What makes a novel funny?

What makes a novel funny? As well as being too enormous a question to tackle properly here, such an enterprise would, I suspect, require so clinical an approach to reading comic fiction as to remove entirely any possible joy or amusement. As the old saying goes, deconstructing a joke is like dissecting a frog: nobody laughs, and the frog dies.

However, the question came to me again recently, as I reread John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. I howled with laughter from the initial farcical scene outside a department store, through Ignatius J. Reilly’s disastrous forays into the world of work and the vaudevillian denouement as Ignatius makes a chaotic bar visit in a scene which includes a burlesque on the Old South, accusations of Nazism and a rapacious bird: it is a funny book. Why so?

On one level, it is easy enough to answer. Anyone who has met a medievalist in real life, or worse, on Twitter, will know that while Toole’s creation is a caricature, he is not an inaccurate one. The prissiness and loathing of vulgarity paired with the personal slovenliness, the desire to bring Boethius into every conversation, the performative hatred of the modern, especially in such of its manifestations — family members or work colleagues — where it comes closest. I know because briefly, I was one. (Although unlike Reilly, I — broadly speaking — had cleanish sheets.)

Yet Confederacy of Dunces is funnier on another level too. A funniness that comes distinctly from the fact that it is written about America and Americans and yet in a way that treats the fundamental search for moral seriousness innate in the American project with disdain ab origine; that is to say, not as a corrupted project but as a ludicrous one. Reilly and the other grotesques who inhabit Toole’s vision of New Orleans couldn’t be anything but American, yet each stands as a mockery of America, specifically what people think of as its Southern manifestations. Reilly and his mother stand as sort of an anti-Atticus Finch/anti-Scarlett O’Hara combo, and are glorious for it.

The model carries beyond just the South, with its particular ripeness for parody and the obvious lostness of its Cause. The American comic novel revels in mockery from sea to shining sea. There is New Jersey rendered ribald by the protagonist’s exploits in Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, the anarchic folly of Auntie Mame as she roars around Manhattan in Patrick Dennis’s eponymous novel, and, perhaps most gloriously of all, the absurdist microcosm of American procedural and institutional insanity in the world of the 256th US Army Air Squadron on the isle of Pianosa in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. All these books are distinctly American, brimming with a mockery — as opposed to unironic celebration or weighty condemnation or self-conscious reinvention— of the American-ness we expect from the nation’s serious literature.

Where does this tradition come from? It might be argued it is the outsider’s perspective, the critical, foreign voice that brings the humor. Yet if we take perhaps the funniest American novel, which is to say Portnoy, the humor comes not in railing against the American dream but the embracing of it and the humor of all that rubbing up against — literally in places — Jewish identity. When the “shining city on a hill” is part of the national foundational myth, it tends to limit the idea that the immigrant experience is enough to explain the challenges posed by its comic creations: if it were, almost every American novel would be a comic one.

Perhaps it might be argued that comedy goes back deeper into the American past. There is the argument that Twain is the founding comedic genius of America. There are two issues with viewing Twain thus: He isn’t as funny as Rabelais, Cervantes or Sterne, and secondly, he is too bound up with the serious literary endeavor of defining America. You would struggle to argue that the great literary character who sums up England or Spain or France is Tristram Shandy, Sancho Panza or Pantagruel, but plenty, justifiably, think Huck Finn is the literary embodiment of America.

Funny novels then, necessarily, have to be outside the accepted corpus and, most importantly, separated from the concerns and purposes that motivate it. They need to believe, not that such concerns are necessarily wrong — plenty of serious, radical and angry fiction argues that convincingly — but that they are preposterous.

What makes Portnoy, Confederacy, Mame and Catch-22 all funny — uproariously so — is that they manage to stand outside the tent of American classic fiction, forging a serious literary vision of what the nation means, yet still commenting astutely upon it, or, more accurately, poking it with a sharp stick. They sit bitchily, deconstructing the idealism and meaning and tragedy that define serious literature. This, of course, is the point of comic fiction. It’s hardly unique to the United States, but there can be little doubt that the recognizably particular idealism and radicalism that define both classic American fiction, from Moby-Dick onward, and the attempts to deconstruct the whole shebang in the post-modern era, make those successful attempts to mock it (a different and, to my mind, finer skill than deconstructing or railing against) all the more impressive.

Perhaps it is precisely because America does not have a tradition of doughty, stolid tropes. It has long preferred to import those from England and then undermine them with the radical urge of the younger sibling, which makes the truly countercultural pitching of its great comic creations so impressive.

If the whole purpose is to undermine the stated radicalism of the original American canon, we are led to the question of whether American comic fiction remains fundamentally conservative. Perhaps. Not conservative in the sense of Reaganomics or Nixon’s Silent Majority, but in the much older sense of the anarchic, cynical Toryism that was purposely expelled from the new Eden of 1776. Despite the efforts of Lin-Manuel Miranda, anybody who’s read their pamphlets will attest that Samuel Seabury was a much wittier man than Alexander Hamilton. Though the canon proper deals with the nation’s dream’s failure or unreality as tragedy, its comic fiction treats the whole affair as farce. It might be seen as the last grunting whispers of the Loyalist id, mocking America’s very conception of such an idea in the first place. Its surviving genius is to do so through unexpected characters, and Portnoy, Ignatius Reilly and Auntie Mame remain superb examples.

All these examples though, were published way back in the twentieth century, the American century. What of today? Are contemporary authors willing or able to mock the American Dream as it becomes increasingly riven by its own contradictions? Mateo Askaripour’s Black Buck is clever both in its skewering of corporate America and of certain American novelistic conventions (the narrative style gently mocks Shawshank) but it is foremost concerned with the black experience of American corporatism and, crucially, with the nature of success. Such a novel is one with a laudable aim and with undoubted comic moments, but it isn’t a comic great. Its points are too obvious and its aims too lofty to fulfill the role of mocking comic id, because it still, at its root, takes the dream seriously. It is hard to see how the current climate has room for profitable fiction that properly mocks the contemporary conceptions of the dream. In today’s America, the dunces are once again — ironically — confederate.

As that young nation indisputably begins to face the problem of being middle-aged and as the American dream is being reshaped — or arguably returned to its Puritan origins — as ever, by an elite, the question of its comic potentialities again rears its untamed head. Whether an author might be found who can really skewer the absurdities of this new age of Americanism is another question.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s May 2023 World edition.