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Christmas funny books

Bevis Hillier

Wednesday, 28th November 2007

Stocking fillers

He sometimes breaks into verse to convey a song’s awfulness, as in the case of ‘Break Me’ (released 2002, words and music by Jewel Kilcher, performed by Jewel). The effect is of an Edith Sitwell run amok:

Your fleshy pistons
embrace my shimmering shell like
the simian peeling
a
gossamer
breadfruit with its
monstrous palms of
hairy digits …
Cripple me, you ape you.

Possibly a case can be made for reviewing dreadful songs in dreadful verse, kitsch feeding upon kitsch — kitsch in sync, as it were.

If it’s laugh-out-loud humour you’re after, you can’t go wrong with P. G. Wodehouse; but I am disappointed by The Wit and Wisdom of P. G. Wodehouse (Hutchinson, £9.99), compiled and edited by Tom King, as it is so titchy. Lines one loves are missed out, including, ‘Lord Emsworth made the short journey to the end of his wits.’ But of course, even in this tiny sampling-flask, there are winners. Here are two favourites:

Years before, when he was a boy, and romantic as most boys are, his lordship had sometimes regretted that the Emsworths, though an ancient clan, did not possess a Family Curse. How little he had suspected that he was shortly to become the father of it.

He looked haggard and care-worn, like a Borgia who has suddenly remembered that he has forgotten to put cyanide in the consommé, and the dinner gong due any minute.

Genius! Notice that he doesn’t just put ‘poison’ or ‘soup’ — like all good writers, he is specific.

Returning for a moment to Do Ants Have Arseholes?, this is among the questions the authors ask: ‘Is laughter the best medicine?’ Well, before reading the books here reviewed, I was suffering from chronic psittacosis, an incipient boil and athlete’s foot. I can only say that, after reading them, I have been able to cancel my return ticket to Lourdes.

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