Take Two: two views on writing funny

Barbara Else and Robert Glancy debate contemporary wit in the New Zealand novel.

 

Are you allowed to do that?

Barbara Else on daring to be funny.

 

My fourth novel for adults, Three Pretty Widows (Vintage 2000), was once discussed on a radio book show. Listeners could phone in. The first, a woman, said, I found it very funny. Even the funeral scene. My question is: are you allowed to do that?

What did she mean? That funerals aren’t fit fodder for comedy? I felt the question was also part of a local uneasiness towards any comedy in fiction.

Humour is highly personal, of course. As the PC version of the saying goes, one person’s meat is another’s poison. What I find funny can make other people go cross-eyed. But my mother’s dry comment often comes back to me: ‘If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry. Look on the funny side.’

Especially when I write for adults a lot of the comedy can come from a dark or even sad place. There are usually several years of sea-change between any event or situation and its reappearance in my fiction. Most often I don’t know from which vessel a coin might originally have dropped. But that funeral scene in Three Pretty Widows came fairly directly from my own experience. Like one of the three widows, Bella, I attended my first husband’s funeral, though some time after our divorce. Like Bella, I had someone sit beside me swearing she’d be support and comfort. As happened to Bella, my support burst into tears during the first hymn and stayed sobbing till the hearse drove away on its solemn tyres. Like Bella, during the service I grew more and more aghast at the eulogies. They extolled the very qualities that had wrecked the marriage and in the end destroyed the man. I mean to say, as a tiny example, on how many committees can one person usefully and, more important, healthfully sit? Twenty-eight? And that’s praise-worthy? Really?

The real-life event and much of what surrounded it were far more awful than the fictional. I toned it down. I left out plenty. But how marvellous in its awfulness was the real event. It illustrated so many idiocies in human beings. Over twenty years later I still can’t think of it without rearing back, appalled. If you don’t laugh, you cry.

People laugh for many reasons: shock, recognition, seeing something in a new way. They laugh out of relief or companionship and a sense of community. Out of subversion. Humour is a weapon of the oppressed. It’s a defence as well as a way of pointing out the absurdities of The Authorities.

My first novel, The Warrior Queen (Godwit 1995), has been called satirical and feminist. It was more writing down what I’d observed in the social life of those authorities, professionals. Kate, the protagonist, suspects her surgeon husband Richard of having an affair. She sets about trying to make him admit it. I didn’t want to write about a woman crumbling and weeping. I was careful not to make fun of the actual professional activities of doctors. But the social life was representative of any profession. Fair game. I thought the humour would be underground, that a few readers who’d suffered those social events where you’re even less than an accessory, would find it funny and true. Book reps told me that wives of bankers, architects, lawyers and doctors, as well as bankers, architects, lawyers and doctors themselves, bought it in truckloads. I stood back, open-mouthed …

Sorry, officer, I didn’t mean to do it.

Phone call from total stranger: I admire your New Zealand recipe book. Me: Pardon? I wrote a novel. No, it is recipes. I am travelling in your beautiful country and have bought very big Maori carving $800. I will send it to my husband and tell him, exactly like your recipe, it is because he is so special to me. I truly hope this was a hoax call. (In the novel it was golf clubs.)

Elderly woman tapping my hand as she passes: Dear, why didn’t you write it twenty years ago when I needed it? Ouch.

Another stranger: Your novel saved my life. I phoned Samaritans and the Samaritan of the evening said: Don’t do anything drastic. Read this novel, it will make you laugh and see your cheating husband in a new light. Shit. Too much responsibility.

Librarian shaking with laughter: A surgeon came to choose books for his wife laid up at home. I put The Warrior Queen in front of him. He read the blurb. Grim-faced he said this would not appeal at all. When the wife was better, I showed it to her – she loved it.

My publisher, whispering: the wife of [a talk show host] has forbidden him to interview you.  Whaa…? Why!? When my second novel came out he set up an interview without telling his wife before it went to air. Again, whaa…?

Elderly male reviewer offended that the author described such goings-on among medical people. (Cross-eyed.)

Young literary novelist publicly bemused that a funny book should be selling more than his.

Wife of prominent civil servant: yes, there wasn’t much philosophy in it. (Cross-eyed. Its subtitle wasn’t, e.g., Bertrand Russell for Dummies.)

