BENGALURU: What makes a joke? Is it based on a certain formula? When I met actor and comedian John Cleese of Monty Python, A Fish Called Wanda and Fawlty Towers fame, he said, “Two different frames brought together creates humour.” His memoir So, Anyway… is everything one would expect — smart, thoughtful, provocative and above all funny. The genre of comedian-memoirs has been around for a long time. Fred Allen’s Treadmill To Oblivion, Lenny Bruce’s How To Talk Dirty And Influence People, Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck and Tina Fey’s Bossypants are some of the funniest books by the funniest people.
Another insight that Cleese gave was that comedians are most funny when they speak in a deadpan, mechanical manner. In spoken humour, the trick to being humorous is to know when not to repeat yourself, when not to overkill a joke, when to be subtle and when to leave things unsaid. You should know when a joke is not working, and if it isn’t, the most disastrous thing you can do is try and milk it by repeating it again and again.
But what about humour in writing? Is it more difficult to be humorous in print than through the spoken word or in a video or film? My earliest encounter with written humour was through the column “Offbase” (formerly known as “Humour in Uniform”) in the Reader’s Digest. The column has appeared for over half a century, with more than 3,500 jokes, quotes, and funny stories submitted by more than a million readers.
In my college days, everyone read P G Wodehouse, but for Indian humour, alas, we had nothing comparable. All the comedy was in our movies. R K Narayan’s Malgudi Days and Swami and Friends are timeless classics while currently Twinkle Khanna is the most prominent Indian woman writer of humour with her Mrs Funnybones. Post college, I read a lot of Dave Barry and Erma Bombeck. Barry defines a sense of humour as “A measurement of the extent to which we realise that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge.” His latest Lessons from Lucy about the seven essential life lessons he learnt from his rescue dog is more of a self-help book and yet funny.
A cult novel that gripped many Indians like me was Joseph Heller’s biting, anti-war satire Catch-22. Kurt Vonnegut, Kingsley Amis, Tom Sharpe and Woody Allen (the books not the movies) were the other modern satirists who tickled my funny bone. One of the lesser-known classics in humour that I recently discovered is A Confederacy of Dunces by JK Toole. The book centres on Ignatius Reilly who does odd jobs to make a living and is nothing short of an asshole (also an obese slob who is constantly farting). You will not only end up laughing at the character but also maybe at yourself too!
My current favourite is David Sedaris who has written 11 bestsellers. If the size of the audience is anything to go by, then his book release and signings held in concert halls indicate that he is nothing short of a rock star. He also has his own Masterclass (masterclass.com). His latest collection of essays The Best of Me is already a bestseller, but he doesn’t take it or himself too seriously when he says that can you add letters to Me in the title so that the book becomes The Best of Mexico, Mediocrity, or Meningitis!