FUNNY BOOKS FOR CHRISTMAS The Time of My Life. By
Nicholas Bentley. (Michael Joseph.
Millen and the Author. (Chatto and Windus. 5s.) Hand-Picked Howlers.. By Cecil Hunt. Illustrated by Blampied.
- (Methuen. 3s. 6d.)
The Laughter Omnibus. Taken from Punch. By Anthony
• Armstrong. (Faber and Faber. 8s. 6d.) How to Make Love, in Six Easy Lessons. By Robin Wise.
d Illustrated by Fitz. (Hutchinson. 5s.)
Live with a Man and Love It ! By Anne Fisher. Illustrated Life with Mother. By Clarence Day. (Chatto and Windus. 7s. 6d.)
THE ever-increasing supply of _Funny Books .for Christmas seems to betray a grave lack of confidence in our abilities to have a properly merry Christmas without some kind of help. 'More and more of them come out every year : some genuinely 'funny, many others simply imitations of last year's successes:— and anything less invigorating than an unfunny funny boiik - I cannot at the moment imagine. However, here are some good ones.
First and foremost, let us thank heaven (though preferably not fasting) for Mr. Nicholas Bentley. His pen drawings _are so sublimely idiotic that they need nothing to explain .them, except at the most a laconic half-line here and there : and in The Time of My Life this is exactly what he has provided. ,This must be the shortest autobiography of our century, and I am sure it is one of the funniest. One can only suppose that Mr. Bentley has very charming and tolerant relatives, for he gives all his family a wonderfully libellous character.
Three books which I vigorously recommend are Whelk's Postbag, Hand-Picked Howlers, and The Laughter Omnibus. Whelk, that unhappy Golf Club Secretary, ranks with the Great who achieve greatness by having something done ,to them. His retired Civil Servants and Generals and Admirals are once again in full cry, more offensive, more quarrelsome, more lunatic than ever : and I hope they go on next year. -Hand-Picked Howlers is a first-rate selection from Mr. Hunt's well-known books, and has expressive illustrations by Edmund Blampied. It may be known to a good many people that an average is " something a hen lays eggs on," but I doubt if so many have read how " The politicians turn to and fro in their complexity, weaving and unweaving their combinations." The Laughter Omnibus contains a selection of the best Punch articles and verses by everybody one could mention, from E. V. Lucas and Sir Owen Seaman to A. P. Herbert. People who like Punch should own it, people who don't read Punch : should get hold of it, and people who malign Punch might look into it if only to prove to themselves how right they arc in their hauteur.
The next four books on my list are a strange development of the Funny Books business, and may well be a sign of the times. Their tides suggest that they come in the wake of a recent vogue, and promise a snappy frankness which in part the books provide. But the oddest thing about them is that all the writers are vehemently and whole-heartedly serious. Their theme is How to be Happily Married, but for the most part they uneasily disguise this wherever they possibly can by wisecracks, funny stories, puns, &c., and their publishers have in three of the books gone one step further and had them illustrated by pictures that are much too " funny " and entirely alter the key of the advice. These various efforts make Mr. Robin Wise to me unreadable, but I hope others will not agfee with me. Miss Anne Fisher subtitles her book " The Gentle Art of Staying Happily Married," and her advice is kindly, brisk, and based on a sound knowledge of human nature. Only occasionally does one have to remember that this is to Funny Book at all.
This takes us some distance from " funny books for Christ- mas," but even at Christmas some people still have their wits about them and like to read books which deserve a little atten- tion. To such, as a parting gift, I recommend the last Clarence Day book—a series of linked stories of Mother, most endearing of consorts, with the New York of Clarence Day's boyhood as a background and Father, upright, particular, overbearing as ever, stealing the thunder through page after page. And if anyone doesn't know Father, now is the time to begin.
MONICA REDLICII.
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