Humour. It’s personal. Different people have different ideas about humour. Not everyone thinks the same thing is funny, not even the things you would think everyone would agree on. The reactions to different authors and different works vary enormously, and it can be tempting to ask whether there is a difficulty here. Does everyone even have a sense of humour?
With books and writing, there is usually enough consensus to determine what constitutes humour. Even if you don’t think something is funny yourself you can generally see the reason that other people might. Humour is not intrinsically academic. Nor is it constrained by length, encompassing as it does everything from a two-lined joke to a full-length novel.
Once you’ve stopped laughing, if you were laughing, defining what it was that made you smile in the first place can be a challenge. It might be nothing more than that you have just recognised something familiar, or something ludicrous, ridiculous, preposterous or even endearing, which seems to confirm that a sense of humour is nothing so much as personal.
This does lead to the consideration of whether or not you can be trained to see something funny in a piece of writing if you didn’t see it at first glance. Can a sense of humour be educated? Can a person’s perception of what’s funny be improved, refined and extended? Or is it an unavoidable conclusion that if you don’t see it immediately you won’t see it at all.
A sense of humour is like a reflex, a bit like knowing immediately whether or not you enjoyed that piece of chocolate. If you don’t react positively in the first instance, does that mean nothing can be done about it? Maybe you will never like that particular type of chocolate, even if you make every effort to change your mind.
Humour seems to operate independently of conscious thought processes, and much like an appreciation of chocolate a person’s sense of humour might be beyond their immediate control. But a cordon-bleu-type school for humour could have its advantages. Learning that the fun’s in the cooking as well as the eating might lead to a wider appreciation when it comes to humour, even though it’s generally presented more in its finished form than in its construction.
Perhaps the ingredients of humour are not as relevant as they are in cooking. Listing the ingredients in a recipe is much easier than describing a taste after all, and is humour is the equivalent of the recipe or the taste? Or something altogether different? Whatever it is, each person seems to have a grasp on what it means for them.
Some things cannot legitimately be laughed at, but if the situation lends itself and nobody gets hurt humour in its written form can be highly entertaining. Integrated within the different types of humour – light and fictional, pointed and political, or satire, wit and wordplay – a common denominator can be detected in the nearly universal presence of relationships between different people, or anthropomorphized animals or objects.
Particular types of relationships and behaviour lend themselves to different types of humour – amorous, ambitious, foolish, lazy, or self-deprecative – and they all have different points to make, if they are making one at all. Perhaps being funny doesn’t need a reason.
In engaging with social mores contemporary writers such as essayist David Sedaris and novelist Peter Carey use different kinds of humour as a means of depicting the situations these mores can throw up. Always worth the time it takes, observing human nature is a rewarding activity for readers as well as writers, whether in real life or written life.
Every author has their own specific style and recognisable traits, often strongly connected to time and place, and perhaps surprisingly this can be appreciated in different times and places. Perhaps it is the humour taking a prime position that drives the reader on.
P.G. Wodehouse, with his stories so firmly set in a social order that was disappearing even as he wrote in the early decades of the 20th century, is still widely read. Jane Austen, with her finely tuned focus on the priorities of her female characters, does not appear to have dimmed in popularity since she first emerged in print in the early 1800s. And even if 18th century writer Jonathan Swift had trouble getting past the censors, he is still read today, although it’s interesting to consider if he would be published now if he hadn’t been published then.
So, whether or not you personally have a sense of humour, it’s always worth seeing what’s happening with humour in books and writing. In the end people read it because it makes them feel good. That’s a good enough reason as any to keep reading.
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Authors:
David Sedaris; Peter Carey; P.G. Wodehouse; Jane Austen; Jonathan Swift