Lead balloons
Patrick Skene Catling
The Best of Modern Humour Edited by Mordecai Richler (Allen Lane £10.95) There are two seasons of the year when publishers offer books which are sup- Posed to entertain the occasional reader Without provoking worrisome thought. Christmas is one of those times; now is the other. Here is a lightweight book so heavy that it can be recommended for the Christ- mas stockings of frivolous old ladies with elephantiasis and for the summer ham- mocks of escapists too lethargic to run away.
British librarians are advised that this stout volume (542 pages) of 'English wit and humour' is Number 827.914 08 in the catalogue. I missed 827.914 07, so I may not have been fully prepared to get all the Jokes. But no anthologist of 'English wit and humour' can expect joyous cries of acclamation, especially when most of it is American, as in this collection, in which the Anglo-American ratio is Punch 1 – New Yorker 20. Other people's notions of `the best' in this sensitively subjective area of the mind are almost always sure to make one whimper through clenched teeth. Mordecai Richler, a Canadian novelist Of Russian and Polish ancestry who has returned to Montreal after spending 20 Years in London, acknowledges the danger that his meat may be your poison in a foreword of manly candour, which is also a Miniature anthology of what some other Professional specialists in the deadly se- rious business of humour have said about L 'There are no guidelines for writing good humour,' Mr Richler recognises. He quotes Edmund Gwenn, the actor, on his deathbed, a stage noted for wisecracks that stop the show: 'Dying is easy. Comedy is difficult.' There aren't any guidelines even for ieeognising 'good humour' or assessing its oddness. Perhaps that is why television 1°InedY has to be presented with canned tatighter, to let solitary viewers know when ° laugh. Performed comedy has an advan- tage over what is merely written; perfor- mers, more easily than writers, can give their public obvious cues (nudge, wink).
Humour is as impossible to define as beauty, and people who make dogmatic pronouncements on either automatically disqualify themselves by doing so. There are no acceptable public experts on these private matters. Freud attempted to analy- se the psychology of laughter, thus once again making himself laughable. There have been solemn dissertations, even some illustrated with graphs, measuring the humour quotients of hyperbole and bath- os, the shock of the slap-stick and the indignity of the banana peel. You might as well dissect a balloon to discover what made it buoyant. Even discussing the impossibility of defining humour is pretty boring, I admit.
After citing Dorothy Parker three times as an expert on humour, Mr Richler bars her own work from his anthology. I'm afraid,' he says, 'I found her comic stories brittle, short on substance, and, to come clean, no longer very funny . .
That disingenuous 'to come clean' fails to save his comments from the humour anthologist's risk of seeming humourlessly pedagogical. And how can he justify ex- cluding Dorothy Parker while including, for instance, Donald Barthelme, who obviously takes himself and the world very seriously indeed? See his little nightmare called 'Game', reprinted here, about two demented USAF officers jealously holding the interdependent keys to a guided missile in an underground silo.
Barthelme's gruesome vignette is as well written and as utterly unfunny as Russell Baker's bitterly sardonic 'Bomb Math', in which he calculates the `general mathema- tical formula for determining the bomb poundage the United States will have to drop to save the hearts and minds of any given nation'. Mr Baker writes a 'humor- ous', sometimes satirical, syndicated col- umn to deadline, primarily for the New York Times, and I feel certain that his motives are pure, diametrically opposed to those of that genuinely bellicose bomb- joker, President Reagan. Modernity in humour, in Mr Richler's judgment, began with Stephen Leacock, who was born in 1869. Perhaps Mr Richler chose Leacock for the honour of first place in this chronologically arranged collection because he, too, was a Canadian. He was a professor at McGill who tried to write humorously only part-time but succeeded quite often, in the simple, innocent style of his era. Some Canadians are thick-skinned about their country's reputation for not being a fun place — a reputation which is no longer entirely valid. Mr Richler has re-anthologised Professor Leacock's most famous line, from his Nonsense Novels: `Lord Ronald said nothing: he flung him- self from the room, flung himself upon his hot* and rode madly off in all directions.' If only Mr Richler had edited his anthol- ogy anonymously he might have enhanced Canada's new reputation for incipient humorousness, without immodesty, by us- ing an excerpt from one of his own novels, such as The Incomparable Atuk, about an
Eskimo bewildered by urban civilisation. But the publishers of anthologies evidently want them to seem sufficiently authorita- tive to be used as text-books, so anonymity usually must be ruled out.
Mr Richler should be given credit for having executed' his gruelling assignment with conscientious thoroughness, especial- ly from the North American point of view. He has assembled most of the familiar names with samples of their works often, but not always, the most obvious ones.
Thus we are invited to enjoy again Damon Runyon's 'Butch Minds the Baby', in vintage Runyonese CI give them a very large hello'); one of P. G. Wodehouse's early Ukridge stories ('Why, my gosh, I've got the idea of the century.'); Robert Benchley's 'Opera Synopses' (`The basis of "Die Meister-Genbssenschaft" is an old legend of Germany which tells how the Whale got his Stomach.'); some bits about Captain Foulenough from J. B. Morton's Beachcomber column (`My dear old god- mother! Have you forgotten the old days? Is there anything to drink in this doss- house?'); E. B. White's Hemingway parody, 'Across the Street and into the Grill' CI am a little fleshed up around the crook of the elbow, thought Perley, but I commute good.'); Wolcott Gibbs's profile of 'Time . . . Fortune . . . Life . . . Luce,' written in old-fashioned Timestyle ('Where it all will end, knows God!'); Woody Allen's short story, The Kugelmass Epi- sode' (` "My God , I'm doing it with Madame Bovary!" Kugelmass whispered to himself. "Me, who failed freshman English".'); and Kenneth Tynan's Faulk- ner parody in the manner of the stage manager of Thornton Wilder's Our Town (` "Well, folks, reckon that's about it. End of another day in the city of Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. Nothin' much happened. Couple of people got raped, couple more got their teeth kicked in, but way up there those faraway old stars are still doing their old cosmic criss-cross,and there ain't a thing we can do about it." ').
As if determined to demonstrate his independence of established preferences, the anthologist then trudges on to offer some specimens which are not generally regarded as 'best'. Evelyn Waugh, for example, is represented by 'Winner Takes All', a depressing short story about the unfairness of primogeniture; Kingsley Amis by an excerpt from One Fat English- man; Joseph Heller by one from his unbest novel to date, Good as Gold, and Terry Southern by a fair-to-middling piece on Mickey Spillane, instead of almost any- thing from his masterpiece, The Magic Christian (or is his claque angrily deman- ding Candy?).
A few of Mr Richler's nominations are downright mystifying. How can even the most ardent admirers of Eudora Welty account for her presence in this company? Why is John Cheever here? Mr Richler is defiant in his arbitrariness and becomes
more so the closer he gets to the neuroses of ultramodern humour, which may be most readily understood as tragedy.
`Put plainly,' Mr Richler says, making no further attempt to theorise, 'there was only one basic criterion (however imperfect) for the selection of the material that follows here. It had to make me laugh — some- times at seven o'clock in the morning, before my first cup of coffee, which may have been playing dirty pool.'
In The Hustler, dirty pool got Paul Newman's fingers broken. And quite right too.
Previous page
