Prose Isn’t Funny

The “women aren’t funny” argument still surfaces online here (Twitter) and there (Reddit), thanks to frustrated young men in basements. I believe this tiresome discourse got rolling with an essay by Christopher Hitchens, whom I’m told was funny. But there was a time when, despite never having read Hitchens, I would have denied his funniness on principle, for I had a separate debate going in my mind: prose isn’t funny. Words on paper can’t elicit a genuine laugh and shouldn't attempt to.

I believed that, while plenty of them are advertised as funny, books can only ever hope to be “humorous.” At most, they can produce a chortle. I hadn’t done much research into this besides a few essays by that one humorist everyone loves, who didn’t do it for me, and books by standup comedians that weren’t really books, but lifeless, word-for-word transcriptions of their acts. But my mind was made up: books were either completely serious, or they sucked, and if you wanted to write comedy, as I wanted to, then you had to write television, film, or standup.

I was twenty-three when I picked up Steve Toltz's lengthy debut novel, A Fraction of the Whole. I liked the cover (it had little holes in it), and the reviews promised a sweeping story. I was surprised, however, to catch myself laughing out loud reading it. I was fascinated by Toltz; how had he pulled off a novel that was moving and narratively sweeping while being funny for 700-plus pages? It changed the way I thought about, and what I sought from, books. Beyond that, it shifted my perception of my future self. Beyond his Australian nationality, there was precious little information about Toltz online, so I invented a life for him. I pictured him as a solitary creature – no wife, no children – shambling from cafe to cafe in Melbourne (he wasn't from there), taking notes on the hilarious stupidity of life. I thought that could possibly be me.

I'm thirty-five now. The comedy career didn't pan out, but it took me to LA and later Brooklyn, where I fell in love, which has brought me all the way across the world to, of all places, Melbourne, Australia, where I still imagine Toltz is from even though I now know he’s from Sydney (last I read, he'd moved his family to Brooklyn). I'm writing a novel of my own now. I hope it's as funny as Toltz's, but maybe about a quarter as long.

I’m sorry this wasn’t funnier.