Male reviewer not terribly amused that the male characters should be objectified. Um. Hadn’t male writers been doing that to female characters for quite some time? Was I not allowed to do that? I had figured that if my two best literary advisers at the time, both male and one my publisher, found the humour worked, then it worked. Goodness, even the Germans published it, under the title: Can Revenge Really Be a Sin?

 

 

Comedy is serious

Comedy in fiction is not really about jokes. Or not as such. Humour can smuggle serious material under its cloak. It develops as part of the narrative voice. In my contemporary fiction, my historical novel Wild Latitudes (Vintage 2006) and my fantasy quartet for children, Tales of Fontania (Gecko Press) humour comes from the underdog or side-lined protagonist. As the voice develops it begins commenting on the oddities in the world of the novel while the character actively tries to achieve a goal. So it’s a three-way relationship: character, voice and action.

For me, as reader or writer, the protagonist in a comic or satirical novel has to struggle, not just be snarky. And I believe that effective satire comes from a warm understanding of the target. For example, early drafts of The Warrior Queen didn’t work till I thought deeply about why the husband behaves like such a narcissistic dick. In order to understand him I wrote a piece in his point of view though I didn’t use it in the novel and never intended to.

A hit list  

Whenever the question of the NZ comic novel is raised most commentators flounder. There aren’t many such novels anyway. But it’s probably also partly because the way a reader reacts to a particular voice is very individual.

I’ve read only some of the novels published here in the last ten years. But I’ve also looked at recommendations by key booksellers, key commentators, best friends. Stay with me while I flounder along.

The Quiet Spectacular (Penguin Books 2016) by prize-winning novelist Laurence Fearnley has a side-splitting scene of a teenager skinning a stoat. But Fearnley isn’t usually laugh-aloud funny and one scene doesn’t make a comic novel. Prize-winning poet Emma Neale has a novel out soon, Billy Bird (Vintage 2016), with a scream-aloud-funny scene starring a rat. Aside: my own Gingerbread Husbands (Godwit 1998 and overseas publications) has a possum electrocuted in an outside loo. Possums being noxious animals in this country, I found it funnier as well as thematically apt to have it survive. There has to be a PhD topic somewhere here: women and furry vermin in NZ lit.

I’ve heard that John Tomb’s Head (Vintage 2006) by Stephanie Johnson is very funny but I can’t pick it up. The premise of a decapitated head as narrator is too much for me. Johnson’s scope is admirable. But in some work there’s a tendency towards gratuitous description where the author is just too visible. I felt this, for instance, in The Shag Incident (Vintage 2002) in a scene with New Age feminists. This is not to say that I won’t address early New Zealand feminism at some stage. Black and bleak humour waits there to be mined when I dare.

Shonagh Koea is both light and sharp in her revenge novels centring on the put-upon woman. But I don’t feel ‘comic’ is the right term for her oeuvre. She’s satirical but there’s often an other-worldliness about the only-apparently-vague protagonists. I think Koea is a category of her own.

I still recall when I discovered Kelly Ana Morey’s first novel Bloom (Penguin Books 2003). In a wasteland of conventional and even pedestrian material I fell upon it as on an oasis. She crashes through literary rules and genres as if they were toothpicks. Daylight Second (HarperCollins 2016) is her forthcoming novel about Phar Lap. I’m looking forward to it, though horse-racing has always left me cold (except for when my second husband and I gatecrashed the Members’ Stand at Trentham).

Of recent novelists some people suggested the chick-lit writers. How I loathe the way that term smacks of condescension. I know it’s used worldwide. But it still links with a local sniffiness to any writing with a light touch no matter how deeply serious the subject matter. Anyway, local books by Catherine Robertson, Nicky Pellegrino, Sarah Kate-Lynch are light, well-done, often funny. Large numbers of followers gobble them up.

My personal preferred easy reading is the thriller. So I’m not always squeamish. I’ve laughed aloud at turns of phrase in the novels of Paul Cleave even when the speaker is the murderer. Again it’s a matter of voice. Cleave manages the mordant in masterly fashion. The Germans love him.

I was recommended King Rich, (Fourth Estate 2015) the first novel by Joe Bennett. Bennett is a sharp and funny columnist. I did laugh aloud. Many times I smiled in recognition. He’s especially good at insight into people and relationships. I admired detail of Christchurch after the earthquake and how the destruction related to upheavals in the characters’ emotional lives. Rich, the main character, is a troubled, kind figure, terribly hard on himself.  I hoped he’d find a way out of his three-layered disaster area – geographical, physical health and emotional need. He and the dog Friday are a wonderful double act. But it’s not what I’d call a comic novel. It’s poignant. I loved it.

