Victoria Sturgess has a clutch of comic classics to remind us that misfortune, misunderstanding and absurdity make great entertainment
Let us use the coming of spring (finally) to cheer ourselves up with some much-needed laughter. It’s not well known that Clockwise, the hilarious film starring John Cleese, was initially planned as a book but instead became Michael Frayn’s first film script.
Brian Stimpson is awarded the honour of being the first comprehensive school headmaster to chair the Annual Conference, and his immaculately ordered world swiftly unravels in a series of unfortunate circumstances. They are set in motion by him boarding the wrong train and proceed to delay him en route, resulting in a genuinely hilarious experience … for us, at least.
Another ‘ordinary guy’, Gary, in Bob Mortimer’s The Satsuma Complex, finds himself in a not dissimilar ‘not of his own making’ situation which spirals out of control. As you would expect from the unrivalled storyteller of Would I Lie to You and Gone Fishing, the story unfolds wonderfully, with an entertaining cast of quirky characters: from Gary’s older, cranky neighbour and her chilled sheepdog to the gym-obsessed cafe owner Wayne and his dad. The conversations encapsulate Mortimer’s random sense of humour.
Perhaps one of the first gentle comic classics is Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat. This 1899 tale, describing a two-week boating holiday on the Thames, was originally intended as a guidebook. Jerome’s digressions into humorous anecdotes soon became the main narrative. There are also classic comedy set pieces such as a Plaster of Paris trout and the ‘Irish stew‘ made by mixing leftovers from their hamper – and not forgetting Montmorency the dog, who supplied a water rat.
Catch 22 could never, ever be described as a gentle comic classic – though classic it most certainly is, often cited as one of the most significant novels of the 20th century. It is a savage, satirical book by Joseph Heller examining the absurdity of war and military life through the experiences of Yossarian, one of the most memorable and compelling characters in any genre of literature.
He and his cohort desperately try to maintain their sanity in a nightmare world. And Catch 22? If one pleads insanity to stop flying missions with a high mortality rate, one is, in fact sane. However, one must be insane to keep flying those exact missions … Read this incredible giant of a book to see how this illogical logic underlies the whole, sorry – but also often incredibly funny – tale. It’s timeless, as current global absurdities prove.
Sorry – I did promise to cheer us up. Only one author for that: P.G. Wodehouse. While Jeeves and Wooster are the (rightly) acclaimed leading players, I read the Blanding Castle series of ten books again and again. Empress of Blandings is an enormous Berkshire sow, and the subject of many plots and schemes, generally involving her kidnap for various purposes – all nefarious – one of which results in her suffering a hangover.
Pure cheering-up guaranteed.
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