For the last eleven or so years the books editors of this newspaper have ruined
my Christmas by giving me the crap job of reviewing the annual outpouring of
"Humour" books. And I have complained over and over again about the
defining assumptions that render so many "Humour" books not only not funny
but also deeply depressing crap. Just to remind you, these are: an unyielding
belief in the redemptive powers of association with TV; a cynical idleness that
assumes that anything tossed off by a cabal of art directors and accountants,
and thereafter usually associated with TV, will do; an unspoken knowledge
that none of these books will ever be read, but just sit by the bog for a month
or so before ending up at Oxfam; a transgressive urge to transcribe the
products of one medium (TV) into another (books) in the erroneous belief that
this will work; and a fundamentalist reverence for comedy and comedians, as
if they were not only the New Rock ‘n’ Roll but also the New Religion.
Last year we had a collective autobiography by Monty Python (...full of grace,
blessed art thou amongst 35 year old telly programmes...) which was more
like the Book of Kells than anything else. This year, in William (no relation)
Cook’s Goodbye Again: The Definitive Peter Cook and Dudley Moore
(Century £17.99), we have yet another book of reheated scripts, the better to
maintain our faith in the divine power and significance of a man who was
pretty funny for a while, but not much else. But if you think I’m being
appallingly po-faced here, reflect not only on what Pete himself might have
thought of all this, but also that next year you’ll be able to buy tiny scraps of
Cook’s calcified liver in keyrings, as relics to help cure the overwhelming
feelings of sadness and futility when confronted by books like this. And if that
doesn’t save your soul, try The Compulsive Spike Milligan (4th Estate £18.99),
edited by Norma Farnes, another cut and paste job about a dead comic genius
who becomes less and less funny the longer they’re dead.
Of the five tests outlined above, three are in evidence in Stephen Fry’s
Incomplete & Utter History of Classical Music (Boxtree £16.99), "inspired",
apparently, by an award-winning Classic FM series, and boasting on the cover
as being "as told to Tim Lihoreau". Does this mean that Lihoreau wrote it?
Or is Fry’s amanuensis? Anyway, although it may have won awards on the
wireless, I found Fry’s transcribed vocal gurnings made the whole thing pretty
much unreadable, which is a shame as Fry, we’re told, is so fantastically
clever (he’s regularly described as having "a brain the size of Kent") he seems
to have found his natural home as a quiz show host. Similarly Making Divorce
Work (4th
Estate £10.99) by the very funny Rob Brydon’s alter ego Keith
Barret started out as a stand-up routine, but doesn’t work as a book, while
Rory Bremner, John Bird and John Fortune’s You Are Here: A Dossier (Orion
£16.99) is such a devastatingly brilliant attack on Blair’s record in government
that its occasional, apparently obligatory dips into flip "comedy" jar horribly,
so it doesn’t really work as humour.
None of these, however, plumb the depths of true, unadulterated awfulness
like Avid Merrion’s Book’Selecta (Transworld £14.99), which is little more
than a scrapbook which should never have been published of a TV programme
which should have been cancelled several series ago. Just as bad is Richard
Porter’s Crap Cars (BBC Books £9.99), another cynical and pointless telly
spin-off, this time from Top Gear, along with two meaningless sledgehammer
parodies, The Sellamillion by A.R.R.R.Roberts (Orion £6.99), which is little
more than an extended one word joke which first appeared in Private Eye 35
years ago, and Steve Barlow and Steve Skidmore’s Star Bores (HarperCollins
£6.99).
Which is not to say that parodies, or books sneering at artifacts from the past,
or even books designed purely to sit by the bog need be this bad. Rohan
Candappa’s The Curious Incident of the WMD in Iraq (Profile £5.99) is not
only a great concept but also brilliantly executed, with his autistic Tony Blair
coming across as chillingly believable far too frequently for comfort. As are
the excellent Craig Brown’s parody diaries for Private Eye, now collected in
Imaginary Friends (Private Eye £9.99). There’s also a very nice parody of
glossy lifestyle magazines with PUSSY: For Cats Who Should Know Better
(Transworld £9.99), which manages to skewer all those mawkish "Cat
Humour" books (life’s too short to list them here) as well as making me laugh
out loud. The Very Best of the Innovations Catalogue (Bloomsbury £7.99),
The Bumper Book of Unuseless Japanese Inventions (HarperCollins £9.99)
and Nick DiFonzo’s The Worst Album Covers in the World... Ever!
(NewHolland £7.99) would also grace any toilet library and bring much
pleasure and laughter in those otherwise empty hours, as would Reach For
The Stars, a compendium of flyers by second and third-league light
entertainers by James Innes-Smith, except that Bloomsbury have withdrawn it
because some of the (real) acts featured didn’t think they were as funny or
ludicrous or sneerworthy as they clearly are. You can probably get hold of this
book if you try hard enough, and it’s worth it.
Sneering, after all, is the solid rock on which much humour is based, although
I didn’t take to Mia Wallace and Clint Spanner’s CHAV! A user’s Guide to
Britain’s New Ruling Class (Transworld £9.99). This extended SloaneRanger
Handbook-style sneer at the be-burberried denizens of the underclass breaks
one of my golden rules for Satire, which is that on the whole it’s better to take
the piss out of people more powerful than you, because otherwise, like this
book, you get dangerously close in spirit to those leaden 19th
Century Punch cartoons which poked fun at servants and foreigners while ignoring more
deserving targets. That can’t be said of this year’s dependably dependable
collections from our top cartoonists, with Steve Bell’s chimp-o-morphic take
on George Bush in Apes of Wrath (Methuen £12.99), that King of Cartoon
Cool Peter Brookes’ collected little zoomorphic masterpieces in Nature Notes
IV: The Natural Selection (LittleBrown £15.00 - and note the innate class of
that extra penny) and the further venal adventures of Charles Peattie and
Russell Taylor’s Alex (Masterley £9.99).
I was previously unfamiliar with Modern Toss, a comic by Jon Link and Mick
Bunnage, and now collected as a book by PanMacmillan (£9.99). Badly
drawn, utterly foul-mouthed, mean-spirited and misanthropic,
it’s also very very funny in ways that equally foul-mouthed rubbish like the dire
Book’Selecta could never be. Why this should be so is a mystery,
or requires far greater exegesis than I have room for here.
And that, dear reader, is just another aspect of the crappiness of this crap job
reviewing all these crap books for you every year. No better book to finish
with, then, than The Idler Book of Crap Jobs (edited by Dan Kieran,
Transworld £9.99), a run-down of the 100 worst jobs imaginable, from Ham
Factory Worker, through Journalist (ha!) to North Sea Ferry Cabin Cleaner,
with tales of humiliation, tedium, futility and, most of all, disgust and horror at
the vileness of other people. At Christmas you’d need a heart of stone not to
laugh very loudly indeed.