What is it about this medium that's so hard to crack and why do so few funny writers attempt it?
Why are there so few genuinely funny novels?
Why are there so few genuinely clever crime books?
I do see your point Marc. I guess my question isn't so much why is so much of what's out there bad but why are all the comedy/funny writers working on sitcoms and other mediums? Why do so few attempt a novel when they're done with sitcom/movie comedy writing? Is it much harder to make people laugh with a novel?
Maybe being a good script writer doesn't automatically mean you're a good novelist.
Oi! I was never a good scriptwriter either!
Well as I've mentioned on other threads Leslie Thomas was a consistently funny novelist. Obviously nobody here agrees with me though.
A novel is generally too long to be constantly surprising?
Robert Klane's 'Where's Poppa' is a very funny novel.
I think there are quite a few genuinely funny novels out there. David Nobbs (Going Gently, A Bit of A Do) is always brilliant, as is Peter Tinniswood (I Didn't Know You Cared, Tales From the Long Room etc). More recently Mark Gattiss trilogy, Danny Wallace two novels.
I've always thought novels are harder to be laugh out funny because comedy needs an element of surprise and that is very hard to achieve with prose and you need to get humour out of situations
A man walks down the street. We see a hole. Man falls down hole. Funny.
Funny, like drama, works best when we know something the character doesn't. I'm not necessarily talking about plot.
Quote: Chappers @ 12th June 2014, 8:53 PM BSTWell as I've mentioned on other threads Leslie Thomas was a consistently funny novelist. Obviously nobody here agrees with me though.
Dangerous Davies: The Last Detective is a very good book; not tried anything else by him but I have Dangerous in Love and Other Times on the shelf unread.
To answer the question I suspect that the reason there are so few genuinely funny novels is that they are extremely difficult to write.
In fact there are very few novelists I read primarily for the jokes: Wodehouse perhaps, and maybe Douglas Adams. Even gag heavy authors like Terry Pratchett and Tom Holt have a compelling story tell, while the likes of Nick Hornby or George MacDonald Fraser or Keith Waterhouse or Leslie Thomas I would see a novelists first and humourists second.
You should try Tropic Of Ruislip although it may be a bit dated now plus the Virgin Soldiers. As mentioned on his RIP thread he almost wrote one novel every year for 30 odd years.
But of course Tom Sharpe's stuff is outrageously funny.
Tom Sharpe does funny the best from my limited range of read books, his best books are not just satirical but funny. To answer the original question I'd say Funny is seen as too base or unliterary by many writers compared to Satirical which is afforded a higher literary status by pompous snobs running all the top awards.
A couple of years back a leading Comic Novel award runner pulled the prize for that year because none of the books published that year were funny enough. Some bitter writers in the prospective shortlist said it was a publicity stunt to get the contest more widely known but others rightly condemned novelists for being too highbrow and ignoring good base humour. It made me want to finish my current funny novel project which I started twenty years ago and now have got to page 17.