From P.G. Wodehouse to Jane Smiley, 7 Comic Novels You Should Read

In the 1982 movie, My Favorite Year, Peter O’Toole plays an aging former matinee idol who is suffering through a grueling day of rehearsals before a guest appearance on a live television program. At his wit’s end about the persnickety nature of—among other things—comedic timing, he dramatically says: “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”

It’s a good line, one that has been attributed—though never verified—to a number of comedians on their death beds. It’s also an apt one. Comedy is hard. Quite hard. And in my opinion, the hardest comedy of all is that on the page. A sitcom or movie can get a lot of mileage out of a sight gag—Kramer sliding into Jerry’s apartment. A stand-up comic can wiggle an eyebrow to milk a little more humor out of a joke. Even on a comedy album like Steve Martin’s Let’s Get Small, you get audio, that faux snarky voice, the moments when he pauses for effect (Grandpa… bought a rubber) or randomly begins noodling around on a banjo. The writer of comedy has only one weapon in his/her arsenal: words. With those words he/she will try to train the reader’s ear to hear intonation and timing, to know when the narrator is using understatement or hyperbole to comedic effect. For me, comedy comes down to narration more than anything else, how effectively the writer can establish the particularities of his/her Fun House world, how quickly the reader’s ear synchs up with the narrator’s sensibility. Quickness is important. For, as the loquacious Polonius says in Hamlet, “Brevity is the soul of wit.”

I’m basically agreeing with Peter O’Toole that comedy is harder than dying. But it’s also fun. I tell my comedy writing students that I’m writing first of all to make myself laugh and suggest that they should do the same. My wife and kids tease me when they hear me in my office chuckling. Are you laughing at your own jokes again, Dad?

Anyway, here are a few books that taught me how to hear comedy and paved the way for Penelope Lemon: Game On!, my latest ridiculous flight of fancy. Here’s hoping these novels might help some other aspiring comedy writer in the same ways they helped me.

John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces

No other modern comedy is so epic in scale, so audaciously ambitious. It’s trying to be funny on every page. Trying to kill the reader with outrageous situational humor and grandiosity of language. It also unleashes a massive and outrageous cast of characters that would make Shakespeare proud. One aspect of the novel that is less often commented on is the sweetness at its core. You can tell Toole has a soft spot for misfits, the outcasts who just can’t be molded to societal norms. The best comic writers are sympathetic to the challenges of being human, and see our daily struggles in an often unfriendly world as both absurd and heroic. I love the myriad ways Toole finds to be funny, other than traditional storytelling. The best example of this is Ignatius’s Journal of A Working Boy /Up From Sloth, where he writes about his various jobs, his mother, movies that have offended his sensibility, and his love/hate relationship with the academic poseur and partner in crime, Myrna Minkoff. But we also get funny song lyrics; ridiculous signs on hot dog carts; forged letters. We even get a poster for a seedy strip club (Roberta E Lee Presents Harlett O’Hara, the Virgin-ny Belle—and pet!) that in 11 words manages to ridicule/eviscerate the notion of the Confederate Lost Cause with enviable efficacy. No other comedy that I know of has so many balls up in the air at once or finds more ways to tickle a funny bone. Simply put, a masterpiece, and one guaranteed to open even the most tightly closed of valves.

P.G. Wodehouse, The Jeeves and Bertie series of novels

These light and lovely books are escapist fiction at its best and the ones that taught me the most about the use of language—word choice, tone, the mixing of hyperbole and understatement—for comedic effect. The narration is effortlessly elegant and stylish, like a well-written musical score (Wodehouse wrote songs for musicals in his spare time). And the beauty of these novels is that you know exactly what you are getting each time—some silly situation involving wealthy goofball Brits, a slyly ridiculous plot, and Bertie being saved from his own folly by his trusty butler just in the nick of time. Like A Confederacy of Dunces, these books are trying to be funny on each page.  Most great comedies have maybe three or four big scenes that you remember afterward. The really good comedy writers make the pages in-between these scenes funny too, the set-up moments or when introducing a new character that are the toughest—and least fun—things to write. Wodehouse is the best at this, and the best at seeming natural and easy all the time. That’s the trick—trying to act like you’re not trying to be funny even when you are. I’d recommend starting out with Joy in the Morning or The Code of the Woosters. If you like these, then there are 15 more just like them.  A steady and reliable series best read on a screened-in porch, in your most comfortable clothes, while sipping a gin and tonic.

