Why Comedy?

I don't think comedy is taken seriously enough in writing. Let me rephrase that: I don't think comic writing is given the level of respect that it deserves.

I should say now that I write comedy. The Space Captain Smith books are comedies and while my novel for Games Workshop, Straken, isn't a comedy, I was interested to see that GW advertised it in their magazine, White Dwarf, as having a streak of black humour. In other words, I've got an angle on this, because I'd like to be respected more, especially if that involves some sort of financial gain.


Comedy tends to be regarded as unimportant, especially in highbrow literature. The main reason for this, I suspect, is the common belief that, to be good, a book has to be difficult and unenjoyable. Some comedies, of course, don't attempt to comment on real life, even obliquely. P.G. Wodehouse described his comic novels as musical comedy without the music, and they are still very readable.


Comedy with depth

On the other hand, life is sometimes comical, often blackly so, and a good comedy can reveal truths that more "realistic" (ie unamusing) novels will miss. Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim is very funny in places, but also rings true. It depicts a man forced to depend on idiots of higher social standing, and as a portrayal of angry desperation, and of the less flattering aspects of the male outlook, it feels absolutely right.

You could argue that Lucky Jim is also satire. A lot of social satire often feels quite ham-handed, but something like Nice Work by David Lodge is both funny and an accurate dissection of a certain type of person (two certain types, actually). And there's also satire not of the real world but of other fiction: Stella Gibbons' excellent rural comedy Cold Comfort Farm is a parody of "earthy" novels, especially those of Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence.

Comedy is not just empty fun: a full view of the world isn't possible without it. Even in the blackest situations, people make jokes. Not for nothing do we have "gallows humour". I think some of the modern "grimdark" novels miss this in their eagerness to be realistic by throwing as much mud and dung at the reader as they can. "Realistic" also means "humorous".

Cold Comfort Farm, home of the Starkadders

A forbidden viewpoint

Also, comedy allows us to say things that we wouldn't normally be allowed to say. George Orwell (that master of hilarity) once said that every joke was a small rebellion, because it allowed people to look at the world in a naughty, askance sort of way. Because comedy is regarded as unimportant, and because it often involves looking at things from a crooked, wry angle, it's possible to look at things that would be dismissed as "problematic" (ie forbidden) if they were presented seriously.

In my own writing, Space Captain Smith is a proud colonialist and empire-builder - his friend Suruk the Slayer is a homicidal maniac. But because this is a comedy, we don't have to automatically condemn them to demonstrate that we're right-thinking people, as we would elsewhere. And that, I think, allows us to take a more nuanced view of them both. They should be bad people, or morally compromised ones, but maybe there's a good side to this conquering, slaying business... or maybe not.

Conviction

Last week, I had a go at the more arty end of writing, the “in a trance” school. This week, I thought I’d alienate the rest of you by commenting on the other end of the scale, the “sausage factory” method.

The sausage method holds that writing is basically like producing sausages on a machine, except with words instead of dubious pork. You find your target market, you figure out what they like, and then you duplicate that, at a fixed rate of words per day. Bingo, instant bestseller.

Or not...

The trouble with this is that it’s nonsense. First, you will inevitably be writing derivative product. This may not matter to you if you’re just in it for the money (in which case you’re a total fool. You’d probably make much better money working in a shop). 

Second, you probably won’t be writing a bestseller. You’ll be writing the thing that people read when they’re tired of the person you’ve ripped off. It will, at best, be second-best and a second choice, and will have to contend with a lot of similar books written for the same reason.

Third, even authors who have a limited range aren’t cynics or hacks. A colleague once said of Lee Childs that “He writes the same book over and over again, but he writes it really well”. Everything I’ve read and heard suggests that Childs takes his work very seriously and is far from “phoning it in”. That’s probably why, even if he does write the same book over and over again, he makes a good job of it. 

 

Conviction

Which takes us onto a wider point. If you look at great “light” novels, the sort of thing dismissed as “genre” or “entertainment”, there’s always something deeper than the need to make a quick buck. You can’t read ‘Salem’s Lot without feeling that Stephen King cares about the decline of small-town America. Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household is full of observations about landscape and social class, as well as being a fast-moving thriller. Tim Willocks’ Green River Rising, a ferociously violent novel about a prison riot, has great sympathy for its heroes, people thrown away by a rotten system.

Perhaps it’s a desire to go slightly beyond the boxes that need to be ticked for the book to work. Perhaps it’s the inclusion of things that the author does care about, and which he is going to make you, the reader, care about even if you didn’t buy the book for that. It's a hard thing to define. The best word I can think to describe it is conviction, and I don’t think a novel can be truly great without it.