Performing Fleas - C20 Comic Literature

[LeMartinPecheur]

Two inter-war classics - Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons - my most re-read book.

RT: I recently picked up a collection of SG's short stories entitled Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm, which unsurprisingly includes the eponymous story, a "prequel" to CCF. Do you know it?

Let's just say that many of its ideas for the 'festive' season will be adopted this year chez LMP.

Relatives, if you're reading this, be very, very afraid!

[Nick Armstrong]

RT: I recently picked up a collection of SG's short stories entitled Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm, which unsurprisingly includes the eponymous story, a "prequel" to CCF. Do you know it?

Let's just say that many of its ideas for the 'festive' season will be adopted this year chez LMP.

Relatives, if you're reading this, be very, very afraid!

Never heard of that. CCC a favourite with my aged P. Could be a good idea for a stocking filler there, LMP

Thank you ho ho ho.

[LeMartinPecheur]

At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien. Beautifully constructed, with surely one of the funniest court scenes in literature.

aeolium: have you delved more deeply (widely?) into O'Brien? AAAGH, I've just discovered that my treasured Best of Myles na Gopaleen anthology is missing!!

But pheew, I still have The Dalkey Archive, The Hair of the Dogma and best of all, The Third Policeman. The latter is in a pretty unique genre, a sort of nearly-comic horror of quite chilling impact.

[Richard Tarleton]

RT: I recently picked up a collection of SG's short stories entitled Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm, which unsurprisingly includes the eponymous story, a "prequel" to CCF. Do you know it?

Let's just say that many of its ideas for the 'festive' season will be adopted this year chez LMP.

Relatives, if you're reading this, be very, very afraid!

No, but thanks for the tip!

If Christmas goes well, you can hold the "Spring Counting" when the sukebind's out

[aeolium]

aeolium: have you delved more deeply (widely?) into O'Brien? AAAGH, I've just discovered that my treasured Best of Myles na Gopaleen anthology is missing!!

Yes, I have read The Third Policeman and I have that anthology The Best of Myles na Gopaleen (I hope it's not yours!) I liked the Keats and Chapman pieces with their terrible punning punchlines on common phrases. But I still think nothing he did surpassed At Swim-Two-Birds.

What about A P Herbert's Misleading Cases? And that purveyor of gentle humour W W Jacobs (though perhaps as much a Victorian writer as one of the C20)?

[amateur51]

I enjoyed hugely Tom Sharpe's first two books, the hilariously satirical Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure, both set in apartheid South Africa. His later work was less political and extemely variable but those two are classics for me.

Florence King's Confessions of A Failed Southern Lady is pretty hoot-worthy too.

More knowingly chucklesome than hilarious, the Tales of the City series by Armistead Maupin.

[LeMartinPecheur]

What about A P Herbert's Misleading Cases?

Picked it up the other day and read to my grown-up daughter and her partner selected highlights of the case proving that the concept of 'the reasonable woman' is entirely unknown to the law!

Not sure how funny they found it...

[LeMartinPecheur]

I enjoyed hugely Tom Sharpe's first two books, the hilariously satirical Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure, both set in apartheid South Africa. His later work was less political and extemely variable but those two are classics for me.

Absolutely my own feelings. Apartheid SA is an entirely suitable subject for satire of course, but for me the problem is he never found another decent one. The later books set in the UK pick subjects rather than worthy targets, and then just monstrously over-inflate them. This can be funny for a page or two, but IMHO not very often

[aeolium]

Any takers for that obscure and almost certainly forgotten writer G C Nash, author of Letters to the Secretary of a Golf Club and the follow-up Whelk's Postbag?

[Dermot]

What about Ivy Compton-Burnett - a very strange style indeed, imv?

I. Compton-Burnett is my favourite novelist. I first read her as a youth of seventeen in my local public library. This was in the mid-sixties and the library had a set of her novels in the characteristic yellow Gollancz dust jackets. At random, I took home Manservant and Maidservant and was instantly hooked. After fifty years, my enthusiasm has not waned. Here are a few quotes from the novels which give an idea of Ivy's style and acid wit.

