How Funny Can You Get ?
Aspects of English History. By Claud Cockburn. (MacGibbon and Kee, 15s.) The Pick of Punch. Edited by Nicolas Bentley. (Andre Deutsch, 18s.) How Can You Bear To Be Human? By Nicolas Bentley. (Andre Deutsch, 12s. 6d.) Angels on Horseback and Elsewhere. By Thelwell. (Methuen, 15s.) Kovarsky's World. By Anatol Kovarsky. (Faber, 21s.) Nightcrawlers. By Charles Addams. (Hamish Hamilton, 18s.) Fabulous Admirals and Some Naval Fragments. By Geoffrey Lowis. (Putnam, 21s.) I Married a Model. By Droo Launay. (Macdonald, 6s.) This England. (The New Statesman, 2s. 6d.) Harry the Locust. By Frank Bailey. (Heinemann, 25s.)
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How to Avoid' Matrimony: The Layman's Guide to the Laywoman. By Herald Froy. (Muller, 12s. 6d.) The Year of the Comet. By Osbert Lancaster. (Gryphon Books, 5s.) Esprit de Corps. By Lawrence Durrell. (Faber, 10s. 6d.) The Woman of My Life. By Ludwig Bemelmans. (Hamish Hamilton, 12s. 6d.) You Can't Get There from Here. By Ogden Nash. (Dent, 12s. 6d.) tnanALL these books are meant to make you laugh. s thi;laughter is a subjective business. Let us get the ity oPutchery over quickly. Claud Cockburn's new id niPook consists of jokes about English history based :e bidargely on the reversibility of cliches and the attribution of ridiculous remarks to historical givtFharacters. Sometimes this comes off, sometimes he bet doesn't. On the whole it is not Mr. Cockburn :t. Asat his best. In The Pick of Punch, edited by nightNicolas Bentley, there are four pieces by Mr. id of.ockburn and one by me. The illustrated jokes ituesin Punch, which get less and less funny as ithenthe years go by, and worse and worse drawn, Mine/Tire with lamentable frequency about mur- Rofler, violent death or suicide. There are, of course, nantome funny ones in this book, but not enough. icolas Bentley also has a book out of his own, his time with an introduction by Malcolm uggeridge, who regales us with some random houghts about God and Man. Bentley's prose is id 0 far below the Punch average, his drawings are Doessequally far above it. And that finishes the chain s oseteaction, save for one last fizzle : a book of cute cbodrawings, mostly from Punch, by a man called gabie'Thelwell, who draws unconvincing pictures of ,ouidehildren riding horses. Very small children. unts,Gymkhanas. Heaven help us. ik, a That New Yorker humour can be almost as inda epressing is proved by Kovarsky's World. tent e draws like a bargain-basement Steinberg, d h nd what he regards as funny are abstract lustpainters, ladies in harems, mythological animals and (here it comes again) violence and death. Charles Addams is, of course, in an entirely dif- ferent class from any of those so far mentioned, but again a certain standardisation of shock—a giant or pigmies feature in a very large number of these jokes—is apparent. But at least he draws beautifully, and a great deal of this very. funny.
Fabulous Admirals is a collection of nautical yarns, some of which are very funny indeed, others less so. They are well told and should delight those naval men who are not infuriated by them. A must for midshipmen. I Married a Model is a long ha-ha-ha about just that, very badly illustrated. This England, in which the inde- fatigable Nicolas Bentley makes his third appear- ance in this review, is the pick of the joky column in the jolly old New Staggers.
Harry the Locust is much better than it sounds or looks. It is the story of a man who was engaged in locust control in Africa and Arabia, and besides being amusing in a rather coarse sort of way—it is a relief to read a traveller who does not pretend never to have noticed the bodies of naked black girls—it is also very interesting about locusts and about Arabia, too. Not coarse but just plain incredible is Jokes, Jokes, Jokes. These are Ameri- can, partly translated so that New York becomes London but store does not become shop, and are in the classic style. `PAUL, in a restaurant : "Go see if the chef has pigs' feet." PETER : "I can't tell. He's got his shoes on."' And also every joke you have ever heard. Now, a discovery. How to Avoid Matrimony, by Herald Froy, is, despite its forbidding title, extremely funny. It could with advantage have been called : 'How to get girls to go to bed with you without actually marrying them,' since it is all about that, but perhaps our bookseller-censors would have objected. Indeed, it is more than funny, since it is frequently witty as well and is in delightfully bad taste. When talking to the father of the girl-you-don't-want-actually-to- marry : 'having found out his school, insist that you too went there, but take care to get the loca- tion of the various houses and the names of everybody concerned utterly wrong.'
Osbert Lancaster's collection of Daily Express drawings, almost all Maudie Littlehampton or her husband, thank heavens, are at least as good as ever they were, which, of course, is very good indeed, and give a deliciously cockeyed view of a quite imaginary country called England. The book is beautifully produced and a bargain at five shil- lings. Lawrence Durrell's Esprit de Corps is a most amusing collection of stories about diplomatic life in the Balkans, and is also strongly recom- mended. Mr. Durrell writes a prose as finished as his verse, is extremely entertaining, and each of these brief anecdotes-without-malice is as light and delicious as the very best Viennese pastry. Since this book is well produced, too, it is only fair to pass over the illustrations in silence.
Bemelmans's The Woman of My Life, a slight novel set in Paris, about a melancholy French duke and his amours, is also elegant, though in a slightly more hackneyed fashion. French dukes, admirable body of men though they doubtless are, get into so many English and American novels these days, almost like working-class intellectuals in the old days. But it makes very pleasant read- ing : and there is a drop or two of pure lime juice in his spun-sugar which is the perfect flavouring for this elaborate confection.
Finally, Ogden Nash has a new volume of poems and ditties. They jingle along as pleasantly as ever, though he seems to have lost his more caustic touch, which is a pity. But he will do.
And next year we'll have lots and lots of jokes about sputniks. And let us hope that the publishers will find somebody else, in addition to Mr. Nicolas Bentley, who can draw well enough to illustrate
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