ANIMALS LOOKING FOR LAUGHS
In answer to your questions
Dear Readers,
Until now, I have been shielded from the costs of disability because of our wonderful and vital NHS. This will change when I get home due to the considerable costs of remodelling the house, and my need for round the clock care.
I ask, therefore, that if you enjoy The Kureishi Chronicles, believe in paying for good writing, and want to help with my recovery, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
I wonder to what extent you have been able to retain what seemed an essentially comedic approach to life through all of this?
HANIF
Two nurses were discussing me as they worked this morning. One said to the other, “he’s the man who never smiles,” and I replied, “No one ever says anything remotely funny.” It is true, I am not a man who smiles easily; I don’t like being made to laugh, but I love comedy, it is my favourite form. And I like to make others laugh. I am often accused of having a dry sense of humour.
Sometimes people ask me why I put humour in my books, but to me that is like asking why you write a book with a story. The humour is integral to the idea and the language, just as it might be integral to a person, the way they speak and view the world.
My father was an amusing man. One of his favourite writers was Oscar Wilde. Dad loved what is called wit, and, like me, he didn’t like much being told jokes, which he found cumbersome. Wit is spontaneous, it comes out of a particular situation, it is not planned or calculated, it just occurs in the moment as a surprise and a shock; it is sudden and alters the atmosphere.
My father was funny all day, and his brothers, of whom there were many, were similar, humour rippled through them. Anything could be amusing, and should be, that was the point of conversation; the reason for people to interact was to cheer one another up. They would make each other laugh, but seemingly without calculation, it came naturally.
Anything can be amusing: my son Carlo has just reminded me that in Primo Levi’s great books about Auschwitz, the characters, even in their dire situation, or because of it, are trying to amuse one another.
This is odd for me to write, because I must admit that I don’t much like laughter. When people laugh near me, particularly in this hospital, it annoys me, I feel like saying, what the fuck is so funny in this shithole that you can laugh like that. It makes me want to strangle them.
This injury has made me envious, particularly of other people’s pleasures, and maybe, when they are laughing, they are enjoying a happiness that eludes me. But I do think that almost all the great writers are essentially comic: Shakespeare, Dickens, Proust, Joyce, and of course Chekhov, anyone apart from Tolstoy, who wasn’t known for his humour, and could be earnest. Humour is a bulwark against boredom, and boredom, especially in hospital, is the most corrosive thing. This year in hospital, I’ve been bored more than you can imagine. Hours have passed where nothing has happened, where I have just been lying in bed, waiting for a shower, waiting for Isabella to turn up, waiting for distraction, listening to the horrible news over and over again.
Oddly enough, I haven’t lost my sense of humour, despite my miserable demeanour. I am visited here, in my room, by a very serious NHS psychiatrist (I wonder if there has ever been a humorous psychiatrist) Foolishly, I like to try and make him laugh, to see if I can break through the skin of his professionalism. Sometimes I try to do the same thing to the doctors, to get passed their enactment of a particular role, to see if there is something softer underneath, something I can reach, which will reveal whether they are more than a talking medical book.
Humour, as Freud recognised - and Freud did, after all, write an entire book about jokes in which there are not many jokes, and the ones he did include are not funny at all – humour, like sexuality, is where we can be taken by surprise, and where the unconscious exposes itself. The unconscious is not underneath, it is more like something which is subtly hidden, but can be unlocked with the key of humour or desire, and of course the two are closely related. Wit is the brilliant expression of a truth, a way of exposing something with concision and effect. The world then seems like a brighter place. After all, much of the entertainment that we consume, movies, TV, in literature and through social media, is comedic in some form or another. We are the animals that are looking for laughs.
When I saw my uncles and their friends trying to amuse and outwit one another, I knew I wanted to be like that when I grew up. If I am funny, in conversation, it is something I had to learn and cultivate; it is a form of creativity, as is all conversation.
A friend has confided an agent has told her "I couldn't sell a novel written by a middle-aged white woman if it came with a blow job." How does this kind of writer proceed?
HANIF
It is difficult now, in some areas of the arts, for older white men to progress as they used to. I have had to listen to many complaints from my friends, many of whom are older white men, that their time has come and gone. They know why this is, and they are almost ready to accept it. They had a great run - the best run that anyone could hope for, when women and people of colour were excluded from the race. But now reality has caught up with them, and they need to bow out gracefully, and join the rest of humankind, the rabble, like everyone else.
On the other hand, not to be too pessimistic, writing is a career that one can take up at any age. One can write a great novel at the age of eighty, if one has the talent and capability. There are no age limits on the human imagination.
Can you share a creative exercise for writing students from your own teaching experience?
HANIF
This is an exercise that I often set for my students. It is an interesting and important one, because character is the basis of fiction.
I will ask you, as an exercise, to write a thousand words, describing, creating, in whatever form you like, a character, a person, making them come alive for us, so that we see and know them. And send in your thousand-word character study to the comment section – I will read it.
This applies to anyone else who wants to write a thousand-word character study; please put them in the comment section below.
Is art for its own sake, with no audience to speak of, still art?
HANIF
Let me answer this question, but in my own way, and from an angle, as it were. I think it is important when you are writing, or indeed creating anything, to be aware of an audience. This may be one person, several, or a crowd. But this will help to orientate you as a writer, so that when you are reading through something you have written you will ask yourself, will the audience be bored by this, are they still with us, or have they left already?
