There’s a problem with writing a humorous novel.
With a normal novel the aim is to deliver a piece of work that is exciting, compelling, that stands out from it’s peers. You need to come up with a concept that is new and intriguing and this is how you sell the book to your potential readers. It is the novelty that draws people to the book, the idea that they might be surprised or shocked by an unexpected situation or turn of events.
With a humorous novel things are different. The humour is invariably grounded in the mundane, the commonplace, the run-of-the-mill. The writer is attempting to derive comedy from the absurdities of everyday life. The reader finds it funny because they recognise the situation, because there is an element of truth. PG Wodehouse is rightly regarded as possibly the funniest writer of fiction who ever lived. Consider then the Jeeves and Wooster stories. They are entirely concerned with relationships, communication, manners and foibles. Nobody ever dies, there are no elaborate and ingenious plots, there’s never any explosions and the largest thing that gets stolen is a cow creamer. A cow creamer. Not a necklace or a painting or five million in gold bullion, a cow creamer. And why? Because a cow creamer is funnier. And It’s funnier because of its inanity not in spite of it.
Consider also any of the great comic novels; Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim is just a university lecturer trying to get on in his chosen profession whilst dealing with a tricky relationship. Richard Gordon’s Doctor In The House is just a student doctor trying to get through his studies. Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men In A Boat is just three blokes doing normal stuff in a boat on the Thames. Even Shakespeare’s best comedy, Much Ado About Nothing, is, well, about nothing.
And it’s not just books. America’s greatest sitcom of the nineties, Seinfeld, is often described as ‘the show about nothing’ and the most successful UK sitcom of the last twenty years was set in the office of a paper merchants. Not even the head office, just a regional office. It couldn’t have had a more mundane premise and yet it remains brilliantly funny. The best comedy is necessarily rooted in the ordinary because when you reveal absurdity in the familiar, that’s funny.
Which brings us to the problem. How do you sell a story that’s about the ordinary? There’s no murder, no mystery, no mayhem. Just a bloke trying to get through life. Doing the things that millions of other blokes have done before him and millions more will do after. There’s no high concept here. This is a slice of life. A warm, funny, charming, witty slice of life. That’s it. No big statement. No complex plot. No elaborate character arc. Just a piece of entertainment. So when people ask me what the book’s about I sort of struggle to sum it up in a couple of sentences. “It’s a sort of funny coming-of-age story, oh I don’t know, just read it why don’t you?!”
It’s a bit like the film Gregory’s Girl. What was the plot to Gregory’s Girl? There wasn’t really one was there? And yet it remains one of the funniest films ever made. If you can’t identify the plot to Gregory’s Girl then you will probably enjoy this book. If you came looking for Love In The Time Of Cholera then what you have found, if anything, is Snogging In The Time Of Bananarama.