noticed the women writers deficit as well. Ah, whaddaya gonna do. Call it irony.
He does reference Veerappan, yeah. A lot of the short stories in the collection are take-offs from random news snippets he'd been reading, and our silverback guerilla happened to be featured in one of them. Woody's evidently a fan of Google Fast Flip.
Just saw the DNA e-paper. Sampath, the books editor, has added Erma Bombeck to the recommendations in the final copy. Looks like he also noticed what you did, and fixed it, the clever chap :)
I see that Desani's book has been reprinted by New York Review of Books. Looks absolutely brilliant, thanks for the recommendation. Just what one needed after a lot of struggling with far less genial authorial souls.
Hatterr's not in print? Got mine from landmark in '02 or thereabouts. Now to actually read past the first few chapters. Heh.
Andy: You're welcome :)
Nina and Andy: Last I checked, it wasn't in print. If things've changed like you say, I couldn't be more thrilled!
Nina: I just checked. As Andy said, there's a new reprint of Haterr by the New York Review of Books. Prior to that, the book hasn't been in print since the late 80s. That 2002 copy of yours from Landmark must've either popped out of a freak interdimensional wormhole or, more disconcertingly, it'd been languishing on that same shelf for a decade or more. Poor neglected Desani.
I (sort of) know the head of books at Landmark, and he's the sort of guy who might actually want to stock that book there - wouldn't find it at Crossword. :)
and ooh, nina lives.
Landmark online seems to have the New York Review version, for some 800 odd bucks.
Indeed, Nina lives, hallelujah.
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