Now I have to say sorry. The Demolition of the Century (Penguin 2013) is the second novel by Duncan Sarkies.  I didn’t read his first, Two Little Boys (Penguin 2008). I feared it would be too much in the vein of many unpublished ‘comic’ novels I’ve seen written by young males, sharp and even cruel, trying to shock the reader with a string of crass activities. But Demolition of the Century is a charmer. It’s truly funny. The poignancy of human relationships is treated with respect. The two key characters each dwell in an aura of self-irony. I found it edge-of-your-seat reading, hoping that Spud, the demolition expert and Tom, the confused older man would at last see each other clearly. It’s a many-carat gem that makes the reader laugh and cry at the same time. Duncan, I’m sorry and I will read Two Little Boys.

Finally I dare to list Janet Frame’s In the Memorial Room (Text 2013). It was written 40 years ago but published after her death as the author intended. That makes it contemporary if I say so. It is delicious with a sharp clear taste. Laugh aloud, yes. Literary –from this author how could it not be?  Comic and satirical and by a woman writer. Is that one reason there have been some uncomfortable responses? Most reviews I’ve read have been gasps of admiration. Let me join them.

Narrator Harry Gill is the latest Watercress-Armstrong Fellow at Menton in the Cote d’Azur. The fellowship commemorates not-terribly-good New Zealand poet Margaret Rose Hurndell. Wondering if Harry Gill is Frame herself when she was Katherine Mansfield Fellow is pointless. Only she could say what’s from real life and what alchemical selection has occurred in the creative process. The core of the novel is a gloomy truth: so often a gift or prize has concealed fish hooks. Harry stands for many, many authors whose work is somehow misinterpreted, misjudged or silenced. The character of Michael Watercress, a beginner writer mistaken for the Fellow, is treated with humour but also pathos. Frame deftly depicts the wannabe’s fragile balance between innocence and ignorance. Frame is having fun. It’s a novel. She is allowed.

To some degree, like Harry, all writers in all genres stand outside society. They observe, comment, wonder how the hell the world manages to work at all. That’s their job, to paint the truth using whatever palette of language and style they choose.  

What is the question?

There are two main sorts of comedy in fiction, I suppose. There’s the novel that makes a reader laugh a lot (as long as that is what the author intended – ouch, another topic.) Then there’s the Shakespearean meaning of comedy where a novel may have a farcical scene or two and characters make ridiculous mistakes. But generally, as Christopher Booker contended in The Seven Basic Plots (Continuum 2004), comedy’s just tragedy with a happy ending.

With any humorous novel, what is the author’s prime intention? With some blokey fiction in particular it seems to me the aim is to make the reader think what a remarkable chap the writer is rather than to illustrate flaws in – whatever.

For me humour works best when it illuminates or affirms the ordinary person. When it illuminates society through the angle it takes. When it leaves the reader to make any judgement that might be called for. It pokes fun, maybe. But it isn’t mean-spirited. It gives the characters full value (well, most of them).

But of course comedy will offend anyone who feels targeted. They might be right about being the bull’s eye. Or they might not. The thing is, if they feel uncomfortable the author has probably got something right, but about type rather than an individual.

We’re a very funny nation with dry wit and subversive comment much enjoyed in conversation. Some of our film and TV comedy, especially political satire, is terrific (White Man Behind a Desk … oh yes!) But I still detect a whiff of Calvinist mothballs in the general attitude towards humorous fiction. Someone – actually my first husband – once told me he admired anyone who could see themselves with self-irony. Maybe the more a society can see itself with irony, the more grown-up it is.

Barbara Else is a novelist for adults and children, and a developmental editor. This year she is Children’s Writer in Residence at the University of Otago and was awarded the Margaret Mahy Medal.

 

 

 

Did you hear the one about the funny Kiwi?

Robert Glancy hunts for the comic novel.

 

I met Kiwis long before I read any Kiwi books. I lived in London and so, naturally, most of my friends were Kiwis. My Kiwi friends all shared one characteristic – they were all funny. Which made me logically assume Kiwi books would be funny too. They’re not. Having ploughed through many a dark and brooding tome, I thought – Could I have met the only five funny Kiwis in the world? Seemed highly unlikely.

