Has fiction lost its sense of

humour?
According to the judges of the Wodehouse prize, this
is the worst year for comic writing in the award’s 18<
year history. So why the long faces? Sam Leith
explores the funny side of fiction

Sam Leith
Sat 9 Jun 2018 10.00 BST

Renée Zellweger as Bridget Jones … novelist Helen Fielding is one of only two female
winners to have won the Wodehouse prize outright. Photograph: Universal/Everett

“I
/Rex Features

s the comic novel dead?” This outstanding instance of a QTWTAIN (Question To

Which The Answer Is No) greeted the news of the non-awarding of this year’s
Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction. The prize – traditional
bounty: a pig named after your book – wasn’t awarded because, according to the
judges, not one of the 62 novels submitted for the prize was funny enough. This
struck a lot of people, including me, as funny. The fact there was a “rollover prize” mooted
for next year, in the form of a bigger pig, seemed even funnier.

A more interesting question might have been: was the comic novel ever alive? Is there
something distinctive you can point to that can be called “comic fiction”? And are those two
questions, or a different way of phrasing the same one? The late Philip Roth was rightly
praised for his humour – David Baddiel said he was funny in the way a standup was funny –
but none of the obituaries called him a “comic novelist”. Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose
novels are very funny, but you probably wouldn’t call them comic novels. AL Kennedy is
extremely funny, but, again, doesn’t seem to merit the label “comic novelist”. Others seem
to travel more in that direction, but it’s a matter of fine judgment where the line is crossed.
Anthony Powell? Evelyn Waugh? Ronald Firbank? Malcolm Bradbury? Vladimir Nabokov?
Stella Gibbons?

The besetting problem with talking about this subject is that being funny is very far from a
monopoly held by the comic novel. The critic James Wood raised a red flag over the whole
idea of the form in his slighting review of one book he considered an example:

There is comedy, and then there is something called the Comic Novel, and these are related to
each other rather as the year is related to a pocket diary – the latter a meaner, tidier, simpler
version of the former. Comedy is the angle at which most of us see the world, the way that our
very light is filtered. The novel is, by and large, a secular, comic form: one can be suspicious of
any serious novelist who seems entirely immune to the comic. But the Comic Novel flattens
comedy into the bar code of “the joke” – a strip of easy-to-swipe predictability. The Comic Novel
might imagine itself descended from Cervantes and Fielding, but it is really the stunted
offspring of Waugh and Wodehouse, lacking the magic of either.

That deprecatory note is a common one: the Comic Novel as the revolving bow tie, the
novelty Christmas jumper of fiction. Not many writers self-identify unhesitatingly as “comic
novelists”. “I don’t sit around all day thinking of a label to attach to myself,” Tibor Fischer
says. “But people do seem to be laughing at me.” Marina Lewycka says: “It’s a label that’s
stuck on me whether I like it or not.” David Nobbs (of Reginald Perrin fame) asked his
publishers to remove the endorsement “probably our finest postwar comic novelist” from
his paperbacks not because he was irked by “probably” but because he was irked by
“comic”.

If I read him right, what Wood is effectively saying is that the “Comic Novel” is a tautology
presented as a unique selling point. Comedy is central to fiction because fiction shares the
mechanisms of laughter itself. Most theories of humour stress surprise, or unlikely
juxtaposition. Fiction is all about surprise and unlikely juxtaposition. The whole form is
comic at its root – not only in its reliance on coincidence but in the basic novelistic idea that
you see characters both from the inside and the outside. There is a binocularity of vision
implicit in the novel, in other words: the same multiple perspective that elsewhere provokes
laughter. Here’s Wood’s “way that our light is filtered”. The novel’s worldview is comic.
Another word for it would be – in its large sense – irony. You’re invested in a character’s
personal struggles; but you also see how absurd they are sub specie aeternitatis.

