30m readers love her books. So why do three middle-aged men think Marian is not funny enough for an award?
IT takes a huge amount of guts to stand up in public and tell people that you’re funny. I’d rather climb into a boxing ring with Katie Taylor than get up on stage in front of her and try to make her laugh. Being funny is just about the toughest thing for a performer or a writer to pull off.
Any half-baked author can spin a sad yarn, and most of us can tell a decent anecdote with a beginning, a middle and a definite end, and sometimes even raise the odd smile in the process. But making people laugh out loud is really hard.
Unlike polite applause, you don’t get laughs unless you’ve earned them. Clapping is a conscious act of good manners, but laughter is a reflex you can’t fake or force. Genuine, spontaneous laughter is a marvellous thing to have in your gift, and those writers and comedians who sit alone at their desks working and re-working a single line until they reckon it will bring a chuckle to an audience or a reader don’t get the credit they deserve. Funny people are, literally, a tonic. Laughter is a mood-altering medicine with no side effects, and people who can dispense it with ease are healers and heroes.
If Marian Keyes had developed a drug or a treatment that brought comfort and happiness into the lives of 30million people around the world, she’d probably have a Nobel Prize on her mantelpiece by now. If she was a reclusive, beardy bloke churning out bleak novellas that made you want to scoop out your own eyes with a rusty spoon in despair, she’d have repetitive strain injury from picking up literary awards and shaking hands with Salman Rushdie. Instead, she can’t even win a relatively obscure books prize because, she reckons, she’s a woman writing funny stories for women about stuff that interests women.
At the weekend, Marian took the hugely gutsy step of standing up in public, at the Hay Literary Festival, and telling the audience she was funny. And mad as hell, to boot. ‘Say what you like about me,’ she said, ‘my books are funny, they’re comic.’ And yet she has never even been shortlisted for the Everyman (…maybe there’s a clue in the name there) Wodehouse Prize for comic writing. If selling 30million funny books in every language under the sun isn’t enough even to get her into the running for the prize, she asked, ‘What else do I have to do to qualify?’
In the award’s 18-year history, only three women have won the award, which (again, this may be a straw in the wind) is judged by three men. The prize includes a case of champagne and a rare breed of pig named after the winning book. Yes, folks, this award is judged by three men who think it’s a hoot to name a pig after a book. Given that level of sophisticated humour, it’s a miracle any woman ever made them crack a smile. I’m praying for the day when a book titled ‘Male Chauvinist’ (an autobiography of a male literary judge, maybe?) bags first prize…
As it happens, this year the three judges – broadcaster James Naughtie, Hay Festival director Peter Florence and Everyman publisher David Campbell – decided that none of the entries deserved to win. None of the 62 submitted books prompted ‘unanimous, abundant laughter’ in three middle-aged men, so they dismissed the lot. Can’t you just imagine them stroking their whiskers and vivisecting every line of humour until it died in agony?
Frivolous
The fact that some of the entries might well have produced ‘unanimous, abundant laughter’ among females doesn’t appear to have crossed their minds. As far as these chaps are concerned, there is only one standard of humour, and it is of the male, white, British, upper middleclass, clubbable, public-school variety. To a cohort of men who find pigs inherently amusing (and that’s definitely a public school thing – remember what David Cameron allegedly got up to in his college days?) women’s humour is white noise: Like a dog whistle to a human, they just don’t have the range to register it.
Marian reckons most of the Wodehouse prizewinners have been men ‘because they’re men. Because male voices are automatically given extra weight. I mean, anything that’s ever been said or done by a woman just matters less.’
‘Things that women love,’ she went on, ‘are automatically dismissed as frivolous nonsense. Football could be considered frivolous nonsense, but it’s treated as hard news in the newspapers. So I think, by giving men the prizes, it just reinforces that the men are more important.’
She suggests holding on to the prizes is a way for men to hold on to the power and money, too, but there might be a more complex prejudice at play. The reality is that the consumers of ‘frivolous nonsense’ – ie, women – are the economic forces that make it possible for publishers to indulge the bearded recluses spooling out their obscure literary navel-fluff – ie, men. Women are the major market for popular fiction, they’re the big readers, the audience publishing houses need to stay in business. Women read male and female authors, whereas men are loath to be seen with a book by a woman in their hands – that’s why Joanna Rowling had to obscure her gender behind initials, and why ‘serious’ publishers had to rebrand her books as literature before men felt comfortable reading them in public.
Women are the major consumers of crime and domestic noir literature, so it’s not just fluffy ‘chick-lit’, all pink covers and happy endings, that we buy. Women readers and writers are the lifeblood of modern publishing. They’ve taken books off library shelves and made them social events with their book clubs, their shared copies, their beach reads. And it’s possible that the men who run these industries resent their dependence just a tad.
JK Rowling and EL James (who also neutralised her gender to publish the ‘Fifty Shades’ series) were simply the biggest literary stories of the past 20 years, knocking every male author off the top of the bestsellers list, and still women writers and women readers are rarely accorded the same respect as their male counterparts. Women like Marian Keyes, Sheila O’Flanagan and Cathy Kelly sell books by the shedload all over the world, and yet it’s the Colm Tóibíns, John Banvilles and the Donal Ryans who get top billing at literary festivals. I reckon Maeve Binchy could have turned out Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn on a quiet Saturday afternoon with one eye on Coronation Street, but being written by a man made it a literary sensation.
Marian Keyes said she was advised by literary insiders that if she wanted to be judged on a par with male authors she should drop the humour and ease up on the happy endings. And the irony is that a smart, skilled wordsmith like Marian could indeed produce a bleak novella catastrophising the human condition as well as any man. And her readers, despite being burdened with frivolous female brains, might even like it.
But bleak novellas are ten a penny, whereas very few acclaimed literary giants could write a laugh-out-loud line if their lives depended on it. Smart people aren’t always funny, but funny people are always smart, and people who can make others laugh are rare, brave and priceless. And writers like Marian don’t need awards – especially not awards from a bunch of middle-aged men who think pigs with odd names are the apotheosis of sophisticated humour – to prove it.