On Comic Novels

Why can't we take brilliant comic novels seriously? The Guardian probes this question.

From the piece...

The two rogue terms I'm addressing – literary and comic – share a vice: they both make exceptional what should go without saying. The novel was born of restless critical intelligence, and it was born laughing. "It pleases me to think," said Milan Kundera, in the course of accepting the Jerusalem prize for literature in 1985, "that the art of the novel came into the world as an echo of God's laughter." If this is so, then talk of the comic novel is tautologous. If we are to be true to the form there will be only "novels" and they will be effusive with wit and humour; thereafter, to help the bookshops categorise, we can allow all the sub-species they have shelf-space for – the novel of distended plot and fatuous denouement, the novel of who cares who dunnit, the novel of what Orwell in his great defence of Henry Miller called "flat cautious statements and snack-bar dialects", the novel, to sum up, of anorexic mirthlessness. But let's not forget that those are the anomalies.

No reader dare decry the pleasure any other takes in what he reads. But there is a fear of comedy in the novel today – when did you last see the word "funny" on the jacket of a serious novel? – that no one who loves the form should contemplate with pleasure. It isn't as though we have lost the capacity to laugh. Stand-up comedy is riding higher than ever. If anything there is an argument to be made that we are laughing too much. But we have created a false division between laughter and thought, between comedy and seriousness, between the exhilaration that the great novels offer when they are at their funniest, and whatever else it is we now think we want from literature.

And, talking about brilliant: