On Funny
I was recently asked during a Q&A about historical fiction authors who have influenced me and I completely blanked. Of course Stacey Halls and Jessie Burton came to mind immediately because their levels of readership are my aspiration, but while I love historical fiction – because it’s fiction AND it’s historical – the authors who’ve most influenced me and my writing aren’t really historical writers. They’re funny writers.
When I was growing up we had books around. My mum took us to the library every week and always had one on the go which she would, because she was a woman of rules, always read before it was due back.
My dad, on the other hand, was partial to a bit of spy and spice. He flew long-haul a lot for work and so there was always a fat airport book by Wilbur Smith or Harold Robbins or Jackie Collins hanging around (the moment I told my English teacher that I’d read JG Ballard’s Empire of the Sun over summer (oh!) and Harold Robbins’ latest (oh …) is etched in my mind). But what he loved more than anything was something that made him laugh.
My dad had a very specific sense of humour, a bit gutter, a bit (lot) misogynist, hugely absurd, and his favourite writer was, of course, Douglas Adams. He’d quote from the Hitchhiker books endlessly and he delighted in shouting 42! whenever one of us asked a question and he wanted to be funny. He also loved Tom Sharpe, Kingsley Amis and David Lodge, and Catch 22 was probably his favourite book ever. So these were the authors he would leave lying about and the ones that I, inevitably, then picked up when stories about pony clubs didn’t quite cut it anymore.
And so while my friends were getting into poetry and Sylvia Plath, I was ploughing through David Nobb’s A Bit of a Do. I learned in those really early years of my reading and writing, that a writer who can thread humour into even the toughest of stories is my kind of writer. Because humour is life, right? The whole ‘if I don’t laugh, I’ll cry’ adage. Perhaps it’s a British thing, but at the very worst moments, humour is very, very welcome.
In writing, it adds colour and texture, but it also brings dimension to a character that straight-writing alone can’t do. Because it’s in the humour that the humanity lies. Big hitters like Hilary Mantel, Karen Joy Fowler, A M Holmes, Stella Gibbons, Nora Ephron and Margaret Atwood are the absolute queens of pitch-perfect one-liners and of course, there’s Austen who eviscerates society through just the tiniest, yet excruciating, drip of observation. But all of these writers are also beloved for the characters they create, the life they breathe into the page and into our lives.
Why? Because humour is humanity. We are not all serious sausages doing serious things – not even the dicks you meet on dating apps who think acting like you’ve never seen an episode of Friends equals smart. We are, all of us, nuanced, complex, stupid beings with a hundred and one nuanced, complex stupid thoughts going around in our heads at the same time. Even you Mr Dick from the dating app. And if our characters echo that nuanced, complex stupidity, our characters are relatable. And relatability is everything in writing. If your reader connects with your cast, you’ve won.
I remember reading Cranford when I was sixteen or so and being struck by how funny it was. I had no idea Old Books could be funny but the detail Gaskill brings in, the comic minutiae sifted out of the drudge of life creates that extra layer of warmth and humanity that made me really get those characters. These elderly spinsters, bumbling around eating oranges in private and worrying about getting marks on their carpets were completely relatable to a sixteen year old girl who only thought about boys, how much Sun-In is too much Sun-In for your hair, and becoming a best selling novelist. One of my favourite chapters is when the women are all sent giddy by the imminent arrival of a magician, and, really I could hard relate from that time my sister got me a Prince ticket for my birthday.
However, while humour works for humour’s sake (see Sharpe, Lodge and Nobbs for example), it is far more powerful when it works in tandem with its eternal bedfellow, tragedy. Probably the best example of this is We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman, which, for a story about watching your best friend die from cancer, is probably one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. Or Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5 which is, at its heart, about the devastation of war. It’s described so often as being one of the most humane and human books of our times and I have no doubt that that’s because it is rich with humour.
During emotionally draining times, we’re keening for release, reaching out for something, anything that will lift us from the myre. Which is why so often we lean into the comedy of that moment, as dark or light as necessary: it gives us time to draw breath before we’re plunged back down into the myre again. It’s a pause, a hiatus, a momentary escape. It’s why we get those moments of absurd hilarity in the depths of grief. They happen because we need to remind ourselves that we’re still here. Humour affirms to us that we may be broken, breathless, forever changed, but we are, for the time being at least, very much alive.