Adam Driver, left, and Jonathan Pryce in According to one old definition, comedy is unimportant things
The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018). happening
to unimportant people and tragedy is important
Photograph: Allstar/Amazon Studios
things happening to important people. The territory of the
novel is the former, even when it’s the latter. Or an alternative
definition: tragedy is when I cut my finger; comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and
die (Mel Brooks). Novels have it both ways. The novelist David Mitchell told me years ago,
and I think he’s right, that the difference between great writers and very good ones is that all
the great ones are funny. Samuel Beckett: nihilist or barrel of laughs? Chekhov: tragedian or
comic playwright? (Fun footnote: when George and Weedon Grossmith’s The Diary of a
Nobody became popular in pre-revolutionary Russia, the Russians are said to have thought it
was a tragedy in the Chekhovian mould.) The novel’s very origins are, famously, comic: head
back through Charles Dickens to Jane Austen and Laurence Sterne and Tobias Smollett and
Henry Fielding and Jonathan Swift and the picaresque bits of Daniel Defoe in the direction
of Don Quixote; wave at Geoffrey Chaucer (we can argue over Samuel Richardson – I think
he’s very funny but there is a case that he’s the inventor of the non-comic novel in English
and therefore something of a mould-breaker).

But whatever the underlying place of humour in the mechanics of the form, it’s fair to say
there have been swings back and forth in the extent to which humour is foregrounded in the
material. Fischer argues that “until the late 19th century when the French and Russians
came in and made the novel the premier vehicle for the expression of the soul, the novel
always had something of light entertainment about it. It wasn’t seen as serious literature till
you got to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Flaubert.” And to each action, a reaction. Perhaps
until the novel started being serious there wasn’t any need for the Comic Novel as a distinct
entity.

Ian Carmichael in the 1957 film adaptation of Lucky Jim …

Kingsley Amis’s novel set the template for much that was to
come. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

But, for a while, an entity it became. A few years back, Jonathan Coe argued that the modern
comic novel started in 1954, with Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim – and that it set the template for
much that was to come. Coe pointed, in particular, to the blokiness of that book; its declared
interest in “difficulties with girls” and noted lack of interest in “difficulties suffered by girls”.
That’s worth attention. When “comic novelists” are discussed, most of the names that come
up are men. Helen Fielding and Lewycka have been the only two outright female winners in
the 18-year run of the Wodehouse prize (Hannah Rothschild, joint winner in 2016, makes it
two and a half), and though 2003 had a two-thirds female shortlist the winner was a man:
DBC Pierre. Marian Keyes said at the Hay festival last weekend: “The one thing I have a
grudge about is the Wodehouse prize for comic writing. I have never been shortlisted. Say
what you like about me, my books are funny, they are comic. What else do I have to do to
qualify?”

You might think of Keyes, Nora Ephron, Beryl Bainbridge, Sue Townsend, Nancy Mitford,
Richmal Crompton, Alice Thomas Ellis, Nicola Barker and Nina Stibbe when you think of
comic fiction. But it is more often male writers who are cited as being squarely in that
tradition: Mark Twain, James Thurber, Carl Hiaasen, the Grossmiths and Saki, Steve Toltz
and Pauls Murray and Beatty, Joseph Connolly, Christopher Brookmyre and Tom Sharpe,
Ben Elton and Stephen Fry, Douglas Adams, Jonathan Ames and both Amises, Howard
Jacobson and Michael Frayn, and so on and so on.

“The long-standing domination of literature by men and the male point of view is (thank
goodness) on its way out,” Coe says now, “and I think that may have something to do with
why the ‘comic novel’ seems to be fading: the term somehow carries a whiff of the bar room
and the gentlemen’s club – it all feels too gendered and out of date. But I’m sure comedy in
fiction will be – perhaps is being – reinvented, and women writers will play the leading role
in that.”

As well as sexual anxiety, a lot of the mainstream of comic fiction has been about social
anxiety. The Lucky Jim strand is, as DJ Taylor puts it, one that foregrounds what he calls
“Richard Hoggart man”: “These characters are making their way on brainpower but find
themselves in situations where brainpower isn’t enough” – and the comedy arises from their
rage at being socially inferior and intellectually superior at the same time. Here are the
grammar school generation fallen among idiotic old duffers; Funny Young Men. And the
mid-to-late-20th-century social setup that gave that generation its rocket fuel has changed.
Yet of course Fielding, Austen, Thackeray, Trollope, Dickens – before they knew they were
writing “comic novels” – also made social anxiety and class ambition engines of comedy.

