The old jokes are the best jokes
Richard Ingrams
The task of reviewing the funny books at Christmas becomes yearly more onerous and depressing. Television radio scripts, re-heated newspaper columns, incredibly unfunny cartoons by a variety of artists are the staple fare. Nowadays there is also a largish quota of `Chri-smut' (the prize for the most unfunny offering in the above section must go this year to Mr Tomi Ungerer for his book The Joy of Frogs, Souvenir, £8.95, cartoons of frogs copulat- ing in a variety of positions).
In the circumstances one is forced back on the Golden Oldies, of which there are a good number. Despite the sad decline of Punch, the magazine's librarian Amanda- Jane Doran, has put together a bumper books of cartoons, The Punch Cartoon Album (Grafton, £14.99 with an introduc- tion by Miles Kington) to remind us of past glories. Sensibly eschewing a chronological approach, she mixes up the likes of Du Maurier and Frank Reynolds with Hoff- flung, Searle, Bill Tidy, Larry and Co. It is a somewhat eccentric choice, and the re- production is not all that it should be. All the same, I would recommend it as a good addition to the thinking man's loo library (full marks to Miss Doran for including one of my favourite Punch cartoons — a full-page drawing by Sprod of a lady showing her guests into the spare room: 'It's rather cold so I put an extra dog on your bed.') Not given as much prominence in the Punch compendium as perhaps he deserves is the late Nicolas Bentley who, in his time, played many parts, ranging from a brief career as a circus clown to illustrator of Auberon Waugh's diary in Private Eye. Ruari Maclean has now supplied an au- thoritative account of his life and work, 'To succeed in this job you must believe in yourself ' including a bibliography (Nicolas Bentley Drew the Pictures, Scolar, £30). Although primarily an illustrator (much influenced by the American artist Gluyas Williams who illustrated Robert Benchley), Bentley was also an excellent spot cartoonist whose jokes were pointed and occasionally sur- real. It is a pity that this charming book is so expensive that hardly anyone will be able to afford to buy it.
Talking of surrealism, a very welcome reprint is Jonathan Routh's Secret Life of Queen Victoria (Macmillan, £9.99), origi- nally published in 1979. Here in words and pictures Routh records a missing period in the Queen's life when she went on a secret holiday to Jamaica and engaged, among other things, in tightrope-walking, water- skiing and limbo dancing. In Routh's primitive paintings the Queen is always an insignificant black and white blob in a multi-coloured Caribbean jungle land- scape.
Anyone who produces something even half-original in the humour department deserves a pat on the back. Other People: Portraits from the Nineties (Bloomsbury, £9.99) candidly acknowledges its debt to an earlier series called Modern Types by Geoffrey Gorer and Ronald Searle, which appeared first in Punch. D. J. Taylor and Marcus Berkmann have brought the idea up to date with a number of shrewdly observed portraits of contemporary folk, including the yuppie, the Green and the computer freak, not to mention a few old favourites like the pub 'regular' (a sketch worthy of Patrick Hamilton). It is only a matter for regret that Griffin's illustrations are not up to the standard of the text.
In the 'more of the same' department, Douglas Adams and John Lloyd have produced The Deeper Meaning of Liff (Pan, £9.99), in which humorous defini- tions are given to the names of towns. This is a sort of Paul Jennings idea which, stretched to one and now two books, may begin to pall a bit. Some of the definitions are good. Others seem pointless (Why should Hepple = 'To sculpt the contents of a sugar bowl'?) The book might have passed muster as a cheap paperback, but as a hardback it seems unduly pretentious. But there are high-class illustrations by Bert Kitchen.
Readers of The Spectator will need no introduction (as they say) to The Agreeable World of Wallace Arnold, illustrated by William Rushton (Fourth Estate, £9.99). In addition to The Spectator pieces, there are a number of gems from other sources, including a totally scurrilous, childish, quite unwarranted and extremely funny send-up of Geoffrey Wheatcroft (dread name).
For stocking-fillers I would recommend a batch of books from Duckworth. Two Heath Robinson reprints, Inventions and Absurdities, and two nicely produced mini- atures, The Sayings of Doctor Johnson and ditto of Oscar Wilde (both £4.95).
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