For generations, the Christmas ‘funny’ book has received a poor press.
For generations, the Christmas ‘funny’ book has received a poor press. We have all been given one, usually by someone who thinks we still have a sense of humour. We have opened it in good faith, we have searched within for the promised mirth and merriment, and finally we have thrown it aside in a burst of unseasonal rage. By mid-January these volumes are clogging up all available Oxfams, or starting fruitful afterlives as loft insulation or raw material for as yet unbuilt motorways. A friend of mine heard that a Christmas funny he had written had ended up under the M6 toll road, which he had to admit was more amusing than anything in the actual book.
The real problem, for writers if not for readers, is that every year there are a few humour books that are genuinely worth buying. How can you compete against the classics? If I were going to ask for two funny books this Christmas, they would be volumes five (1959-60) and six (1961-62) of Canongate’s Complete Peanuts (£15 each). When I was a boy I obsessively collected the Coronet paperbacks, which were mere cherry-picks of American selections of Charles Schulz’s wondrous comic strip. We Peanuts fans were isolated within the pre-teen humour mainstream, for Schulz was looked down on as a sentimentalist and a sell-out, who embraced every merchandising opportunity known to mankind and coined the dismal phrase ‘Happiness is a warm puppy’. But as Russell T. Davies points out in his introduction to volume five, Schulz was one of the great comic draughtsmen, a remarkably skilled turner of a joke and a full-time depressive whose strips were gloomier than any cartoon had a right to be. Since his death in 2000, his fans have emerged from hiding and declared his genius. I have now handed my 60-odd paperbacks on to my 10-year-old daughter, and am collecting these lovingly produced hardbacks with enthusiasm undimmed.
The heyday for Christmas funnies was probably the 1970s, when Monty Python published their Big Red Book (which was blue) and then the great Papperbok, a riot of wild design and visual jokes that must have been a nightmare to put together. Accordingly, other TV comics published their own daft books, and top of my Christmas list in 1977 was The Morecambe And Wise Special, now republished in a facsmile edition by Orion (£9.99). Incomprehensible to anyone under 40, this could now act as a form of comedy time capsule, reminding us of an era when ‘Wedgie Benn’ was a much-feared figure of fun, and middle-aged men smoking pipes made endless jokes about wanting to feel up luscious young women. I thought Eddie Braben, their usual scriptwriter, might have had something to do with it, but he isn’t credited, so one has to assume that Morecambe and Wise wrote it all themselves. There are some truly terrible gags in here, but you laugh at them anyway because they are Morecambe and Wise. It’s a remarkable trick, which they carried off effortlessly for 40 years.
Barry Cryer’s Butterfly Brain (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £14.99) is supposed to be an autobiography, but can’t really be considered as such because Baz simply isn’t interested in talking about himself. No, he wants to tell old stories and make lots of jokes. It’s a wonderfully sunny book, almost irresponsibly lightweight, and I laughed many, many times. He isn’t horrible about anyone, but he is never bland — a tricky balancing act. And he is acute about his fellow comedians: Frankie Howerd, Ken Dodd, Kenneth Williams. Almost the only person he met and didn’t like was Jeffrey Archer, although he never comes out and says it: he just tells a couple of stories that perfectly capture the Archole’s singular personality. That anyone would buy Ant and Dec’s autobiography instead of this is clearly a crime against humanity and good sense.
The Best By Miles (Old Street Publishing, £12.99) is a fine compilation of the late Kington’s work from 1964 to his death in 2008. As a Punch reader you were always a Coren man or a Kington man, and it came as no surprise to me to learn, decades later, that they had a similar rivalry in real life. I was and remain a Kington man: his jokes always seemed sharper and funnier, and his technical virtuosity could be astonishing. Some of his best later writing appeared in the Oldie, where his columns seemed to ramble in random directions, and were actually ingeniously structured and full of surprises, all wrapped up in 800 words. If he made it look easy, that’s partly because it was — he wrote humorously as the rest of us breathe — but also because he worked hard to make it look easy.
Finally, a poetic squib for adults and children, Carol Ann Duffy’s Mrs Scrooge: A Christmas Tale (Picador, £4.99). On Christmas Eve Mrs Scrooge can be found outside the supermarket, protesting against waste and consumerism, while passers-by shout ‘Spoilsport’. Duffy’s retelling is droll, warm, unexpected and delightfully illustrated by the great Posy Simmonds.
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