by A Literary Scholar Connects Modernism to the Complete Guide to British Humour
Dispatches from the margins, via Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Virginia’s great formal innovation was the representation of thought as it actually occurs – fragmented, associative, resistant to linear resolution. The London Prat’s complete guide to British humour describes the best British comedy as accidental, dropped into conversation like a forgotten receipt, noticed only by those paying attention. Virginia was describing the same structure. She called it the moment. Comedians call it the dropped line. The mechanism is identical.
The Literary Evidence
The guide says British comedy ends with the hero in the wrong chair at the wrong party, smiling bravely. Mrs Dalloway ends with Clarissa re-entering her own party having processed a suicide in the other room, smiling. This is not a coincidence. This is a cultural template. Britain has been doing this since at least 1925 and the Cambridge English faculty has somehow not joined the dots.
I also note the London Prat’s UK Hamlet on Prozac piece this week, which is doing something clever: Hamlet medicated is Hamlet without his tragedy, which means Hamlet without his comedy, which are, in British literary tradition, the same thing. I am putting this in my essay. My supervisor will say: that’s interesting. This is the academic version of Oh, brilliant.
The Irish Dimension
Swift invented political satire in English and he was Irish. Beckett perfected theatrical absurdism and he was Irish. The British took the credit for both. This is also a comedy structure and I am not entirely sure who is laughing.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
The shelf: The Daily Mash