When I came to live Auckland in 2003 I’d take the ferry from Waiheke to work. I’d look out over the crystal waters of this exquisite place, chatting and laughing with my funny Kiwi friends, and then I’d crack open a Kiwi book and want to slit my wrists. Many of the novels came under the category of what Joy Cowley calls ‘bleak books’. I asked a friend how sunny isles packed with witty Kiwis churned out such grim tales. He shrugged, then took me out to a drunken evening where the most inebriated man in the bar was the legendary poet Sam Hunt, who managed – overcoming obstacles of waning memory and slurring tongue – to have us all in stitches.

Then I discovered Steve Braunias, the epitome of Kiwi wit. A man who brings as much clarity and humour to stories about steak-eating competitions as he does to tales of dark Kiwi crimes. From Fool’s Paradise (2001) to his latest book, The Scene of the Crime, his nonfiction books are comic gems. So I went in search of the man who’s succeeded in translating Kiwi wit into words. Talking to idols is a treacherous business, and I feared he might be one of those writers who are funny in print but unfunny in the flesh. So, feeling nervous, I called and politely requested an interview, and he politely requested that I – ‘Get fucked!’

Braunias is just as funny in life as he is on the page, and inventively offensive too. Upon offering a summary of my article – Kiwis aren’t renowned for funny books and, as an outsider, I wanted to uncover a few amusing authors – he said my angle was ‘crap’, that I should, ‘risk having an original thought for a change’, and offered the sage advice that I should ‘go to a fucking library and read some fucking books.’ I thanked him for his time and his kind words, and said it was probably best I continued my odyssey alone. He then promised he’d ‘try his best to be less offensive’ in an email. So I sent him an email and awaited the purest invective. A lovely email came back. So Braunias, reluctantly and begrudgingly, became my guide to the funny side.

He gave me a brilliant reading list, from A.K .Grant’s I Rode With The Epigrams to Tom Scott’s Ten Years Inside, as well as poems by Bill Manhire. However, Braunias is resistant to the idea of comic novels. ‘Because, with the exception of the singular genius of Woodhouse, most comic novels are no good. There are many NZ novels shot through with humour, and the likes of Grant and Scott are working within the humour tradition, but if either attempted comic novels it’d be a flop, not because of any failure of wit, just that comedy at length is a dreary proposition.’

I don’t entirely agree with this as my favourite books fall firmly into the genre of comedy fiction – Catch-22, Portnoy’s Complaint, Breakfast of Champions, Money, Confederacy of Dunces – and many of these are not just long but also hilarious. Which makes me wonder where the classic Kiwi comedies are hiding.

Assisted by my cranky guide, I had uncovered wry Kiwi poets, as well as Braunias’s merry band of mocking men, caustic wits of the nonfiction tradition. But I still wanted to find comic authors working in the more ambiguous waters of fiction. So I took Braunias’s advice and visited a fucking library to read some fucking books.

When I asked about funny Kiwis the librarian shot me a suspicious look, as though I was taking the piss. Then she gave me The Penguin Book of Contemporary New Zealand Short Stories, a great gateway book to Kiwi authors. And alongside its darker material – such as Selina Tusitala Marsh’s haunting ‘Afakasi Pours Herself Afa Cuppa Coffee’ – comedy nuggets twinkled, the best being Jo Randerson’s ‘Our New Boss’.

The book was edited by Paula Morris who has written her own funny book – Trendy but Casual. Morris, known for more serious novels, says some New Zealand reviewers treated her ‘funny book’ as if it was a hiatus from the serious business of writing. Which touches on a sore point that may explain why many shy away from the funny side. Comedy isn’t taken seriously. Comedy has a strained relationship with culture.

However, the disposability of comedy isn’t merely the effect of snobbery: there are technical reasons too. Comedy comes with built-in obsolescence; it often contains the seed of its own disposability. One of the technical tricks of comedy is shock and misdirection. Shock and awe is key, and Eleanor Catton pulls off some cracking examples in The Rehearsal:

‘What’s the most common cause of paedophilia in this country?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Sexy kids.’

Dark, disturbing, it trips you up. But it only really works once. As the great comedian, George W Bush, once said, ‘Fool me once, shame on – shame on you. Fool me … you can’t get fooled again!’ Some comedy is like gum: once chewed it’s done.

But not all comedy is equal, nor disposable. Some comedy is born great, some has greatness thrust upon it; some ages well, and some ferments. I had a teacher who’d laugh his arse off at Shakespeare, then had to explain the joke. Which of course killed it. The words the reason it’s funny are the assassin’s bullet to a joke. A joke must be an autonomous package. But though some of the Bard’s gags are dead to all bar a few snickering scholars, the core of his comedy remains. Malvolio still makes us think, The guy is a pompous arse with no self-knowledge, he’s just like David Brent. It’s a joke that’s so entwined in what makes us human, it’s simply truth.