I have noticed in my teaching that sometimes young writers are too internal. They are not always aware enough that they creating entertainment for someone else, for an audience. So, for instance, the writer should be aware that a novel should get off to a good strong start, that there should not be pages of warm-up, of easing slowly into the story. It is best that it should start dramatically. This will help the reader to become interested in the story.
If possible the story should have a certain pace, which will keep the reader at the book. As a writer, you must be able to separate yourself into both author and reader. I know this sounds daft, but it is possible; it has been done, I’ve seen it. So I am neither an arts-for-arts sake guy, nor am I a guy who likes art to be purely commercial; the best artists, the ones I admire – Miles Davis, The Beatles, Hitchcock, etc – are usually the ones that are able to combine serious ideas within a commercial envelope.
Hanif
One thing that blind-sided me for absolutely ages, as a flailing amateur writer, and that seems to be a common blind spot, especially among writers of pompous vampire fiction, is the failure to grasp that stories that are absent humour or bathos never feel entirely genuine. Humour, whether we accept it or not, arises in all facets of our lives, from the prosaic to the undeniably tragic, where it lies in the eye of the beholder. It is admittedly less funny if you are the person who has just walked, face-first into a metal pole, causing a dulled chime to ring out, alerting others to your humiliation.
To ignore something that is so pervasive is to deny characters their humanity. I can think of few contemporary writers who grasp this better than the comedian and film-maker Louis CK. The episode of his show 'Louis' where he accidentally takes a duckling on a tour of US military bases in Afghanistan is absurd, sad and heart-warming television.
I used to sit in a staffroom, alongside people who were treating terminal cancer patients. Among those who were unable to emotionally detach themselves from their work, there was a dark undercurrent of humour. They weren't making fun of their patients. They were laughing at death. You should laugh at death. Catching a reflection of your bared-teeth in the down-swing of his scythe is the best that any of us can hope for. If I were to have fallen similarly unwell, I would have trusted any one of those men and women with my own treatment. It was their privately-voiced humour that enabled them to function competently, professionally and emphatically within that setting.
The recent death of a man who was pummelled by a robot arm on a factory production line is both tragic and horrifying. It is also, by some cognitively dissonant sleight of hand, funny, though the humour arises not from the plight of the victim, but from the absurdity of a mechanical servitor having been insufficiently programmed to distinguish between the bodies of its superior creators and the boxes of food that it was built to handle. In the mind of the machine, both are the same thing.
The last image I downloaded to my meme folder consists of a composite photo – a before and after: On the left, there is a faded sepia portrait of a man in military uniform, his face clouded by a pronounced watermark. The person who posted the image identifies this man as the only picture they have of their late uncle. On the right is a restoration of the photo, undertaken by AI and stable diffusion, which has re-rendered it as a black and white, anime style portrait of the man, still in his uniform, but now sporting a giant pair of fake-looking breasts.
The original photo is of a man who served his country in the armed forces – who may have even died in the service of his country. That part of his life remains impervious to easy humiliation. The humour lies in the limitations of the AI that mapped the faded contours implicit in the photo, but failed to understand the context of the image, and posthumously gifted the man the kind of giant siliconised rack that was once commonly sighted on episodes of 'Baywatch'. Additional layers of humour could develop if, following the extinction of our species, the image is uncovered by alien archaeologists who assume that it is the archetypal form of our species.
In all but the most crude humour, the subject of the joke is seldom the target. If I reflexively laugh at a routine that is politically incorrect, which is currently every joke outside of Hannah Gadsby special, then it is often the absurdity of the attitudes or the situation that is being expressed that is the source of that laughter. A hallmark of the comedian, Stewart Lee, are routines that are subversions of the openly racist humour of the previous century.
I think that writing humour requires empathy. You cannot effectively articulate, in humorous form, the ridiculous nature of someone, real or fictional, unless you can see mirrored in them, your own ridiculous nature.
Now that an agent has come forward and confirmed that blow jobs are in circulation as literary currency (I had always assumed this was the case) I am interested to know how many it would take to sell a novel penned by a white, middle-aged woman, if one is deemed to be insufficient. Does the amount vary between the small and large publishing operations? Does the amount of agents who are willing to provide blow jobs to publishers impact upon the overall market value. As the economies of nations teeter on the brink of balkanising into tiers of bartering and dystopian government-run crypto schemes, I think this represents fertile ground for economists.
When I read “orientate” I reach for my Luger. And sometimes a Luger really is a Luger, as Freud might have said. My father, a Berlin raised psychiatrist with a very good sense of humor, viewed change, societal, language, cultural, as subjects to study rather than rail against. Yet even presumably college educated tv news anchors can no longer pronounce et cetera correctly.
And, to cover their asses, they insert “potentially” whenever possible, as in “potentially it might rain tomorrow.” Fortunately I gave up my Luger and don’t want to die of apoplexy.
Sorry you don’t abide jokes well. Agreed, situational humor is usually superior, but a good joke teller, in my book, is a connoisseur and only tells jokes with a great twist or revelation in the punchline:
Young British lieutenant, newly arrived at a Kashmir hill station, paying his respects to the Colonel: “Sorry to hear you recently buried your wife.” Colonel: “Had to...dead you know.” 60 years after my father told us this joke, my siblings and I still use the punchline to get a laugh from one another.