When choosing a book to read on a long, hot summer afternoon, you have many choices. There are books that change the way you see the world, books that shake you to your emotional core, books that open your mind to the dazzling possibilities of the English language. There are books that move you so profoundly that you emerge from their pages in a state of shock.
And then there are the books that simply make you laugh; the ones whose greatest goal is to amuse.
Some of the most important books in my life have been comedies. From an early age, the hilarious works of Helen Cresswell, Richmal Crompton and PG Wodehouse were the ones I loved most. Then there are funny books that are full of wisdom and real emotion, such as The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13¾ or Terry Pratchett's finest works.
But some of my favourite books are pure comedy. In fact, if I had to pick the book that has influenced me most, it'd probably be The Compleet Molesworth by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle. It helped form not only my sense of humour and the way I write but also the way I speak.
Being funny in print involves not only an original imagination and a fine sense of timing but also serious linguistic skill. Nevertheless, comic fiction tends to be seen as, well, lightweight.
Even Britain's award for comic literature, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, tends to be won by the weighty, ponderous and not particularly hilarious likes of Will Self's The Butt and Howard Jacobson's Zoo Time. Neither of these features anything remotely as amusing as the scene in Wodehouse's own Eggs, Beans and Crumpets in which Bingo Little asks a policeman to judge whether he or his bookie has the ugliest baby. (The bookie wins, but only because the sun shines into his baby's face, "causing her to screw it into a hideous grimace".)
You can’t survive on a literary diet that consists only of laughs – it would be as unsatisfying as a constant diet of cheese. But a literary life devoid of pure comedy is surely not worth living either.
The narrator of Noel Coward's 1929 song If Love Were All, from his operetta Bitter Sweet, describes herself as having "just a talent to amuse". The use of that word "just" makes it a self-deprecating line, based on the idea that being able to make others laugh is trivial.
But when Sheridan Morley quoted the line in the title of his 1969 biography of Coward, he left off the “just”, turning deprecation into homage. Morley, and Coward’s fans, knew that this particular talent was worth celebrating. And, when Coward died, “A talent to amuse” was engraved on his memorial in Westminster Abbey. It’s a pretty good way to be remembered.
Anna Carey’s first novel for young adults, The Real Rebecca, won the senior children’s book of the year prize at the 2011 Irish Book Awards. Her third book, Rebecca Rocks, is out now.
