Bevis Hillier

Christmas funny books

Stocking fillers

Reading reviews of new books of poetry, I am staggered at how seldom the critics quote from poems they are assessing. Describing what a poet is like, without quoting him, is like trying to describe a smell. In the latter exercise, you can get somewhere by using such adjectives as ‘fragrant’, ‘acrid’ or ‘foul’; but only by unstoppering a phial and waggling it under a person’s nose can you convey what the scent is like. It’s a similar case with poetry. You can prattle away about felicitous rhymes (assuming there are any), striking imagery, passion, depth and concentration of meaning (John Betjeman called poetry ‘the shorthand of the heart’); but if you fail to give an example of the verse, you can achieve little more than someone who says a violet smells sweet or damns the odours from a sewage farm as ‘effluvia’.

Much the same principle applies to reviewers of humorous (and would-be humorous) books. It is no use my telling you that X’s book made me ‘laugh out loud’ because your sense of humour may diverge exponentially (wonderful bluffer-critic word) from mine. But once I give you a taster of the book you can decide whether your funny-bone has been hit hard enough to land you in A and E.

I use the word ‘taster’, partly because ‘sample’ sounds like a hospital specimen, and partly because a sense of humour is very like taste (in art, interior decoration and so on): we all think we have it, but there is no way I can prove mine is better than yours. In this review I am going to quote rather a lot. From the defensive apologia you have just read, you will kindly accept that I’m not just being lazy, a Constance Spry of Other Men’s Flowers. I’m hoping that some of the jokes that made me laugh will wring the odd guffaw from you.

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