Together in Spirit

An online reading group ('TIS a reading group!) to bring together friends, and friends of friends, who aren't able to be in a conventional reading group due to constraints of time or geography.

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

funnily enough

I agree absolutely with Helen’s blog on humour in novels. Everyone I’ve asked nominates Scoop, but I found the humour there mostly tedious and overworked. (I say mostly, because there are some better bits.) Like Helen, I think Trollope (A) and also Galsworthy are writers who can be very funny, but I think that’s because humour that appeals to me is often inadvertent: often the writer doesn’t mean it to be funny, or leaves you with sufficient doubt about his/her motives that you don’t feel you are being required to laugh. It also means that it is almost impossible to convey to anyone else what exactly you have found so funny. Perhaps my response to humour has been significantly influenced by AA Milne: I laughed at the Pooh books as a child and still do as an adult. They say we all misquote Hamlet everyday, many times a day, but in our family it is Milne (as well). Maybe I haven’t move on? So I don’t have a suggestion to cheer us up after Kevin, and really really hope no-one else does either, because if I’m told it’s funny, it won’t be.
As I for one am falling rather behind, could Geisha be March and Kevin April?