A choice of humorous books
Olivia Glazebrook No, how do you do — I didn't quite catch your name? Oh, The Esquire Hand- book for Hosts — a pleasure to make your acquaintance, so charmed... I really oughtn't... oh, naughty, perhaps just the one... Here's a book (Thorsens/Harper- Collins, £12.99, pp. 184) full of sturdy advice for New York bachelors on how to 'arouse a girl's interest', and polite tips for girls on behaviour that won't embarrass the gentlemen ('Do you either play bridge or dance really well? If not, take steps to cor- rect this at once.'). All sound advice, too, about not getting smashed and laughing at your own jokes, shaving at least once a day and being able to invite a girl in without unleashing her mother. It seems as sweetly up-to-date as it ever will be, although the canape recipes left me feeling a bit queasy, but the sad truth is that while it's all very well for a host to read this book as a joke, if his guests suspected him of actually applying the advice he encountered he'd be a laughing-stock. The attentive reader will be turned back at page two: 'If you are guided by a consideration of others, you need no rule book.' It is useful, though, to know how to make a gallon of mint julep.
Whilst waiting for an invitation from an honest-to-goodness Esquire host I light the two-bar fire, pour myself a mint julep and leaf through The Private Eye Annual 1999 (Private Eye Productions, £7.99, pp. 96). Now I suspect that the person who reads Private Eye every fortnight doesn't buy the Annual for himself; he (or she) buys it for a friend or relation in whose loo he (or she) plans to spend a fair bit of time in the fol- lowing year. Bought with this simple rule in mind, the Annual is a great success. Trying to read it straight through, with only mint Julep for comfort, gave me the same feeling as if I'd been watching television all day: slightly sick, greasy-palmed, curly of lip. But placed in a friend's loo, and visited lit- tle and often, it is matchless — hilariously funny, even if you've read it all before and all the jokes are out of date.
Craig Brown's diaries (The Craig Brown Omnibus, Private Eye Productions, £12.99, Pp. 192) are one of the Eye's best features. He triumphs more smoothly with the Nor- man Tebbits of this world than the Chris Evanses, because a parody of Chris Evans just sounds ghastly, like Chris Evans with the volume turned up. It is more satisfacto- ry to hear the quiet hiss of air escaping from a punctured windbag. A copy should be despatched, post-haste, to the lavatory of each of the entrants. Definitely another gift/loo book, since it's a joy to read, but not at one sitting.
Cartoons are another obvious choice for the WC, since nobody except perhaps Michael Heath would pick a book of car- toons for a long train journey. The New Yorker Book of Money Cartoons (Nicholas Brealey Publishing, £12.99, pp. 110) is rec- ommended since all the New Yorker's car- toons are of an exceptional standard, but the collection limits itself to one level of amusement. Dog cartoons, for example, present a situation to be recognised and interpreted by the reader as typical human behaviour. Money cartoons, of course, pre- sent the human behaviour itself. Although they are funny, they lack what makes a car- toon really succeed — the reader's suspi- cion that he (or she) has seen the point where others might miss it.
Political cartoons, on the other hand, rely on knowledge (in my case, pathetically slight) of the persons and situations drawn. Steve Bell's Bell's Eye (Methuen, £12.99, pp. 192) is brilliant but horrid — an ugly, mean, angry record of 20 years of British politics, encouraging a grim smile rather than a gusty laugh. Take in small doses; prolonged exposure to such a poisoned pen results in deep depression, which is what we expect on Boxing Day, but not at all what we want on Christmas morning.
Previous page
