Only a genius like Craig can make us laugh out loud about Mary Berry
KATHRYN HUGHES HUMOUR
Haywire Craig Brown Fourth Estate £25 ★★★★★
People talk about things, situations, stuff being ‘laugh-out-loud funny’ and then proceed to recount something so dull or clichéd that it is a strain to look even moderately amused. But with Craig Brown telling the story, it’s exactly the opposite.
He starts off with a subject that sounds distinctly unpromising – Marks & Spencer, Mary Berry, nature writing – and by the second sentence you are making strange honking noises and frightening the cat.
A case in point. Sigmund Freud is not generally known as a barrel of laughs but, in a wonderful piece reprinted from 2007, Brown explains that in the early years of the 20th Century the psychoanalyst spent a holiday in Blackpool and loved it. From here Brown spins off into another true-life story about another gloomy sage, Les Dawson, who moved to nearby Lytham St Annes once he had made a bit of money. But what would have happened if these two serious souls had happened to cross paths? Chances are, suggests Brown in a surreal climax, they’d have told each other mother-inlaw jokes to see who would crack a smile first.
Even if a subject is wellworn, Brown manages to make it fresh. There’s a lovely piece on Duck Soup, the Marx Brothers’ 1933 masterpiece, a film that has been analysed to death down the decades. But Brown takes us through the script’s endless punning, before linking it seamlessly to a real-life trip that Harpo made that same year to perform in the newly minted Soviet Union.
On his way, Harpo stopped in Hamburg and saw the chilling antisemitic slogans that were appearing under Hitler, before moving on to the Russian border, where he was arrested on suspicion of being a spy. None of which is remotely comic, yet Harpo’s terror at travelling through this chillingly nonsensical landscape is linked deftly by Brown to Freedonia, the topsy-turvy country in which the Marx Brothers make surreal mayhem in Duck Soup.
The point is that Brown has that rare and priceless gift of being able to make you laugh even when pointing out the sad underswell of life. There’s an excellent piece on Kenneth Williams, that prim yet lewd comic who was repelled by people using the lavatory in his flat, yet loved nothing more than pulling up the toga he wore in Carry On Cleo and flashing his co-stars.
Brown is clear-sighted, too, about the fact that even comic gods can start to get old and stale. While Peter Cook was incandescently funny in his Pete and Dud days, in later years, when Brown knew him well, Cook’s monologues became self-indulgent, meandering and, the ultimate sin of all, just not that funny.
There have been collections of Craig Brown’s journalism before now, of course. But it tells you something about the quality and consistency of his work that these 120-odd pieces, covering everything from Downton Abbey to Jimmy Young, read as if they are the greatest of his greatest hits.