An ounce of wit, a pound of truth
Iwas invited to give a lecture on humour in literature. I declined because I couldn’t make the dates suggested, but now I can’t stop musing on the subject.
And since, as a bloke, I amincapable of thinking about two things at once, I need to spit it all out before I can apply my giant throbbing cerebrum to more important matters such as the decline of All Blacks rugby. So, ladies and gentlemen, humour in literature.
Humour isn’t the best word. Humour suggests a sort of virtuous jocularity. Men in particular like to advertise their good sense of it – their GSOH – which is a sure sign they haven’t got any. Even worse is the humour section of the bookshop where you’ll find Your 50 Best AfterDinner Rugby Stories which are about as funny as rectal surgery. In other words, what declares itself to be humorous rarely is, and that’s because one chief ingredient of a joke is surprise.
‘‘Rilke used to say that no poet would mind going to jail because he would at least have time to explore the treasure house of his memory. In many respects, Rilke was a prick.’’
That’s Clive James. It’s funny because it’s unexpected. (Please if you didn’t find it funny, or can’t see why it might be funny, turn to the puzzles page now. There is nothing for you down this particular road.)
A joke is a delicate creature, easily killed. Remove the words ‘‘In many respects’’ and the James joke dies, because that phrase sets the reader up to expect something other than a jolting Anglo-Saxon monosyllable.
But the nub of the joke, the heart of it, is that it’s true. James bursts the bubble of Rilke’s pretension with the needle of honesty. Humour is ameans not an end. The end of literature, indeed of any writing worth reading, is to tell the truth. Humour is just one way of doing it.
Clive James was Australian. Jane Austen, I believe, wasn’t. But she was every bit as pointed. ‘‘It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.’’
The opening line of Pride and Prejudice is famous because it’s funny, and funny because it’s ironic. What Austen describes as a truth universally acknowledged is no such thing. Rather it’s the fervent wish of desperate mothers and their unwed daughters. Austen is sticking the knife into her own milieu.
Her irony leaves us readers with a little work to do. If we don’t get the joke, so be it. If we do we laugh, partly because we are pleased with ourselves. There is always an element of self-congratulation in laughing at a joke. We’ve joined the teller’s club.
Humour is unflinching. It goeswhere it goes, and it scoffs at politeness. ‘‘I expect you’ll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir,’’ says a character in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. ‘‘That’s what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour.’’
Humour mocks authority. People like Trump hate it because it tells the truth. The Trumps of this world can neither make a joke nor take one. Laughter bewilders them.
People often patronise comic literature. If it’s funny, they say, it can’t be serious. They couldn’t be more wrong.
Humour is rooted in the comic vision. It sees us as the ape that climbed onto its hind legs, that created gods but pretended it was the other way round. The ape is crying out for mockery. There is more truth in an ounce of wit than in a library of earnestness. The word humour just doesn’t do it justice.