Humour

Monday

Fleur Macdonald

Across the literary pages: Amis Asbo special

The promotional tour for Lionel Asbo: State of England has been suspiciously quiet. The fact that Martin Amis hasn’t sworn, bitched or nominated the queen as guinea pig for euthanasia booths stirred the press into feverish levels of anticipation. Had the OAP (Old Age Provocateur) finally lost his teeth? Or was he simply biding his time before biting back? A satire on Lionel Asbo – Wayne Rooney look-alike and dedicated chav –  and his lottery win, it seems written to offend … even without subplots involving teenage pregnancy (she &”was six months gone when she sat her Eleven Plus”), incest with a thirty-something year old granny, pit bulls and acid attacks.

Friday

David Blackburn

Happy birthday, Edward Lear

The god of nonsense, Edward Lear, is 200 years old this year. (Yes, the Inimitable can’t have the whole stage for himself, and must give way to another peculiarly English genius.) To mark the occasion, the Spectator’s Jubilee Double Issue (available from all good newsagents and doubtless a few bad ones too — alternatively, you can subscribe at new.spectator.co.uk/subscribe) carries a piece by Thomas Hodgkinson, a devotee of Lear who also shares the old man’s love of Corfu. I urge you to read the delightful piece in full, but here’s an excerpt to tickle your fancy: ‘The Owl and The Pussycat’ was my favourite childhood poem. And I must confess

Saturday

Marcus Berkmann

A deafening silence

One morning in 2007, the music critic Nick Coleman woke up to find that he was profoundly deaf in one ear. ‘The silence did not descend silently, however. It made a small sound. You might compare it to the sound of a kitten dropping on to a pillow.’ Within an hour this pffff had developed a pulse, and over the next few days it evolved into an unceasing clamour of clanks, zizzes and whistles. By now Coleman was in hospital and doctors were scratching their heads, as they usually do with tinnitus. I can remember the eyes of my doctor glazing over with boredom when I told him about my

Saturday

Sam Leith

Frank exchange of views

Solomon Kugel is morbidly obsessed with death: his own, and that of those he loves, including his wife Bree and his only son Jonah. He spends his idle hours writing down possible last words in a notebook, and contemplating the undignified and senseless extinctions that await him around every corner. His outlook is not helped by his therapist, Professor Jove, who is convinced that hope is the cause of all human suffering and works hard to extinguish it; nor by his brother-in-law, the unsubtly named evolutionary biologist Pinkus Stephenor — a professional optimist whose latest book is You’ve Got To Admit It’s Getting Better, A Little Better All The Time.

Wednesday

Peter Hoskin

Ed Miliband volunteers for a kicking, gets kicked

“First he denies his own policy, then he tries insults.” So said Ed Miliband of David Cameron’s performance in PMQs today. But I wonder what he’d say of the hundreds of Twitter users who went straight for the insults in a special Q&A with the Labour leader earlier. Urged on by Guido, plenty deployed the #AskEdM hash-tag to be rather unkind to MiliMinor. Here’s a selection of some of the crueller, funnier and less comradely tweets: @MTPT: If a train leaves Paddington at 1136, carrying 200 commuters, what time will the RMT bring it to a standstill? @FelicityParkes: Where did Ed Balls touch you? Show us on the doll. @MShapland:

Saturday

Marcus Berkmann

Dying of laughter

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

Saturday

Byron Rogers

Laughter from the Gallery

This is an amiable book. The parliamentary sketchwriter Simon Hoggart, also the wine correspondent of this magazine, for which he drinks as selflessly as Zorba the Greek, has set out to record anecdotes that have amused and appalled him in the course of his long professional life. He also throws in some, mainly Jewish, jokes whenever the mood takes him, so at times this reads like one of those gag books that professional comedians lose, then loudly appeal in the press for the return of, but it is none the worse for that. This is a book you are meant to read, put down, read, and put down. It is

Saturday

Penelope Lively

Shop till you drop

Within the past month I have been to an 80th and a 90th birthday lunch, both of them highly festive occasions. And now here is an entertaining, erudite and thought-provoking meditation on the matter of age by Jane Miller (aged 78). The so-called twilight years are no longer quite that, for some of us. This book takes a look at the experience of age, and the perception of age, using the writer’s own engagement with it for the former, and for the latter the promptings of a well-stocked mind to demonstrate how literature has reflected life. Those called in range from Simone de Beauvoir through Bellow, Updike, Roth to Turgenev

Saturday

Mark Mason

Teed off

There are those of us who, asked if we play golf, reply: ‘No, I like women.’ A relaxing game in pleasant surroundings it may be. There are those of us who, asked if we play golf, reply: ‘No, I like women.’ A relaxing game in pleasant surroundings it may be. But that disappears under a landslide of regulations about shirt collars and footwear, penned by men who boast of ‘values’ yet are happy only when everyone in sight is Exactly Like Them, and not just in terms of gender. Maurice Flitcroft loved the game with a passion. Regulations less so. A crane driver at Vickers shipyard in Barrow, Flitcroft reached

Saturday

George Trefgarne

The credit crunch with jokes

Unlike most financial writers, who are too serious for their own good, Michael Lewis has a sense of humour and he deploys it deftly. In Liar’s Poker, his semi-autobiographical account of the Salomon Brothers bond desk published 20 years ago, the traders always explain a market move they do not understand by blaming it on ‘the Arabs’. At once, we realise that the Masters of the Universe do not always know what they were talking about. In The Big Short, Lewis examines the credit crunch through the eyes of a handful of ‘short-sellers’, who not only saw it all coming, but put their money where their mouths were by placing

Saturday

Marcus Berkmann

Array of luminaries

In November 1660, on a damp night at Gresham College in London, a young shaver named Christopher Wren gave a lecture on astronomy. In the clearly appreciative audience were 12 ‘prominent gentlemen’, who in discussions afterwards, possibly over a drink or two, decided they would meet every week to talk about science and perform experiments. In a flash, this informal gathering coalesced into a society, which they called ‘a Colledge for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning’. As Bill Bryson writes in his introduction, ‘nobody had ever done anything quite like this before, or would ever do it half as well again.’ In 1662 Charles II granted them a charter,

Wednesday

Marcus Berkmann

Quirky books for Christmas

After the Christmas ‘funny’ books, here’s an even larger pile of Christmas ‘quirky’ books. After the Christmas ‘funny’ books, here’s an even larger pile of Christmas ‘quirky’ books. In practice, quirky books aren’t just for Christmas, they’re for the whole year round. But try telling a publisher that. Thousands of them have been pouring out this autumn, and in the pre-Christmas jungle good books will surely be lost, consumed by larger and nastier predators in a single contemptuous gulp. In Ghoul Britannia (Short Books, £12.99), Andrew Martin muses on ‘a nation primed for ghostliness’. Our weather is just right, our landscape could have been designed for the purpose, and we

Saturday

Paul Johnson

Here’s the secret of humour. But don’t tell the Germans.

V.S. Naipaul, that clever and often wise man, once laid down: ‘One always writes comedy at the moment of deepest hysteria.’ Well, where’s the comedy now? There is certainly plenty of hysteria. Old Theodore Roosevelt used to say: ‘Men are seldom more unreasonable than when they lose their money. They do not seek to apportion blame by any rational process but, like a wounded snake, strike out against what is most prominent in their line of vision.’ I notice that the OED, as a rule politically correct, thinks hysteria is chiefly female: ‘Women being much more liable than men to this disorder, it was originally thought to be due to