A choice of humorous books
Richard Ingrams
Humorous writing for the printed medium is a dying art. My feeling is con- firmed by reading Now That Funny (Methuen, £12.99), a collection of inter- views by David Bradbury and Joe McGrath with assorted comedy writers almost every one of whom writes for television. About the only exception is Keith Waterhouse, best known nowadays as a newspaper columnist. He is also one of the few featured here who works alone, comedy writing being something, they all agree, that is best done by a duo with the partners sparking one another off. It is only the truly great men like the late Johnny Speight, the creator of Alf Garnett, who do it on their own. (Another, not included here, is David Renwick, author of the only outstanding sit-com of recent years, One Foot in the Grave.) There is an interesting contrast here between those comics who are naturally funny and tell jokes all the time like Spike Milligan and those like Richard Curtis of Blackadder and Four Weddings and a Funeral fame who take it all very seriously. I liked Milligan's story of a comic called Michael Howard who only ever told one joke: 'He said there was an old woman who'd never seen the sea. So he took her there and she watched it and she said, "Is that all it does?" ' You don't get jokes like that in Blackadder.
Convinced that their only hope of salva- tion lies in attracting more women readers, newspapers have recruited recently a mon- strous regiment of female columnists under the possibly mistaken assumption that women like reading columns written by other women. They range from the fierce feminists or crazy viragos of the Greer/Burchill variety to a whole new breed of more domestic chroniclers who describe in brain-numbing detail the trou- bles they have with boyfriends, pregnancies or specifically female ailments. I am not surprised to learn that since Craig Brown started parodying their efforts in the Guardian using the pseudonym Bel Little- john, many of their readers have assumed that it was the real thing. Who can blame them?
I was halfway through my cup of coffee when I decided to make a piece of toast. I did this by cutting a slice of bread off a fresh loaf with a sharp knife and then placing it in the toaster. I have found over the years that this is a good method, as it means that both sides can be toasted at once and at equal heat.
A collection of Bel's work, Hug Me While I Weep for I Weep for the World (Little Brown, £9.99) is the perfect present for the misogynist.
Peter Bradshaw of the Evening Standard also had problems in being mistaken for the genuine article when he was sued for libel by his victim Alan Clark, who claimed, successfully, in court that readers could well believe that he was the man behind these lunatic Nazi-esque ramblings, which appeared originally in newspaper form. They read well as a book, Not Alan Clark's Diaries (Pocket Books, £6.99). Still, one wonders whether Alan Clark deserved so much attention in the first place. I remem- ber losing interest in his actual diary when he said he looked upon Cecil Parkinson as a major political figure.
One of the great enduring myths of our time is that the cartoons in the New Yorker are funny. With the exception of a tiny handful of famous names (Thurber, Charles Addams, Saul Steinberg) their artists have never been a patch on ours. I suppose the typical New Yorker cartoon is the fat businessman wining and dining a bosomy blonde saying, 'My wife doesn't understand me' (or variations on that theme). So it is appropriate that a new book The New Yorker Book of Business Car- toons (Bloomberg Press, £14.95) should be devoted to jokes of this kind. With only a few exceptions the cartoons are not only unfunny but badly drawn as well. I note also that the editor, Robert Mankoff, selects more of his own jokes than anyone else's — though, to be fair to him, they include the only one in the book that made me laugh, a businessman on the phone with a desk-diary open in front of him: 'No, Thursday's out. How about never — is never good for you?'
Whilst on the subject of unfunny Ameri- cans, I cannot warm to P. J. O'Rourke whose new book, Eat the Rich (Picador, £13.99) describes a round-the-world tour in an attempt to discover the truth about eco- nomics. O'Rourke's non-stop wisecracking cannot disguise his essentially smug, self- righteous nature. Nor can one commend a man who likes Hong Kong, surely one of the world's worst dumps.
I think of Miles Kington every time I see a Parceline van because it was he who sug- gested that it was a variety of pasta. It is this kind of imaginative humour that inspires his latest book Miles Ington's Motorway Madness: A Traveller's Treasury (HarperCollins, £7.99), an anthology of poems, prayers and stories on a motorway theme. Only Kington could derive humor- ous inspiration from such an unpromising subject, along the way raising a number of interesting philosophical questions e.g., why are there exits from motorways but never any entrances? Or why do so many traffic jams have no cause?
I commend the anglophile Akadine Press of New York who have republished Auberon Waugh's complete Private Eye Diaries in one volume with illustrations by Nicolas Bentley and William Rushton. Waugh has always regarded this as his masterpiece, keeping two copies perma- nently on his bedside table. I think he is right to do so. Younger people oblivious of a world before Mrs Thatcher may profit from this vivid account of the Seventies when Grocer Heath and Harold Wislon ruled the land, when trade unionists were important national figures and Waugh was regularly entertained to tea by Her Majesty the Queen. Copies can be obtained from the Oldie Bookshop, Tel: 0171 734 6768.
Previous page
