Humorous Books

A friend who is about to set off mountain climbing in the Rockies confessed that he's never read anything by the great English humorist P G Wodehouse so he is taking one of the Jeeves and Bertie Wooster short story collections. It's a good choice, provided he has the self-restraint to ration himself to one story a night, something I could no more do than eat one salted peanut, or one chocolate peppermint cream. His remark sparked a train of thought about humorous books, including ones that make you think, like Rabelais, Voltaire's Candide, much of Mark Twain, Fielding's Tom Jones, and nearer our time, S J Perelman, James Thurber, Alan Bennett, among others. The last of these, Alan Bennet,may never have been funnier than in the sermon skit he performed in the original Cambridge Footlights performance, Beyond the Fringe, and much of his recent work is the sort of humour that is as likely to induce tears as laughter. It's probably a cultural thing, that I have more affection for the English humorous writers than for any other, so Three Men in a Boat, and The Diary of a Nobody have a place in my personal pantheon.The Canadian humorist Stuart McLean, who is often funnier if not more witty than his American counterpart Garrison Kieler, in much the same way that Stephen Leacock was funnier than Mark Twain, can induce tears or a lump in the throat too, but his serious mode is often a rather mawkish sentimentality, not a profound reflection on the human condition. I have enormous respect for real humorists who have that rare ability to make us laugh yet make us think too. Perhaps no one did it better than the classical Greek playright Aristophanes 2500 years ago: in Lysystrata,he fully exploited the endless humorous potential of a situation in which the women withhold their sexual favours in order to dissuade their men from endlessly fighting and going to war. And on the matter of that book, would the unprincipled rascal who stole my copy with illustrations by Norman Lindsay please return it! I will ask no questions, offer forgiveness, and not report the theft to the authorities.