LIGHTEN UP
Nick Hornby’s latest screen-ready novel is an exercise in self-defence — but does ‘Light Entertainment’ require defending?
here’s a point about midway through Nick Hornby’s Funny Girl that sees one of its protagonists — Dennis, a repressed BBC executive — considering an appearance on Pipe Smoke. The gig, Hornby’s fictional version of a Charlie Rose-style talk show, would see him pitted against a public intellectual, Vernon Whitfield, to defend the virtue of Barbara (and Jim), the sitcom he produces which is, according to Pipe Smoke, a textbook example of “Light Entertainment.”
Barbara (and Jim) being the cornerstone of Funny Girl, Hornby’s imagined ups-and-downs 1960s BBC sitcom, we know how it’s going to go: Dennis — whose wife, incidentally, has by this point left him for Whitfield — will have some sort of epiphany regarding “Light Entertainment” on live television, and will make a highly eloquent, impassioned argument championing the merits of his silly sitcom as Whitfield festers, redfaced, in the opposing seat. Have you cast the scene yet?
Funny Girl is almost obnoxiously big screen-ready, which makes sense for Hornby: he’s an Oscar-nominated screenplay-writer for An Education, never mind About A Boy and High Fidelity. But Funny Girl is so dialogueheavy, its prose peppered with exposition occasionally so flimsy it practically reads as stage direction, that it very often risks coming across as an enjoyable 450-page script treatment rather than a satisfying, novel-sized chunk of “Light Entertainment.”
The book begins with Barbara, a young Sabrina look-alike — Hornby compares the pneumatic real-life 1960s bombshell to Barbara, and the other way around, throughout Funny Girl’s first half with a frequency that really hammers home the idea that Barbara is, to put it Hornby’s way, “busty.” Blackpoolian by birth, Barbara wins a beauty pageant in the opening pages, and uses the win to propel her southwards, where it’s not so much her looks but her Lucille Ball — inflected comic charm that wins her a starring role on Barbara (and Jim).
Barbara — or as she’s soon renamed, Sophie Straw — is a fantastic protagonist, but Funny Girl very quickly becomes an ensemble comedy. Working alongside her is the aforementioned Dennis, who falls in love at first sight with Barbara/Sophie; writers Tony and Bill, who met years earlier after both were arrested for indecency (cruising); and pompous actor Clive Richardson, a Lothario who thinks he’s much better than the BBC comedy on which he’s been cast.
Hornby develops his characters with great speed, and before long the plot of Barbara (and Jim) becomes secondary to the fanfare and cultural debate surrounding it: there are controversies (Jim’s impotence), politics (Barbara is Northern; Jim, Southern) and behind-the-scenes tensions (I won’t spoil anything). Underlying all of this is the question of whether or not Barbara (and Jim) is worth the time it’s given by Britain’s national broadcaster since, while it touches gently on numerous socio-political themes of the time, it does so only to get a laugh. It is, again, “Light Entertainment,” and is therefore an easy punching bag, because it’s stupid. Through his characters’ consistent defence of the merits of Barbara (and Jim), Hornby uses the fictional series as a device to offer a defence of, yes, Funny Girl: After all, even when he himself is tackling Very Serious Problems — Britain’s pervasive class system, the political divide between the north and south regions of England, female empowerment, gay rights in the 1960s — Hornby treads lightly. But there’s a case to be made, he infers (and his characters sometimes just come right out and say), that frivolity doesn’t necessarily equal foolishness. Perhaps we should rethink what we consider to be intelligent, Hornby suggests through Dennis’s appearance on Pipe Smoke.
It’s a fair point, and Funny Girl truly is more of a compulsive pageturner than a literary masterpiece. Hornby’s handling of Tony and Bill’s sexuality, for instance, isn’t quite sophisticated enough to be insightful, though it gets frustratingly close as the pair’s interactions and respective personal lives are the most nuanced aspect of the entire book. And it’s such a shame that Barbara/Sophie gets less and less consideration for her presumably formidable comedic talents than she does for her affairs and familial obligations. (Frankly, Hornby’s treatment of his female characters is, on the whole, not great — they’re all mothers, wives or homewreckers.)
But it all ultimately comes back to one driving point: can’t something just be good for what it is? Funny Girl is a sort of play-within-a-play; both it and Barbara (and Jim) deliver a gentle prodding of the intelligentsia through fast dialogue and a happy ending so enjoyable it’s easy to overlook that the sum of its parts are, well, kind of dumb. And in that way, Hornby succeeds. It almost feels like a trick: I can’t outright admit that I didn’t like Funny Girl, because it made me laugh hard and I read it very quickly, even if Hornby spent its entire duration making a case that I ought to reconsider what I consider smart.
Either way, I look forward to the movie.