Marcus Berkmann on the few genuinely funny books aimed at this year’s Christmas market
It’s a worrying sign, but I suspect that Christmas may not be as amusing as it used to be. For most of my life, vast numbers of so-called ‘funny’ books have been published at around this time of year, aimed squarely at desperate shoppers lurching drunkenly into bookshops on 24 December, still looking for the perfect present for someone they don’t much like. But this year there aren’t anywhere near as many. Perhaps they stopped selling. Maybe the QI Annual and Schott’s Almanac saw them off. Or maybe it just dawned on everyone at the same time that being given, say, Jeremy Clarkson’s latest collection is an act of such blatant passive-aggression as to make family life almost intolerable for the next 12 months, until you can retaliate with a present that’s even more offensive. ’Tis the season to be jolly, after all.
And yet, a few genuinely funny ‘funny’ books do still creep through, books you will be happy to see on your shelves when all manifestations of Top Gear have long been pulped and forgotten. I cannot resist including The Lost Diaries by Craig Brown (Fourth Estate, £18.99), even though the book has been reviewed here once already. The wondrous Brown finds yet another way of recycling his Private Eye parodies, by slicing them into nutritious bite-sized chunks and spreading them across a calendar year. So on 15 June, we have James Lees-Milne:
To tea with Chairman Mao. Do I detect something Chinese about him? Curiously his wardrobe seems not to run to a shirt and tie. I set him at his ease. ‘My dear — those are workmen’s overalls! But how witty!’
On 9 August, it is our own sainted Charles Moore:
I went toad-hunting this morning.
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