Funny books
Richard Ingrams
It is bad luck on the authors of joke books that they are never considered to be worth more than a few lines of review at Christmas. It is also bad luck on them that they are usually judged by their suitability for reading in the loo. Not everyone, however, would look down on them on that account. According to the Sloane Ranger Handbook by Ann Barr and Peter York (Harpers & Queen £4.95), Sloanes attach great importance to their loo reading, amongst their preferences being Osbert Lancaster, Giles and The Specialist by Charles Sale. (I should perhaps add that Private Eye books are also included.) The authors of the Sloane Ranger Handbook have now added their own book to the list and I am sure they are right to do so. Although it contains too many lists of things like OK shops and schools (in other words advertisements) the handbook is a very fascinating guide to the mores of the Husky folk, those people who have silver pheasants on the sideboard and grand- mothers living in Eaton Square. Despite its generally affectionate tone there is just enough satire — 'When the Sloane bachelor commits suicide he shoots his labrador, then himself' — to stop the joke from pall- ing.
A far cry from the Sloanes and living in the wrong part of London, Wendy Weber was a member of the anti-Vietnam war generation in the late Sixties, married and had her large family in the Seventies and is still struggling to live up to the feminist ideals of her youth. Her house is a mess, her children go to state schools, but surprisingly her marriage has lasted unlike those of so many of her friends and contemporaries who have to struggle with the problems of maintenance and access. The creator of these familiar characters, Posy Simmons, is an original who has successfully made a world of her own. Though not all her strips 'come off' in the sense of making strong points, there is enough humorous detail in her drawings and captions to keep the readers happy. In the awful world of Wendy Weber the little children who look as if they have escaped from Ardizzone drawings provide a welcome note of humanity.
Amongst my own favourite loo reading are a collection of tattered old This England anthologies, ridiculous news items culled from the Press by readers of the New Statesman, all illustrated by the great names of the past like Vicky, Anton and Nicolas Bentley. This England is a selection of the collections chosen by Audrey Hilton with an introduction by this year's winner of the Most Introductions Award, Arthur Mar- shall. A sad reminder of the New Statesman that was, the book is nevertheless a rich and handy harvest of British absurdity, though I always thought it a pity that so many readers' letters to newspapers were included when it is a well known fact that most of these are made up by journalists.
In Swan Song of A. J. Wentworth, H. F. Ellis resurrects his dear old prep- schoolmaster, so well impersonated on radio and television by the late Arthur Lowe. Wentworth is at his best teaching at Burgrove where the book opens. When he goes off to America on an exchange scheme, some of the fun is dissipated but by no means all. Nothing much seems to have changed at Burgrove, though the boys now have to learn Dylan Thomas by heart. Wentworth is alittle classic and I hope that H. F. Ellis has not retired him for ever.
The C. 0. Jones Compendium of Prac- tical Jokes by Richard Boston is a jocular and highly readable survey of practical jokes, old and new, written by a man who I know from personal experience is addicted to things like plastic fried eggs. All the famous stories are here — the Berners Street hoax of l809, the Sultan of Zanzibar hoax of 1910 when a number of friends in- cluding Virginia Woolf dressed up as Abyssinian princes and were shown over the Dreadnought — as well as a number of less familiar stories. I liked the one about John Betjeman smuggling a horse chestnut into a glass case at the Geological Museum with the card 'Horse Chestnut picked up in Bushey Park. Donated by J. Betjeman Esquire.'
Though nothing could ever be as good as his stage appearances, fans of Barry Hum- phries, of whom I am one, will enjoy Dame Edna's Bedside Companion, a lavish collec- tion of bad taste items on a bedtime theme compiled by the Maestro of Transvestism. These range from Dame Edna's 'Fisher- man's Facial' which involves covering her face with assorted uncooked seafood to special Australian hints for insomniacs ('If a lovely snooze you seek, Drink of the phlegm from a platypus' beak').
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