funny thing

[metaphortunate]

I just read The Unknown Ajax by Georgette Heyer. It's extremely funny, and the interesting thing is, the pseudoeponymous Ajax himself is an extremely funny man. Which got me thinking. There are not so many people out there writing characters who are very funny people, and I wonder why? My first thought was that it might be like the well-known problem of writing a character who is smarter than you are; but no, even very funny writers don't write very funny characters. I mean, they write characters who make you laugh; but much more rarely characters whom you would think were funny people if you met them, who do it on purpose. You laugh your ass off at Bertie Wooster's hapless drollery, but he's not doing it to get a laugh out of others. Ned's internal monologue in Connie Willis's To Say Nothing of the Dog is witty and sharp and makes the book itself funny, but there's no indication that he's ever particularly funny out loud. Nick in Sarah Rees Brennan's Demon's Covenant trilogy is a whiz with the one-liners - actually, so is everyone else in the first book, in very similar voices, which is a flaw in that book that basically disappeared over the rest of the series and it's so nice to see a writer do a thing like that - but you couldn't exactly call him humorous. Jamie, maybe. Jane Austen clearly could make her characters funny but she only gives the anal sex jokes to Mansfield Park's Mary so that she can later moralize about how terrible she is with the levity and all. (I'm not joking, Austen n00bs. There's a buttsex joke in Mansfield Park. Austen could work blue, she just didn't want to.) Lord Peter Wimsey, of course, is funny as hell, but Sayers cheats: more than half his jokes are quotes, as though she didn't trust herself to write them, which is ridiculous.

Of course Ajax, like a lot of Heyer's other funny heroes, has it easy, in that he has the heroine to laugh at his jokes - and be the butt of them. As always, it reminds me of that Woolf quote:

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size...That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men... Under the spell of that illusion, I thought, looking out of the window, half the people on the pavement are striding to work. They put on their hats and coats in the morning under its agreeable rays. They start the day confident, braced, believing themselves desired at Miss Smith’s tea party; they say to themselves as they go into the room, I am the superior of half the people here, and it is thus that they speak with that self-confidence, that selfassurance, which have had such profound consequences in public life and lead to such curious notes in the margin of the private mind.

Sure it's easier to be funny when being funny is sexy, when coming off the better in the battle of wits gets you what you want. Hugo wants Anthea and Anthea wants Hugo, that is a fact. But in the way their conflict is set up - the classic way that courtship is set up - if Hugo is cleverer than Anthea, Hugo and Anthea get each other, and if Anthea is cleverer than Hugo, neither of them gets to be happy. What's Anthea's motivation to be clever, or funny, or effective, or wise, when doing it gets her punished instead of rewarded? Of course she plays to lose. Millions of years of training women to let men win; and then claim that women are bad at negotiation.

Comments

[oursin]

Shakespeare has women being funny and scoring off the male lead - okay, sometimes she has to be disguised as a boy to do so, but not always - e.g. Beatrice in Much Ado.

There's also, more contemporaneous with Heyer, screwball comedy, in which the women were cracking wise at least as fast as the men and sometimes faster.

And while Rebecca West probably didn't mean it as a courtship strategy, it was her pointing and mocking in the columns of The Freewoman (which is take-no-prisoners hilarious, so much for suffragettes being dour and humourless) that first aroused HG Wells' interest (this probably counts as an Awful Warning, actually).

[metaphortunate]

Shakespeare, definitely! I wonder if overtly funny characters are more likely to show up in plays, because to be funny to the audience they must also be funny as people. It's harder to have, for example, Ned's funny interior monologue.

[laurajv]

I think funny characters in the sense you're talking about are extremely difficult to write, even for writers with a gift for humor. They're, I think, more common in visual media, where physical comedy can be employed to emphasize someone's funniness.

[amaebi]

Ah, brilliant and beautiful.

You've read Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing, right? Your last paragraph reminds me of its quickfic forward.

[metaphortunate]

I have not! I must find a copy some day.

[kalmn]

i just re-read maureen mchugh's "in the country of the blind" (short story, in her wiscon book and also in _after the apocalypse_ which just came out) and it explicitly references this-- it talks about how she (protagonist) had forgotten that it was her job to mirror back at the man in the story how brilliant and fabulous he was, and it briefly goes through the reactions to that.

(it's an awesome story in so many ways; this is the one that made me cry in the lunch room this week.)