Comedy Row

Comedy Row comprises the second row of the far left bookshelf of my apartment. I never really intended to create a "row of comedy," it just sort of started happening as I filled up my new bookshelves last spring. I discovered that I had unwittingly collected 6 or 7 P.G. Wodehouse books in the time that I had been in New York, not counting the 5-10 books I still have back in Michigan. Some people collect James Brown bootlegs, I apparently collect Wodehouse.

Even stranger, I realized that in under two years, I had picked up some more books James Thurber (my first comedic love), some Evelyn Waugh (whom I still don't really get), Mark Twain, Dorothy Parker, Steve Martin, Benjamin Franklin and Nicholson Baker (who don't get the credit they deserve for being laugh-out-loud funny), 3 (!) copies of My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell, and more.

This was it for me. I realized I had a chance to create my ideal row of books! If I could only bring one book with me to a desert island, it wouldn't be the Bible or Remembrances of Things Past, it would be Fierce Pajamas, the New Yorker humor anthology. While I could possibly stumble through a half hour conversation about Modernism, I could easily spend an entire night trying to articulate how Mark Twain stays so funny after a century and a half or why there's really nothing quite as uniquely hilarious as one of James Thurber's dog drawings. Comedy, especially written comedy, seems like a mystic art to me, equally as hard as any dramatic work. And, for whatever reason, I've always been more intrigued by comedic questions than dramatic ones.

I guess there's an element of attainability there that I find very attractive; while I find James Joyce's genius inscrutable, I feel as though I could maybe, if I tried hard enough, figure out what makes a piece of writing laugh-out-loud funny. Granted, I don't know that you really can; anybody who's tried to read any sort of academic writing on comedy knows how dry and ultimately unilluminating that proves to be. I don't know that I think "funny" can be taught or learned and there's absolutely nothing worse than meeting someone that tries to tell "jokes." Mark Twain captures this dilemma well...

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3250/3250.txt

Still, trying to crack the mystery has always been a big part of the fun of reading comedic writing for me. It hasn't really worked out, but, much like solving crossword puzzles, I just can't resist the challenge.