Monty Python. Rowan Atkinson. Douglas Adams. Terry Pratchett. These are all names we know and love, the classic British humorists, and they all have that sort've classic British deadpan. But I never knew who was the first.
In my 18th Century British Eroticism Class (the teacher doesn't like the name, either) we are now reading Tom Jones. And damn, I love it. I just get a kick out of reading Henry Fielding. It's a welcome change of pace from Defoe, whom I found usually to be so boring that it actually made my eyes water.
I thought about it and found that the characters that I love the most in British humor are the narrators themselves. The Brits are the ones who are best at being keenly conscious of the structure of what they make - be it narration, as it works in Adams and Fielding, or in sketch comedy, such as Monty Python, who first created "Stream of Consciousness" comedy with the whole show deriding itself ("This isn't satire! It's zany madcap humor!" or how they named one show "'Man's Crisis of Identity in the Latter Half of the 20th Century' or 'Teeth'") and pretty much everything else. In the end, you don't know who they're making fun of: the audience, the characters, or society in general.
This is what really struck a chord with me in Fielding: he feels like the first to have called such huge attention to the narrator himself. He titles his chapters hilarious things, like, "Chapter II: A short Hint of what we can do in the Sublime, and a Description of Miss Sophia Western," or "Chapter I: Containing Five Pages," or "Chapter I: Containing little or nothing," or "Chapter IV: The Reader's Neck brought into Danger by a Description; his Escape, and the great Condescension of Miss Bridget Allworthy," or even "Chapter VII: Containing such grave Matter, that the Reader cannot laugh once through the whole Chapter, unless peradventure he should laugh at the Author." The reader is so conscious of the Narrator at all times that he becomes the character they begin to know best. I heard that in the 1997 mini of Tom Jones they actually made the Narrator a character who would leap into screen and begin talking, which is an idea I find absolutely brilliant.
Anyways, just wanted to share this new discovery with you.
[ March 07, 2005, 12:41 PM: Message edited by: Book ]
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The thing is, even the depressing British authors usually make me laugh. (I am thinking of Thomas Hardy)
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We didn't have an 18th Century British Eroticism class at my school -- at least not in the course catalog. However, when I showed up for the first day of the class on 18th Century British Novels, I learned that the professor had chosen as the theme for the class the topic of Libertinism. (No, not Libertarianism! Get it right!)
So he had us read things like Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (aka Fanny Hill), Dangerous Liasons (which isn't British, but he didn't consider it's Frenchness to be a hindrance), Defoe's Roxana, and yes, Tom Jones.
Of all the books I read in that class, the only one I have gone back and reread for my own pleasure is Tom Jones, and I've done it twice. It is a treasure.
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