A choice of funny books
Richard Ingrams
The only classy offering this Christmas is Ronald Searle's latest oeuvre, Slightly Foxed — but still desirable (Souvenir, £14.95), a large-format book of full-colour cartoons illustrating those peculiar phrases that second-hand booksellers use in their catalogues — 'slight splitting of paste- downs', 'unwashed with only slight margin- al soiling', etc. Searle has lost none of his skill over the years and is, as always, especially good at dirty old men and mini-skirted dolly birds.
Miles Kington deserves to be given a knighthood, at least, for his services to humour. He is one of those very rare people who can be funny, effortlessly, for 24 hours a day. Welcome to Kington (Robson, £9.95) is a collection of his pieces from the `Indie' (not to be confused with the Indy). He loves to engage in extrava- gant verbal fantasies but I like him best in his traditional Punch vein of a man baffled by the complexities and horrors of the modern world. It is a typical Kington idea that clever marketing men have deliberate- ly withheld giving names to certain inven- tions, like those little strips of white plastic you get offered in place of spoons. You cannot complain about something, says Kington, if you do not know what to call it.
In recent years, publishers have hit on a new idea for funny books, which is simply to reprint the scripts of television and radio comedy programmes. I think the Goons were the first to be given the treatment but now the shops are full of them. The latest offering is Monty Python's Flying Circus in two volumes from Methuen (£7.99 each). It is still fashionable to praise Monty Python as a work of great genius but it was never up to much compared with, say, Milligan or Cook and Moore. Reprinted in script form, without any of the visual jokes, it strikes one as not only tremendously unfunny but acutely depress- ing as well. There are a number of grey, rather out of focus photographs, including one of the late Graham Chapman dressed up as a vicar with an axe stuck in his head.
The True Confessions of Adrian Albert Mole (Methuen, £5.99) is being marketed to look like a new Mole book, which it isn't. After producing her two-volume masterpiece of Adrian Mole, Sue Town- send very wisely decided that enough was enough. This new little book consists of a number of bits that were left over, padded out with magazine articles and a spoof Mole diary by the young Margaret Thatch- er. At first I thought it might be a bit of a rip-off. But at least half the book is vintage Adrian Mole and £5.99 is not bad for a hardback nowadays. The illustrations by Caroline Holden are charming.
Collecting Himself by James Thurber (Hamish Hamilton, £14.95) is an original selection of pieces which have not appeared in book form before and some of which have never appeared in print. There are also about 80 cartoons, including many that are equally unfamiliar. Thurber has been taken too seriously by American critics like Michael J. Rosen, the editor of this collection, who explains, for example, that `I have supplied an additional structure to coalesce excerpts . . .'. But then, for much of the time, Thurber took himself too seriously to boot. He thought, wrongly, that he was a writer first and a cartoonist second. Yet by far the funniest things in this handsome book are the cartoons. They include two exceptionally bored looking couples seated in front of one another (an old man with a beard is fast asleep) captioned `Ravel's Bolero'.
Among the funniest of our own new wave of cartoonists are Peattie and Taylor, creators of the strip cartoon 'Alex' in the Independent. Alex II (Magnum Force) (Penguin, £3.99) would make a very acceptable stocking-filler for the Sloane Ranger in your life. Although it appears on the City page of Mr Whittam Smith's great journal, most of it is concerned with the domestic scene. A kind of up-market version of the 'Gambols', but very funny.
`This is the way below my head...'
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