The last truly great book I’ve read that showed absolutely nothing resembling humor was Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon.
Definitely- there are several vignettes that show people swapping dirty jokes, for instance.
Or, think of the Okie kids who get to use a flush toilet for the first time ever, at a government camp, then think they broke it when it starts shooting water.
I recently read John William’s Stoner, which I think is little known, but very highly regarded. (The NYTBR critic called it a “perfect novel.”)
Not funny at all.
It’s not just you. I was thinking about this thread this morning, and had almost the identical thought about Moby Dick – the beginning is hysterical. I think it helps to ground the rest of the story a little bit, so that it doesn’t become entirely allegorical.
A Separate Peace slays me every single time. When I was younger, Where the Red Fern Grows was laugh a minute. It wasn’t quite as funny as The Color Purple however.
In my experience, there’s less intentional humour in classical works. I don’t think I found anything particularly funny in the Aeneid, for example.
It’s been a while, but I don’t remember any humor in Heart of Darkness. Or the small amount of Faulkner I’ve read. Or Nathaniel Hawthorne, but maybe that’s because he put me to sleep before I got to it.
Whoa, hey, the Aeneid in particular may not be the most side-splitting thing that the ancient world came up with*, but put down the mile-wide brush, dude. The Romans had a whole genre of comedy, as did the Greeks. Also, while the Aeneid is on the sombre side, the Homeric epics that inspired it are profoundly funny at times. The Odyssey, especially, is deeply comic throughout.
(*Though I can’t help picturing Hermes reminding Aeneas of his destiny as a comic episode:
- Wow, hanging out here in Carthage with Dido sure is awesome. I’ll just grab another bowl of wine and… hey, Hermes, what are you doing here?
- Look, Aenas, dude, the boss man sent me…
- Yeah? What’s up?
- Look, dude, I know you’re living the good life here with this chick and all, and she seems really nice, but… well, the the thing is that you should have been in Italy like, a year ago, and the boss wants you to get a move on. That new culture over there isn’t founding itself.
- FUCK! I knew there was something I was supposed to do… OK, OK! Let me just get my stuff together, and… but wait, Dido will be PISSED!
- Well, tough shit, dude.
- OK, tell you what. I know what we’ll do. I’ll just have the guys get the boat ready, and we’ll sneak out of here real quiet…)
Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny.
- Guy Davenport
Everything by the Brontes had one to three beautiful examples of acerbic wit. And that was it. I am not entirely certain what a moor is, but I know I never want to live by one.
Either you never read the right translation, or your classical Greek (pardon me) sucks. The Aeneid, though not as funny as the Odyssey, had a strong line of mocking, irreverent, and black humor.
I now have a vision of Hawthorne, Faulkner, and Conrad in the sitting before the fire with the Brontes, as confused as they are unhappy.
Wemmick himself is a very amusing character, especially in the way he segregates his personal and professsional identities.
I don’t recall any humor in Antigone nor in Corneille’s Le Cid.
There’s at least some comic relief in Antigone, like the guard who is scared stiff that he will get the blame for burying Polynices, and explains how the guards all drew lots to decide who would give the message to the king, because none of them had the balls to do it.
Well, to each their own - and anyhow, I can’t get the (partly remembered, very loose) translation exactly right, but…
Mephistopheles: Such a Holy Joe you are! You’ve spent bunches of years as a professor, claiming to your students that you know the ways of God and nature, and the hearts and souls of men – come on now, did you know even as much about such things as you know about what happened to this schmuck Schwerdtlein (nothing, that is)?
Not slapstick, but at least very heavy sarcasm.
WHAT? Okay, so I first read that when one does tend to read Dickens, i.e., too young. But when I read it a second time in college it was hilarious! The school? Seriously?
IIRC (this is based on the one Greek drama class I took in college) there’s the occasional comic relief in the works of Aeschylus or Sophocles, and a good bit more in Euripides’s plays. He seems to have had quite the snarky sense of humor, although his intentions aren’t always clear. Some critics over the millennia have felt that he relied too heavily on deus ex machina endings and didn’t even pull them off very well, while others have argued that these endings must have been meant as satire. For example, at the end of Orestes the god Apollo appears suddenly to set things right, which includes telling Orestes he needs to marry the girl he was about to murder!
Why, are you worried that they’ll drive the property values down?
I have found none of the examples given to even approach being funny.
The moors, or the Brontes?
This was my first thought.
It’s been a very long time since I’ve read it, but I don’t recall any humor in A Tale of Two Cities.
OTOH, I think Raymond Chandler’s books have lots of humor in them.
The darkest, most humorless writer I can think of is James Ellroy. I think some of his books are great, and they are all incredibly bleak and pessimistic, but I’m not sure how widely shared that opinion is.