 

 

Asking Google about funny Kiwi authors resulted in: Andy Griffiths. The two issues here are: first, he’s a children’s author; second, he’s Australian. Oh dear. My kids assured me his Treehouse series is the ‘funniest thing in the universe!’, which I don’t doubt, but the fact remains Kiwi authors have yet to tickle Google’s algorithm.

So I visited the fount of all my New Zealand literary knowledge, the Oracle – otherwise known as the two old ladies who run the local bookshop. Usually they jump to help. This time they glared as if I’d asked for something inappropriate, like a pack of flavoured condoms.

The First said, ‘No, we don’t do funny!’ and the Other agreed – ‘No, we don’t!’

There followed a silence in which I fought the sense that I’d slipped into a sketch from League of Gentlemen, until the First said, ‘But we do do dark humour,’ which was echoed by the Other – ‘Yes, we do do dark.’

‘And we do,’ added the First, ‘do a good line in irreverence, too.’

‘Yes we do!’ rhymed the Other, stumbling into Dr Seuss.

Then the First said defensively, as if the honour of the nation was at stake, ‘We’re very funny people actually, but …’ and here the First spluttered out leaving the Other to pick up the telepathic thread – ‘We’re just not flashy with our humour!’

This was said with a tint of reprimand as if I was a dealer of flashy humour. They then recommended ‘everything by Nigel Cox’ and also Warrior Queen by Barbara Else, a book crackling with quiet humour – funny but not flashy.

The final wise man on my comedy odyssey was Damien Wilkins, Director of the Institute of Modern Letters at Victoria University, who has a new funny novel out called Dad Art. We’ll be on a ‘humourous novels’ panel together – along with Danyl Mclauchlan and Paula Morris – at the WORD Christchurch Readers and Writers Festival in late August so Wilkins seemed the perfect person to talk to.

I ask if the lack of funny writing in New Zealand is to do with nerve. That while many confidently craft heavy scenes knowing they’ll inspire heavy emotions, arguably there’s more at stake when crafting a comedy scene. For there are few feelings as grim as being singed by the furious silence of a failed punch line.

Wilkins doesn’t think this is the case but contends that the ‘default of writers is seriousness. The vehicle of the novel tends to lead to profound places. We put on our best clothes, as it were.’ But to counter this he then reels off a long list of his favourite funny books, including Barbara Anderson’s Girls High, Kirsten McDougall’s The Invisible Rider, Bird North by Breton Dukes and Son of France by Geoff Cush.

Kiwi have an idiosyncratic sense of humour: dark and irreverent, it spills into everything – into odd bookshop owners, into the giggling wit of Billy T James and bro’Town, the deadpan genius of Flight of the Conchords, even into the design of a potential national flag featuring a killer Kiwi with murderous laser eyes. When I ask why more of this wit is not spilling into literature, Wilkins says that it is. In fact, he says, it’s so often deftly executed that ‘jokes slide by with great elegance.’ Humour, he argues, ‘is simply an intrinsic part of great writing.’

This brings us back to the Braunias-Catch: funny should infuse, not fuel, books. Though I can see his point I also believe there’s still room for more funny books. Now I say this with the utmost respect, for I have an immigrant’s fear of losing my most prized possession, my Kiwi passport, but – New Zealand is hilarious.

Comedy is conflict and New Zealand is fizzing with the stuff. It’s a prosaic place with people rubbing along; yet bubbling below is a violent unresolved history of who owns what. It’s a stunning land where Kiwis potter about on the most volatile fault lines. It’s renowned for the greatest feat of human endeavour – conquering Everest – and for the shaggiest sheep – Shrek! This is a funny, and need I add beautiful and incredible (please don’t revoke my passport I love it here!) nation. Frankly, if you made New Zealand up people wouldn’t believe it. They wouldn’t believe these tiny islands could contain such heaving contradictions. I’m thrilled to have hit a few seams of comedy gold but there are still rich pickings in this strange and brilliant land.

 

 

Author of the novels Terms & Conditions (2014) and Please Do Not Disturb (2016), Robert Glancy was raised in Malawi – The Warm Heart of Africa – before being frozen in Scotland. He is now thawing in New Zealand, writing book three.