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.
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