The U.K's Telegraph highlights the plight of the comedic novel. Plight, in that it often doesn't win many literary awards. But why? Just because they're funny doesn't mean they're not serious.
From the piece...
Comic novels — let’s call them terrific novels that happen to be funny — tend to fall through the cracks, especially where prizes are concerned. Publishers have to choose which books from their list to submit for a prize such as the Orange: is a book that makes a reader laugh really worthy of a prize? Or is it just, well, not serious enough? Ian McEwan’s new novel, Solar, is really very funny: luckily he is already Ian McEwan, so no one will think less of him for that. He has always been what you might call a darkly funny writer but there is real slapstick in Solar; Roddy Doyle — a master of comedy himself, when he wants to be — told me that it reminded him of Tom Sharpe’s books, “only more subtle”.
But there is another issue, too: one for which you can’t blame publishers or booksellers. The thing about being funny is that it’s really hard. It’s a lot harder than being serious. It requires wit, grace, agility, sensitivity; it requires knowing how hard to push and when to stop on a dime. The reason the classic comic novels — such as Lucky Jim, or Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, or Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm, or Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle — stand the test of time is not because they are great comic novels: it’s because they are great novels, full stop. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22: comic novel or serious novel? Doesn’t matter. Brilliant novel.
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