What's so funny about comic novels?
From Fielding and Austen to Wodehouse and Amis, humour has always been at the heart of English literature. But who makes us laugh today – and is humour now harder to achieve?
"And here, perhaps, we can see the obvious reason why the "comic novel" might currently seem to be on life support. As Pritchett observed, "our comic tradition in the novel … has one serious defect: the lack of tragic irony. It is extraordinary when one thinks of the influence ofDon Quixote on the English novelists how they have all – with gentlemanly or middle-class optimism, natural I suppose to an expansive culture which was dramatising its satisfactions – avoided the tragic conclusion." Is that all Jim Dixon was really doing, then? Were his potshots at the minor hypocrisies of postwar society just a form of complacency: just a way, essentially, of "dramatising its satisfactions"? And now that we know, post-9/11, post-2008, how extremely fragile those satisfactions are, is it time for novelists to jettison comedy altogether, like Desmond Bates in Deaf Sentence, and finally get serious?
It sounds convincing. Indeed, the rational case for the stifling of laughter until our global problems have been soberly addressed and sorted out seems unanswerable. Jim Dixon may have had the cold war to worry about, but in other respects he seems to have been living in a fool's paradise, a bubble of provincial ignorance which today's novelists are simply not permitted to share. Where are the laughs in massacre, famine and climate change, exactly? What's so funny about the Middle East, North Korea and Afghanistan?"
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