Every author has their own recognisable style. Laurence Sterne writing in the 18th century, Jane Austen in the 19th, P.G. Wodehouse in the 20th, and Alexander McCall Smith in the 21st century are all authors of full-length novels who use humour in different and individual ways. Coincidentally, or maybe not coincidentally – humour is popular – all of these authors have also had their books turned into movies or television series.
Laurence Sterne was an Irish novelist, an Anglican clergyman and the author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. One of the original ‘shaggy dog’ stories, the novel has narrator Tristram stating his intention of telling the story of his life. Published serially in nine volumes from 1759 to 1767, Tristram does not actually get to himself until the third volume, side-tracked as he is by talking about his forebears.
As with a lot of humorous writing, the novel has a serious side, and Sterne presents social isolation and its overcoming through love and understanding. He buttresses the ribald humour that punctuates the story by using techniques such as including sermons and legal documents in the narrative and inserting an entirely black page in the book. His use of digression, free association and fluid concepts of time have influenced other writers, and Italo Calvino has said that Tristram Shandy was the ‘undoubted progenitor of all avant-garde novels’ of the 20th century.
In marked contrast to Sterne, Jane Austen does not incorporate bawdy humour or experimental literary techniques in her novels. Focusing on the minutia of social life at the turn of the 19th century, combining realism with irony and a humour based on the social mores of the time, her social commentary is far more subtle.
As with Sterne though, Austen does have a serious underlay to her writing. The importance of marriage to most women of the time and social milieu she was depicting – that of the landed gentry in Regency England – was the basis of the plot lines of her six published novels. In describing the novel Emma, Sir Walter Scott said that Austen had ‘the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life’.
The four novels published during Austen’s lifetime were written under the pen name of ‘A Lady’, with only the posthumously published Northanger Abbey and Persuasion appearing under her own name. She did not begin to gain wider public and critical recognition until later in the 19th century when all of the novels were republished. Her rapidly increasing popularity during the late 20th and early 21st centuries can be attributed at least in part to the movie versions of her books.
P.G. Wodehouse is one of the most widely read humorous fiction writers of the 20th century. He wrote more than 90 books and 20 film scripts as well as collaborating on plays and musical comedies. Departing from the real world in his fiction, Wodehouse sets most of his stories in an imaginary if somehow familiar English landscape between the two world wars. His cast of characters, that some critics maintain are stereotypes repeated under different names, include the famous duo Jeeves and Wooster, for whom he wrote 10 novels and over 30 stories from 1934 to 1974.
Once he had developed the form of his mostly plot driven stories, Wodehouse often finished a novel within three months, although his writing speed did slow with age. In discussing the humour of his writing, Wodehouse said that ‘for a humorous novel you’ve got to have a scenario … making the thing a sort of musical comedy without music’. He kept his stories light and easy to read, often using word abbreviations and quotations or mis-quotations from other authors in his text.
Writing in the 21st century, Scottish-Zimbabwean writer Alexander McCall Smith became well-known with The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series which has sold over twenty million copies. He won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction in 2015 (the prize was not awarded in 2018 because ‘none of the books made all of the judges laugh’) and along with Wodehouse, has written more than 90 books, although not all of them are humour or fiction.
Unlike Wodehouse, McCall Smith sets his fictional humour in different places, from Botswana in The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series to Regensburg in the Portuguese Irregular Verbs series, and Edinburgh in his 44 Scotland Street books. His other work includes a libretto for the chamber opera The Okavango Macbeth, a version of Macbeth set among a troop of baboons in Botswana.
Humour does not really change much over time. The literary techniques employed by writers in earlier centuries continue to influence those that come after them, with the changes in setting and underlying social issues still serving to support the humour. But even without the influence on future generations, readers can find the same things funny now, as evidenced by all of the above authors still being read today.
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Authors:
Laurence Sterne, Jane Austen, P.G. Wodehouse, Alexander McCall Smith, Italo Calvino, Sir Walter Scott
Titles:
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne, Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, Persuasion by Jane Austen, Emma by Jane Austen, Jeeves and Wooster series by P.G. Wodehouse, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series by Alexander McCall Smith, Portuguese Irregular Verbs series by Alexander McCall Smith, 44 Scotland Street series by Alexander McCall Smith, The Okavango Macbeth, Macbeth
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