A season of happy books

you will laugh, dammit.

Going into last summer, my vibes felt off. There was nothing particular. Just that sort of dull, existential dragging that comes at you occasionally. It used to hit me if I spent too much time scrolling through an Instagram or Twitter feed. That’s why I deleted Instagram and took Twitter off my phone. But this time, I didn’t know quite what to do; and so I figured I’d spend the summer reading (and re-reading) nothing but happy books.

Because if you’re the type of person who is affected by books — and I suppose I am — then books can get you down. Not that they mean to, but sometimes you read a beautiful book and it’s sad as hell and you walk around all bummed-out. It’s a nice, pensive sort of bummed-out, but you’re bummed-out nonetheless. Under the Volcano is a great example of a beautiful book that bums the hell out of you. So is Tender is the Night and Mrs. Dalloway and Less Than Zero.

I hadn’t even been reading particularly dark stuff. It was a lot of Kafka and Turgenev. And so I wanted to see what would happen if I only read books that make me happy. I guess a better way of saying this is funny books. I set out to read books that would make me laugh; books that would make me feel bright about the world.

I wanted reliability¹ and so I began by re-reading the books I know make me happy. Out of the gate, I read my favorite: Tortilla Flat by Steinbeck. And then right into Don Quixote. Then Catch-22 and Huckleberry Finn. I was going to do White Teeth after that. But I just read White Teeth a year ago so I skipped that one. Then onto some I hadn’t done. Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh. Journey to the End of the Night by Céline. The Good Soldier Švejk. Confederacy of Dunces. Less is Lost. Then I re-read a few more: Dead Souls and Moby Dick.

This is beginning to sound too much like a list and I’m not near the end. What I’m saying is I was looking for things to make me laugh. It’s hard to do comedy well in fiction.² It’s hard to hit the right note. This is a reductive observation, but it seems to me that there are three kinds of comedy in a book. Firstly, there’s comedy-of-dialogue. This takes three forms — one-liners/wordplay (Tybalt, after being stabbed joking, “look for me tomorrow and you will find a grave man”) and then monologues and short, back-and-forth dialogue. I could show any of them, but here, let’s have a good monologue. This is from The Good Soldier Švejk. In this scene, the chaplain, who is drunk, is giving a sermon to the soldiers before they go off to battle:

“It’s not enough just to hear,” the chaplain continued. "Dark is the cloud of life and God’s smile will not take away your woe, you bloody apes, for God’s forgiveness has its bounds too. And don’t choke yourself, you at the back there, or I’ll have you locked up until your black in the face! And you down there, don’t think that you’re in the tap room! God is supremely merciful, but only to decent people and not to the scum of human society who won’t be guided by His laws or service regulations. That’s what I wanted to tell you. You don’t know how to pray, and you think that going to chapel is some kind of entertainment like being at a theatre or cinema. But I’ll knock that out of your heads. I’ll send each and every one of you into solitary confinement, that’s what I’ll do, you sods. I’m wasting my time on you and I see it’s all quite useless. If the field marshal or the archbishop himself had been here, you wouldn’t reform, you wouldn’t incline to the Lord.

I mean, come on. That’s a hilarious sermon. It’s a dark comedy, but it’s comedy all the same. Anyway, let’s carry on. You don’t have all day. The next layer of comedy is physical comedy. This is more difficult, slapstick doesn’t translate well into fiction. But if it’s built up and around, physical comedy can come off. Take this passage from Dead Souls when the main character rides up to a new estate and discovers his host:

In the lake a great commotion was in progress. In the first place, some twenty men, immersed to the knee, to the breast, or to the neck, were dragging a large fishing-net into shore, while, in the second place, there was entangled in the net, in addition to some fish, a stout man shaped precisely like a melon or a hogshead. Greatly excited, he was shouting at the top of his voice: “Damn it, bring the net to land, will you!”

I love that bit, it makes me laugh every time. The melon-shaped landowner trapped in the net, flopping about with the fish that he’s terrified of letting loose. But this is getting long, you have things to do, let’s go into the last piece: narrative comedy. It would be wrong to do anything other than Catch-22 here:

Major Major had been born too late and too mediocre. Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.”

And there you are, there are the jokes, dissected and explained. Of course, dialogue, physical and narrative comedy go best when combined. You could find a combination of them in any of the books I’ve listed but I’d like to finish with the first great comic novel: Don Quixote. You know the scene, Sancho Panza and Don Quixote are standing in a dark clearing, Sancho is holding onto Don Quixote’s horse when he pulls down his pants and shits everywhere, explosively. Cervantes writes it like this:

as Don Quixote's sense of smell was as acute as his hearing, and as Sancho was so closely linked with him that the fumes rose almost in a straight line, it could not be but that some should reach his nose, and as soon as they did he came to its relief by compressing his nose between his fingers, saying in a rather snuffing tone, "Sancho, it strikes me thou art in great fear.”

"I am," answered Sancho; "but how does your worship perceive it now more than ever?"

"Because just now thou smellest stronger than ever, and not of ambergris," answered Don Quixote.

"Very likely," said Sancho, "but that's not my fault, but your worship's, for leading me about at unseasonable hours and at such unwonted paces."

"Then go back three or four, my friend," said Don Quixote, all the time with his fingers to his nose.

Now that book is over 400-years-old and it’s still hilarious. There’s physical comedy there (the fumes rising in a straight line, Don Quixote pinching his nose), narrative (the bit on Don Quixote’s sense of smell) and, of course, dialogue (“then go back three or four, my friend”). I mean, it’s brilliant. I actually laughed out loud.

Maybe you didn’t laugh out loud when you read the blurb, but a blurb is a pretty useless way to illustrate a point when you’re talking about books. It’s a bit like me pointing out this color palate for Van Gogh’s Starry Night and telling you, “now, imagine this was a post-impressionist night sky.”

You don’t get anything from that. But I’m the sort of person who can cheer myself up by looking at a painting. I don’t mean a picture of a painting on the internet, I need it on a wall or at least in a book. I can go to the National Gallery of Art and look at Ground Swell by Hopper or Farmhouse in Provence and feel better about the world. But you have to get lost in it — books are the same way.

You have to get lost in the worlds of Sancho Panza and Don Quixote and Yosarrian and Švejk and this is what I’m telling you. This is the wonderful thing. The humor transcends time. Cervantes must have chuckled as he wrote Don Quixote. And Shakespeare too³. This emotion, the emotion contained in happy books — not simply of laughter — but of the bliss delivered in recognizing the absurdity and simplicity of the world transcends time. That’s the promise of literature, that’s it, right there.

1. Now, just about every blurb on the front of a book these days promises something like you will roll with laughter at the sharpness of the prose. Whatever the hell that means. Blurbs are usually nonsense. If you want to go down that rabbit hole, here’s a good explanation of them from a publishing veteran.

2. There’s been a lot of criticism about the cinematic potential of prose — and I believe that comedy is where the mediums of cinema vs literature are most at odds. I think about this a lot. Certain tricks work well in movies and not in books. And vice-versa. That’s why the Catch-22 show stunk. I don’t know what would happen if you tried to do a novelization of Step Brothers (and again, I think a lot about this) but it doesn’t hold much promise.

3. We also know that Shakespeare — a contemporary of Cervantes — read Don Quixote and liked it so much that he wrote a play about it. Unfortunately, the play is lost. I wrote about it in the lost works piece.