‘Not funny. Try Punch.’ This, unkindly, used to be the boilerplate rejection letter from Private Eye to those who submitted jokes to the magazine. And the UK’s only prize for comic fiction, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, has just doled out the equivalent of five dozen such notes – its judges having decided that not one of this year’s 62 submissions was funny enough to deserve the prize, and that it would therefore not be awarded this year.
In an odd way, I find this cheering. One reason for that is personal. My own first novel The Coincidence Engine was shortlisted in 2011, so I deduce from that that it must have been funnier than every novel published this year. For the record, Gary Shteyngart won the 2011 prize, as he was bound to – though, since my fellow shortlistee India Knight and I had already been planning to share the prize (a pig) if either of us won it, it was galling when he did.
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