Charles Portis, Norwood and Dog of the South

No writer has a better eye for the just-right detail. So much of the humor in these books is observational—the quirky way someone puts a napkin under a glass, for instance, that makes the reader say, “Oh yeah, I’ve seen that.” Or “I’ve never had it put that way, but he’s right. That is funny.” The characters Portis writes about are primarily Texarkansans, many of them blue collar types that would be easy to stereotype and paint in broad strokes. What I admire is how he never strips any of his characters of their dignity. It’s obvious Portis has met a lot of different types of people in his life and has found a lot of different people interesting and worthy. All great writers need to know people, to have interacted with a wide assortment of what planet Earth has to offer in the way of human beings. The best ones—especially in comedy—love the panoply of people one might meet on a car lot, or a dive bar or drinking Joe at a trucker’s diner. Check out these two novels if you are looking for a quick, quirky read, and enjoy deadpan humor. Both are cult classics and admired by a wide range of writers.

These are the writers who helped me the most to discover my own comedic sensibility and style, helped me to—as Emily Dickinson said—Tell all the Truth, but tell it slant.

I recommend reading all of these books and any other comedies you can find. Here are a few more that I’ve enjoyed—and taught—for your consideration.

Jane Smiley, Moo

As someone who has spent a quarter century in academia, I’ve long been tempted to take on the Ivory Tower in some sort of satirical way. I think what had held me back is the same reason the fry cook at McDonalds doesn’t want to come home and cook burgers. Another reason is that I don’t trust myself to have narrative distance, which is necessary to be funny. Thankfully, others don’t have the same qualms, or, if they do, have just powered through them. Moo (an all-time great title) is a hilarious send-up of modern academia, with an intricate plot, shifting third person narration, and a whole cavalcade of funny characters. Anyone who has spent time in a large land-grant university will recognize the tenured professor who is just mailing it in, the students more interested in Greek life than their studies, the administrators who are focused exclusively on that next big donation. Unlike the books mentioned above, this is a comedy that seems to stem primarily from righteous indignation. There is an edge bubbling under the surface here, as if perhaps Smiley has had to grade just one too many half-ass English papers (the samples she gives of student essays are comedic gold), had to endure one too many interminable department meetings. It’s a double-barreled assault on all the things on a college campus that don’t deal with educating young people, and it’s as timely now as when it came out in 1995. A hard left hook to the exposed underbelly of academia, and one that my students really enjoy.

Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

Here’s another satirical look at life on a college campus. Set in late 1940s England, at a university of middling reputation, the novel follows poor Jim Dixon, a graduate student (and teacher) of history, as he tries to finagle his way into a full time job at the school. To do this he must impress Professor Welsh, the quintessence of academic pomposity and fecklessness, and find some journal—any journal—to publish an article—The Economic Influence of the Developments in Shipbuilding Techniques, 1450-1485—that even he can barely stand to read. Amis’s books got darker each one out, but his first novel is charming in its goofy earnestness as it portrays that most powerless of creatures—the graduate teaching assistant.  It’s also the first book that taught me about comedic hyperbole, the best example of which is a multi-page description of the mother of all hangovers. Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way. . . His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. I suggest that a lot of the best comedy comes from exaggeration, describing a rough morning as if it’s the D-Day invasion, for example. The converse of this is understatement (a mere flesh wound, says the Brave Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail as blood spurts from both his recently severed arms). In short, humor arises when words juxtapose tonally with situation. If you like the ironically elevated style that the English have mastered, and wordsmithing at its finest, then Lucky Jim is the comedy for you.

Mary Robison, Why Did I Ever

A unique, rapid-fire novel which rips along at about a thousand miles an hour. Like most of Kurt Vonnegut’s books, the chapters here are short. It’s a strategy I suggest to my comedy writing students, believing that snack-sized portions of prose keep the reader reaching for just one more page, one more page, until—before you know it—the whole book has been read. It’s a canny way to make your book slightly habit forming. I love the manic style here, the machine-gun delivery of the first person narrator as she bounces around the southland trying to figure out her mess of a life. And I respect how the novel makes no special allowances for reader expectation. It’s brave—and honest—in its seemingly random structure and plot that perfectly mirrors the mindset of the protagonist, a Hollywood scriptwriter-mom-outcast who just can’t adhere to the rules. It’s also truly and weirdly funny. As I often say to my students: this is good, but weird-it-up a bit. Chapter 50, in its entirety, is a good example of the kind of strangeness I like:

Here’s a sign that reads: PORK! Some signs aren’t there to make you happy.

That seems a fitting spot to end my list of favorite comedies, stylish absurdities all. I hope you will check out the ones you’ve not yet read. They’ve brightened many a day for me.