And there we return to the difficulty of definition. The comic

Benedict Cumberbatch as Patrick
Melrose … Edward St Aubyn’s novels are
novel might be one of those things, like a highly reactive
funny but not ‘comic’. Photograph:
element never found in its pure form, that you can’t isolate
Patrick Melrose Photograph: Justin
Downing/SHOWTIME many unalloyed examples of – but you can detect everywhere
in admixture. Wood may not think the victim of his review did
it as well as Waugh or Wodehouse, but he admits that those writers have something imitable
in common – and that done well it can be “magic”. What are its elements? I’d suggest they
are a nudge northwards on the sentence-level chuckleometer, a more than usually hectic
way with plot; and a more than usually cartoony way with characters, or at least a
willingness – as Dickens did – to splice two-dimensional characters in with their more
rounded counterparts.
There is an associated quality that flows from this, perhaps, to do with the extent to which
you see the author pulling the strings. If one pole of literary endeavour can be seen as a sort
of extreme naturalism – contriving to present characters and situations with the illusion of
an author reporting on, rather than creating, a situation – comic novels inhabit the antipole.
You delight in (or, if you’re James Wood, grind your teeth at) the presence of the author: the
unlikeliness of the situations, the showy dance moves in the prose. Coe talks of “the comic
novel’s wilful artificiality”; Taylor talks of “stage management”. Done badly it descends into
jocularity and contrivance; done well it is, indeed, magic.

And as if in rebuke to the Wodehouse prize, the Pulitzer this year found just such magic in
Andrew Sean Greer’s Less. “Finally, a comic novel gets a Pulitzer prize,” announced the
Washington Post.

But is that an outlier? Are the times simply too dark and too absurd in themselves for comic
fiction to flourish? Is it impossible to make bad taste jokes when the news is a bad taste joke?
There is a final canard to add to our duck soup: that comic novels are generally “light” or
“escapist”. That is a drastic under-reading. Thomas Pynchon wrote a comic novel about the
V-2 bombardment of London. Kurt Vonnegut wrote a comic novel about the firebombing of
Dresden. Joseph Heller wrote a comic novel about the futility of war. Apartheid-era South
Africa was what got Tom Sharpe started. For Fischer, it was Hungarian totalitarianism.
Lewycka took on Ukraine’s Holodomor. Shalom Auslander took on Anne Frank. Ian
McEwan’s most ostentatiously comic novel, Solar, had the prospect of planetary extinction
as its backdrop. And, of course, depressions and recessions of every kind are fertile ground
for comic fiction. Coe’s breakthrough What a Carve Up! made hay with the dark side of the
Thatcher years. The Great Depression gave us Nathanael West and Damon Runyon among
others. And Miriam Toews’s wildly, sob-makingly funny All My Puny Sorrows was a comic
novel about her sister’s suicide. We can already see comic fiction responding to our own era
– Jacobson transposing Donald Trump into fairytale in Pussy, for instance, and Coe working
on a contemporary novel in his Rotters’ Club series.

Of course, comparisons are odorous. And the most odorous of all is perhaps Wodehouse
himself. As probably our language’s pre-eminent comic novelist, it may be natural that he
should give his name to a prize for comic fiction – but he is a bit of a red herring in the
history of comic writing. He’s close to sui generis. He doesn’t seem to articulate, except
glancingly, the political satire or the social anxiety that fuels most comic fiction. There’s
pure sunshine in Wodehouse. Taylor calls him a one-off: “He created a world of his own.”
Coe calls him “the elephant in my comic room”. As Fischer says: “Wodehouse was a
particular sort of light comic novelist – a sort of good-natured comic sensibility – and I can’t
think of anyone who still does it in that way; Pratchett, maybe, but he’s gone, and Douglas
Adams, perhaps. Most comic fiction uses darker and crueller jokes.” He adds: “Just because
you’re funny doesn’t mean you’re not serious.”

So to see comic fiction as generally escapist – or generally Wodehousian – is to ignore most

comic fiction. It is, rather, more often a slant way of approaching serious things. The Comic
Novel may be a faltering proposition, if it was ever a proposition in the first place .But is
comic fiction dead? Don’t make me laugh.

Topics
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