''They feel your bark is worse than your bite.''

''That is an empty saying. Only bark has a place in life. There is no opportunity to bite. I have wished there was.''
- from The Mighty and Their Fall

''You cannot eat your cake and have it.''

''That is a mean saying. You could, if you had enough cake. It is sad that it has become established. It throws a dark light on human nature.''
- from Darkness and Day

''Ah, to know all is to forgive all,'' said Rhoda.

''I confess I have not found it so, my lady. To forgive, it is best to know as little as possible.''
- from A Heritage and its History

''But we could not speak evil to their faces,'' said Hope.

''Well, it is not a thing we are obliged to do, Mother.''

''I like my friends best when they are doing it. It makes them so zestful and observant. Original too, almost creative.''
- from Parents and Children

''I don't expect justice tempered with mercy. I have only seen that mercy is tempered with justice. I think people get confused.''
- from The Mighty and Their Fall

''Of course, I see how civilised it is to be a spinster,'' said Rachel. ''I shouldn't think savage countries have spinsters. I never know why marriage goes on in civilised countries, goes on openly. Think what would happen if it were really looked at, or regarded as impossible to look at. In the marriage service, where both are done, it does happen.''
- from Men and Wives

[vinteuil]

I. Compton-Burnett is my favourite novelist.

... in her introduction to the Penguin omnibus edn of Ivy Compton-Burnett, Hilary Mantel writes :

"Because it requires an effort of concentration to read the books they offer a respite from ordinary, nagging preoccupations. They offer respite without comfort, if such a thing can be : a relief from the quotidian and the trite. Ivy Compton-Burnett is an enemy of the easy, the unexamined life. She is not a cynic, but a tough-minded moralist ; having anatomized the world's nonsense, she offers a bleak sense of her own. She returns the reader to the ordinary world equipped with skinned sensibilities, an educated ear and a fleeting ability to address his or her own loved ones in clipped, peculiar, deeply distressing sentences."

Thanks for the recommendation, Dermot : I think I'll have to give her another try!

[vinteuil]

I. Compton-Burnett is my favourite novelist.

... many thanks, Dermot, for the recommendation. I am acquiring her novels apace and am currently deep in "A Family and a Fortune" - marvellous!

I see that John Waters, of all people, was a big fan -

"Want to go further in your advanced search for snobbish, elitist, literary wit? Of course you do, but I should warn you, you'll have to work for it. Try reading any novel by Ivy Compton-Burnett. She was English, looked exactly like the illustration on the Old Maid card, never had sex even once, and wrote twenty dark, hilarious, evil little novels between the years 1911 and 1969. Pick any one of them. They're all pretty much the same. Little actual action, almost no description, and endless pages of hermetically sealed, stylized, sharp, cruel, venomous Edwardian dialogue."

https://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/john-waters-role-models-part-five

[Rolmill]

Can I add the Don Camillo short stories (by Giovanni Guareschi) to the list?

Of more recent writers, I have also enjoyed some of Ben Elton's satirical novels - Dead Famous is particularly funny in its precise skewering of the "Big Brother" culture (as well as the sometimes priggish reactions to it) in a detective novel setting.

[french frank]

Can I add the Don Camillo short stories (by Giovanni Guareschi) to the list?

I was taken to see The Little World, Fernandel as Don Camillo. Mother took my brother and I and reasoned that it was all right, exceptionally, to go to the cinema on a Sunday because the subject matter was suitable (about a priest)

[amateur51]

I was taken to see The Little World, Fernandel as Don Camillo. Mother took my brother and I and reasoned that it was all right, exceptionally, to go to the cinema on a Sunday because the subject matter was suitable (about a priest)

There are several DVDs available of Fernandel as Don Camillo, and I remember enjoying them. I wonder if Gabriel Chevallier's Clochemerle series of books about a French village would tickle modern chuckle muscles. The books are still available , largely pre-owned, and a 2-DVD set has just been released of the BBC series based on the books with scripts by Galton & Simpson.