To take a phrase from the real estate sector, ‘Location, Location, Location’ can say a lot about a place. Location, a product of combined time and place, can also say a lot when it comes to humour in books and writing. While it is not really possible to separate time from place in examining the role of location, looking at them both can offer some insights into written humour.
The location or setting of a story can be real or imaginary. The location that exists in real life speaks for itself and can appear in any kind of writing. Even if the story is fiction, a real location can draw in a reader who identifies with it because they already know it, whether or not they’ve actually been there. If not by personal acquaintance then previous reading can help in understanding an area, and may be one of the reasons why book series have become so popular.
While a location necessarily remains the same, a place can change over time. The Rocks area in Sydney, for example, is right next to Circular Quay on the harbour – marvellous views, hustle and bustle, the centre of action. It has been that way since the Europeans first settled there, but that particular location has far more cache now that it did when Henry Lawson was writing his poem ‘The Captain of the Push’ in 1892. The poem tells a story, already apparent in the first two lines.
As the night was slowly falling over city, town and bush,
From a slum in Bludgers Alley slunk the Captain of the Push
Loaded with historical detail and atmosphere – the Push was a gang that operated in The Rocksarea in the late 1800s – this is not a scene that would be found in The Rocks of today, with its tourism, eating places and rising property market. The character of the area a hundred years earlier has almost disappeared, heritage work aside, and the stark difference in place would obviously lead to very different stories and very different kinds of humour in a piece written in the 21st century.
To take another big city, London can be almost anything as a location in books and writing. Same location, different time, different place entirely. From the scenes of Samuel Pepys’ daily peregrinations in the 17th century to the late 20th century scenes of much of Helen Fielding’s’ Bridget Jones’s Diary, London is seen in completely different manifestations. One diary real, the other imaginary, but both accurate depictions of the time and place in which the writing is set.
Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, written in the late 20th century, shows a different side again to London, with the story playing out in both a record shop and in the mind of the shop’s owner. Advances in music technology might seem to indicate the book could feel a bit dated when reading it in the 21st century, but this doesn’t seem to affect the humour of the novel.
Taking a real location and changing various aspects of it is also a technique used in writing humour. P.G. Wodehouse bases much of the action of his Jeeves and Wooster series in a recognisable but highly fictionalised London – the Drones Club can’t be anything other than a flight of fantasy, although a very funny one.
The tinkering with reality aside, completely imaginary scenes and settings can be found in nearly every genre other than memoir (and even then it depends on the writer). Perhaps the most obviously imaginary locations are those found in science fiction and fantasy, although historical fiction and utopian/dystopian stories run them a close second.
A fantastic place allows fantastic characters, and a time in the future allows an author to create almost anything. Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy takes full advantage of this by locating most of his novel in places unknown to humankind and populating them with unusual beings. In juxtaposition with strange things happening in time and places a long way away, the everyday 20th century minutiae occupying the mind of the hero keep intruding into the story to telling effect.
Using time and place in a different way, George Orwell develops humour in the form of satire to make political points in his novels Animal Farm, set in a farm that houses animals acting like humans, and 1984, where he sets the story in what was then decades into the future. Orwell creates unrealities that extract part of their meaning through humour, and part of it through seeming to retain a semblance of reality.
The real and the imaginary work well together in written humour, entrenched as it is within its own location. It keeps on entertaining, apparently oblivious to the developments that take place and continue to take place in most areas of human endeavour. Unless they’re the point of the humour.
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Authors:
Henry Lawson; George Orwell; Douglas Adams; Samuel Pepys; Helen Fielding; P.G. Wodehouse; Nick Hornby
Titles:
‘The Captain of the Push’ by Henry Lawson; Animal Farm and 1984 by George Orwell; The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams; The Diary of Samuel Pepys by Samuel Pepys; Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding; Jeeves and Wooster series by P.G. Wodehouse; High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
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