This year, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse judges have decided not to award a prize for best comic novel “in the spirit of of PG Wodehouse”, which might lead some to believe that comic writing is in decline. “There were a lot of witty submissions, bloody good novels,” said judge David Campbell, “but they weren’t comic novels”.
But a dearth of great comic novels doesn’t mean that novelists are no longer funny. There has been some great comic writing published in the last 12 months. The problem is – though this should only be a problem for judges searching for “comic novels” – that it’s often found in books with the darkest, unhappiest subject matter. Take Roddy Doyle’s Smile, which contains laugh-out-loud set pieces and consistently amusing dialogue – but is a novel about child abuse in Irish Catholic schools. Likewise, Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry has some of the most controlled comic writing I have read in recent years – and half of it charts the imbalanced (if tender) relationship between a young woman and an older, famous, male author. (The other half is about an Iraqi-American being detained at Heathrow – not laugh-a-minute territory.) Meena Kandasamy’s harrowing When I Hit You, about domestic abuse in India, displays Kandasamy’s knack for dark comedy, which makes the events depicted all the more horrifying.
To give these books a comedy prize would undermine the gravity of their themes and intentions. And they certainly aren’t in the “spirit of Wodehouse”. Surrounded by the rise of fascism and two world wars, PG Wodehouse wrote of a carefree England, providing escapist laughter in dark times. Living in France when it fell to the Germans in 1940, he was captured and interned at a series of prisons, then used by the Nazi propaganda division to make radio broadcasts in English. These have come to be known as his Berlin Broadcasts, and detailed his supposedly fair treatment in captivity in an ambiguously ironic tone. MI5 files released in 2011 showed how, after initial duress, Wodehouse took the Nazi pay cheque and lived luxuriously in Berlin and Paris hotels. The writer of innocuous country house comedy, who had always avoided the political pressures of the day (apart from the odd fascist neighbour or dinner guest), was accused of treachery. During his internment and after, Wodehouse’s output remained remained full of viscounts, butlers and misplaced fortunes. There is definitely a novel to be written about the author himself trying to write escapist fiction to atone for his strange pact with the Nazis – but it wouldn’t be an all-out comedy.
Wodehouse never returned to the England he wrote about; but then, writing brought him closer to that England than being there could have. That place no longer existed, either because two wars had destroyed it, or because it was always to some extent imaginary. That is why he wrote: to approach that place of unchallenging glamour. It’s why generations of readers have followed him, then and since. It’s why people today watch the Kardashians.
I’m not saying there shouldn’t be a prize for the straight-up comic romps, satires and farce; or for uncomplicated laughter in complicated times. The decision to withhold the 2018 Wodehouse prize, however, signals something more complex. Perhaps today’s comic talent feel they can’t turn away from the world they’re writing in, but channel humour through ambiguity and discomfort, rather than diverting from it. In 2016, Paul Beatty’s Booker-winner The Sellout, a very funny novel about a very unfunny topic – the almost accidental reintroduction of slavery – was shortlisted for the Wodehouse prize during the rise of the #blacklivesmatter movement. Beatty didn’t win; Hannah Rothschild and Paul Murray did. The most funny writing and the most important funny writing were there shown to be, supposedly, quite separate things.
The novels emerging in our era will by necessity be very different from what we might traditionally think of as a “comic novel”, the kind featuring hapless, Woosteresque men humiliating themselves in amusing ways. For better or worse, there seems to be less of an appetite for that at the moment. What comes next will have to operate outside those boundaries.
