Laughing matter

The best way to establish whether a book is truly funny is the Commuter Guffaw Test, where a piece of writing seduces you into disregarding your surroundings and
startling your fellow passengers.

After nearly 30 years of literary incarceration, Woody Allen staged a prison break last year with a new collection of short stories titled, appropriately, Mere Anarchy. The book, which hit our local shelves recently, is an intriguing specimen of 20th century humour. Twentieth century, and not the 21st, because the references and even world view, given the author’s vintage, would appear to GenX as somewhat dated.

Having said that, what makes the writing intriguing (and modern, too) is Allen’s 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. But what exactly is it that qualifies this book as funny? 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 test of a really funny piece of prose is 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 — you can rest assured that what you have in your hands 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 tickle-bomb; indeed, the most reliable ‘humour section’ is that bus/train seat you just fell off laughing.

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 there exists a comic elite even among 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 one-fourth 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 over-technical 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.

For Something 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 GK 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, PG Wodehouse could well be the bright focus, with various comic luminaries, from Roald Dahl to Stephen Fry to Nick Hornby, radiating out from the centre.

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 RK Narayan and the opposite-of-prolific, forgotten GV 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.