This book has some excellent aspects and some major drawbacks. Its best features are a very broad coverage of topics relating to comedy throughout history, and almost 20 pages of references and recommendations for further reading. The author's (MB's) juxtapositions of works from different periods and genres is sometimes very stimulating.
MB's style, though is too clever by way more than half: it's a constant patter of allusions, quips, gratuitous references and supposed insights that too often dazzle rather than inform. E.g., MB mentions "a confederacy of dunces" in the context of a Shakespeare character (@67): the phrase comes from Swift or, if you prefer, J.K. Toole, neither of whom are discussed there at all -- it's just a gratuitous wink. Or: "When Mark Twain noted that `reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated,' he hit upon a good epitaph for comedy, for the mode suggests that death as the final outcome is itself something of an exaggeration" (@109-110). What does this mean, exactly? If it's comedy's epitaph, that means that comedy itself could die, an eventuality that even MB never suggests; but if it were to die, there wouldn't be any exaggeration. And why bring up epitaphs at all?: Twain's epitaph is something else entirely, and rather sentimental. MB's brilliant glibness too often dissolves into non sequitur or other sorts of thought-eddy that distract the reader; page after page of these rococo touches gets old very quickly.
The book's other disturbing feature is that MB's taste in comedy evidently runs to the sadistic. The mild family sitcoms of the US Baby Boom years, or the animal-loving antics of films like "Fierce Creatures" (to say nothing of the pleasant plotless meanderings of much Japanese TV comedy) don't seem to be on his radar. Maybe the tortures inflicted in Voltaire's "Candide" are an important aspect of that tale's message (@83), but it's a bit much to be told that Jonathan's Swift's cruel joke about a flayed woman is "gorgeous" (@99). Similarly, after quoting an Evelyn Waugh passage mentioning how a caged fox had been killed in a British private club by being pelted with champagne bottles, MB notes, "This is more vertiginously, comically delightful than just a satire on the bottle-throwers (satire is often a way of saying that you care, but in Waugh's fiction caring itself is satirized)." (@89). I can imagine the expression on fictional detective Inspector Lewis's face were he to read that while investigating MB, who teaches within Lewis's jurisdiction at Oxford -- and I'd agree with the policeman.
The book has quite a few jokes and quotes with four-letter words and/or sexual overtones, so if that would bother you, be warned. (Not that it affects my rating: I thought the funniest joke in the book was an almost-unquotable one-liner from Sarah Silverman, who BTW is also mentioned often in Oxford's VSI on Humour.) This has many ingredients of an excellent book, but sadly after the first few pages it becomes unpleasant to read. Traditional British understatement would have been much more effective
No comments:
Post a Comment