I?ve always believed that writing to make people laugh is much tougher than to get them to sniffle. Kill off a principal character, or make her lose her eyes in an accident, and you can have readers? tear ducts working overtime. But to get a belly laugh out of him? Now that separates the men from the boys. It?s also a job in which fear of rejection is much stronger and rejection more humiliating. If I were a humourist, I would be a very insecure man, for there is hardly anything more discomforting in civil society than the prospect of telling a joke and meeting incomprehension or stony silence.
So who are the funniest writers of all time? Since humour, obviously, is the most difficult genre to translate into other languages, let?s stick to English. My vote for the funniest man to touch pen on paper goes to Mark Twain, though to term him a humourist is to unfairly label this truly great and courageous author, one of the sharpest voices of reason in 19th century America. Anybody who could dissect the race-ridden feudal horrors of southern USA the way Twain did in Huckleberry Finn, or expose the inequities and brutality of the so-called era of chivalry in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur?s Court, deserved a Nobel. But, yes, the man could have you in splits.
In How I Edited An Agricultural Paper, the narrator has taken temporary editorship of the paper, with no knowledge whatsoever of anything about farming. After the issue is out, a man comes to his office and asks him to read out a piece the narrator has written. The piece, among other things, calls the pumpkin a berry, and mentions ganders spawning.
?The excited listener sprang toward me to shake hands, and said ? ?There, there-that will do. I know I am all right now, because you have read it just as I did, word for word. But stranger, when I first read it this morning, I said to myself, I never, never believed it before, notwithstanding my friends kept me under watch so strict, but now I believe I am crazy; and with that I fetched a howl that you might have heard two miles, and started out to kill somebody-because, you know, I knew it would come to that sooner or later, and so I might as well begin. I read one of them paragraphs over again, so as to be certain, and then I burned my house down and started. I have crippled several people, and have got one fellow up a tree, where I can get him if I want… Good-by, sir, good-by; you have taken a great load off my mind. My reason has stood the strain of one of your agricultural articles, and I know that nothing can ever unseat it now. Good-by, sir.??
No one has used wild exaggeration as effectively as Twain. In Journalism in Tennessee, the newspaper is a war zone, with agitated readers dropping by to try to kill the editor through the day. Anyone who can read that story without laughing out loud is possibly a pervert. And Twain?s inventiveness is pure genius.
From The Personal Habits of the Siamese Twins: ?During the War, they were strong partisans, and both fought gallantly all through the great struggle ? Eng on the Union side and Chang on the Confederate. They took each other prisoners at Seven Oaks, but the proofs of capture were so evenly balanced in favour of each, that a general army court had to be assembled to determine which one was properly the captor, and which the captive?The vexed question was finally decided by agreeing to consider them both prisoners and exchanging them.?
Twain also played with form, and his experiments are still modern and charming. In Political Economy, the narrator tries to write a treatise on political economy while being constantly interrupted by a lightning-rod salesman. Twain keeps flipping back and forth between the essay as it is being written, and the writer?s hilarious travails with the salesman (and of course, the essay is pure rubbish). In His Grandfather?s Ram, Jim Blaine, whenever he has had one too many, starts to tell the story of the ram, but right after the first sentence, constantly digresses from topic to topic, till he goes off to sleep, and no one ever gets to know what it was that happened to that ram. Today?s post-modernists would have heartily approved. But forget my analyses. The truth is: Mark Twain is a sure cure for depression.
And my 780 words are up, and I haven?t even been able to begin on PG Wodehouse and James Thurber.