When San Francisco's mayor told everyone to stay home in March 2020 because of the pandemic, Andrew Sean Greer's first instinct was to order every Agatha Christie novel he could find. He was not alone: many readers turned to dependable narratives to drown out the chaos. Later, as the lockdown stretched on, his reading shifted to a different kind of book. The comic novel, he says, is what still fills his reading hours.
What makes a comic novel?
Nobody really knows what a comic novel is, and talking about it tends to kill the fun. EB White likened it to dissecting a frog, leaving you with innards and a dead frog. Greer prefers a different image: turning on all the lights at a party, where everyone looks terrible and the party is ruined.
Most people would agree that PG Wodehouse wrote comic novels, but Greer finds laughter in books hardly anyone would classify that way, such as Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Comedy, as Jerry Seinfeld once put it, is deciding that something is funny. In Moby-Dick, it is a coin nailed to a masthead; in Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, it is the worst best poem you have ever read. These books, Greer argues, reach for the same big themes as the most solemn fiction: grief, love, death, and the human condition. They could easily have been tragedies, except the author decided to make them funny.
The idea came home to him through a wise friend. After Greer angrily recounted a publishing mishap, she replied: “That's not a very funny story.” He realised he had not processed the story at all and was serving it to her raw. He learned to turn old outrage into something funny, and later put that exact scene into his latest novel.
Two plots, one serious and one comic
Greer has written novels that make you smile and novels that do not. Writing the comic ones is much more pleasant, though very different. The plots are no funnier than the serious ones, as he demonstrates with two examples:
- A young woman in 1952 San Francisco joins with her husband's gay lover to remove obstacles to her liberation and gain a small fortune.
- A middle-aged writer travels across a troubled United States while struggling to maintain his recently renewed relationship with a younger man.
The difference comes from a decision. Greer calls it double-processing, like blond hair at a salon. First, he works out the hardships and frustrations of his characters as realistically, even tragically, as possible. People die in comic novels. Sometimes the whole world ends, or at least the world the characters thought they knew. They do not know they are in a comedy. Then he writes the same material as if it is all just a funny story.
In Less Is Lost, the novel about the middle-aged writer, Greer sat with notes from visiting three forced-labour plantations in the American south. There was nothing humorous about them, but he did not want to cut them; the protagonist had to confront that part of American history. Reading his notes from the final visit, he realised he was the comedy: he and the other white visitors were showcasing their guilt and anxiety through utterly absurd statements. He ended up portraying the visit almost exactly as it happened, but with a different emphasis. It is not “funny”, he says, but it is definitely “comic”. He cannot fully explain why.
Finding real feeling in Villa Coco
For Villa Coco, Greer had a much easier time. He worked from diaries kept while living in Tuscany, and those notes were already “blond hair in a salon” – he had promised himself he would turn each day's events into a funny story. But his task was to sift through the stories for the real feeling beneath them. Those days had included the death of a dear friend, a turn of seasons, and a broken heart. The diary had expunged these things, and as a novelist rather than a diarist, he had to get back to the hardships and frustrations of his characters.
“Comedy is only great fun if it is about something hard and true,” Greer writes. A writer friend once told him: “I don't think of you as writing a comic novel. I think of you as working through something in whatever way you have to.” His books, he says, are not really about women in 1952 or middle-aged writers or olive harvests in Tuscany. They are about marriage, growing old, and the terror of death. In a comic novel, those problems are temporarily resolved, often in a deliberately artificial way. It is as if the book says: life is a vale of tears and there is no fixing it, but let's fix this one small piece and briefly lift the weight of being.
The joy of comic language
Writing comedy also makes language richer. Painters think about paint, photographers think about light, and writers think about words. In a serious novel, you might have to settle for “noise”. In comedy, a feast of words opens up: hullabaloo, brouhaha, hubbub, chivaree. Chivaree – banging pots and pans together to shame a citizen or tease a newly married couple – is a word Greer savours. Comedy has made his language zestier, like tomatoes finally coming into season after months of cabbage and kale.
There is a grand tradition of great writers dabbling in comedy. Don Quixote, sometimes called the first novel, is one of the most slapstick comedies around. Chaucer was not above a fart joke, and Shakespeare could never resist a pun. Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and Thornton Wilder all found laughter in darkness. In difficult times, many readers reach for Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm instead of an apocalyptic film or novel.
For Greer, the comic novel is dear and beautiful: a friend who holds your hand when the lights flicker out and tells you a story until they come back on. In Villa Coco, a young American man gets off a train at a rural Tuscan station so fanciful “one might unwrap it and find it was chocolate”. A princess cannot understand his “American dialect”. A wild animal is thrown through the window. The septic tank overflows. All of it points to a simple truth: the world is trouble and full of sorrows, and we will not get out alive. But look closely – it is, in fact, made of chocolate.
Ten novels to make you laugh
- Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons – A satire of a genre that no longer exists because its perfect humour erased it.
- Pomp and Circumstance by Noël Coward – The queen is coming to visit a far-flung island nation and everyone is aquiver.
- Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov – The poignancy of Nabokov's tortured Russian academic makes you fall in love with poor Pnin.
- Bech: A Book by John Updike – The first in a series about a novelist adrift in the world; a wordsmith having fun with English.
- The Sellout by Paul Beatty – A brilliant example of taking a most serious subject – slavery in America – and turning it on its head.
- I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith – A book Greer rereads annually, laughing and shedding tears over the teenage narrator Cassandra.
- Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene – A wonderful case of mistaken identity; Greer prefers Greene's “entertainments” to his serious fiction.
- Little Me by Patrick Dennis – A deliciously deluded memoir of an absolute nobody, complete with photographs.
- The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford – Eccentricity and delight mix with heartache in a classic fictionalised portrait of her family.
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes – Hilarious from beginning to end, with an even better sequel because everyone has read the first part.
Villa Coco by Andrew Sean Greer is published by Sceptre.
