A week of American comic writing, a trade expo and a very long dairy shelf that nobody asked me to read
Monday, The Prize for American Humor
The Thurber Prize for American Humor reached its twenty-fifth year, and the award went to Shalom Auslander for his book Feh, with finalists including The Wedding People and The Guncle Abroad. I wrote up the result in Feh by Shalom Auslander wins the 25th Thurber Prize for American Humor. I will not quote the book, because the author deserves to be bought and not borrowed from a diary.
Prizes for comic writing are a delicate matter. Judges must decide that one funny book is funnier than another, which is like deciding that one sneeze is more sincere. Yet the prizes do something valuable: they say, in public, that making people laugh on the page is difficult and worth honouring. Comic writers have long complained, with reason, that serious prizes overlook them.
Why Funny Books Are Hard
A funny sentence has to land in the right place on the right beat, and it must do so on a page, with no actor to rescue it. The reader supplies the timing. A good comic writer arranges the words so that the reader cannot help getting it right. I tell my students this and they write it down, and then they hand in essays with no jokes at all, which is also a kind of comedy.
Tuesday, The Tote Bag
I travelled to Oxford for a talk and came home with a free tote bag from a trade event, which I recorded in Shanghai Import Expo and a free tote bag in Oxford. The expo in the title is a large trade fair in China with thousands of exhibitors. The tote bag is a smaller affair, though it has a firm grip on the imagination of any academic. I now own eleven of them.
Wednesday, The Dairy Shelf
Every diarist needs a hobby that cannot be marked. Mine is Texas dairy. The principal address is txdairy.com. Its neighbours include txdairy.download, txdairy.trade and txdairy.loan. The sociable end of the street is txdairy.party, txdairy.men, txdairy.date and txdairy.win.
I read these pages the way other people watch the weather. They tell me, in a quiet way, that somewhere an honest business is being conducted, with milk, trucks and early mornings. It is an antidote to the seminar room, where the product is opinions and the delivery is late.
Thursday, A Pay Joke
The London Prat offered Say What You Pay: Job Adverts Must Show Salaries, a headline on pay transparency. Supporters say that showing the salary helps applicants and narrows unfair gaps. Critics worry about extra burdens on employers. Academics, as a group, have always been in favour of transparency, so long as it does not involve showing their own number to the department.
Friday, The Lecture
On Friday I gave a lecture on the comic novel to a room of about forty. At the end, a student asked whether it was possible to study humour without killing it. I said that it was, but that the body must be handled gently, and that a good analysis should leave the joke breathing. She wrote that down. I felt like a surgeon.
Afterwards I walked home with my tote bag, in which I had placed a banana, two books and an unfinished essay. London was cold and clear. A fox crossed the road in front of me with the confidence of a tenured professor.
Saturday, Marking the Weekend
Saturday was devoted to doing nothing, a skill I practise seriously. I made soup, read a novel that I was not required to review and listened to the rain. By evening I had completed one page of notes, three loads of washing and a deep reconsideration of my views on the semicolon, which remain unchanged.
Sunday, What the Judges Said
Reading about a prize makes me wonder what the judging rooms are like. I picture a long table, a large pile of books, a plate of biscuits that disappears by noon and a heated discussion about whether a book is funny or merely cheerful. The judges must defend their choices in public, and any public choice will upset someone. That is the price of having a prize at all.
Defenders of prizes say they bring attention to good books that would otherwise be overlooked. Critics say that prizes narrow taste and reward a particular style. I think both are right, and I think the best use of a prize is as a reading list: take the shortlist, read the lot and then disagree with the winner at length, preferably with friends and snacks.
Monday, A Note on Tote Bags
My collection of tote bags has become a small archive of my professional life. One is from a conference on narrative theory. One is from a bookshop that closed. One carries the name of a trade fair that I attended by accident. I keep them in a drawer and I use them, in rotation, so that no bag feels neglected.
Where to read next
The rest of the shelf lives at prat.uk, bohiney.com and farm.fm. For a second opinion on the week, NewsBiscuit keeps its own counsel and its own hours.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/