The Oxford book of humorous prose Book

This really is an extraordinary volume. In the UK, Frank Muir (d.1998) was a much-loved character latterly famous as an urbane and witty radio and television performer on quiz shows, but remembered too as a comic writer who co-authored the ground-breaking radio comedy Take It From Here, which incorporate the splendidly awful radio soap-opera,The Glums.

This book reveals a new Frank Muir, a man of considerable erudition, for this is an intelligent selection of comic prose, made all the better by an equally intelligent commentary. Here, one can savour pretty much all of the best comic writers, such as Lewis Carroll, Stella Gibbons, Philip Roth, Damon Runyan, Mark Twain, PG Wodehouse, in total, about 250, most of them famous, but quite a few not at all well-known.

Each of these writers is provided with a short, often learned biographical note, followed by one or more gobbets of humorous prose. Unlike dictionaries of quotations, most of these gems are sufficiently lengthy to thwart any reviewer who strives to provide a pithy extract. Their focus is not on the quotable quote, but upon lengthier passages that evoke each writer's style of writing. The sections are organised roughly in historical sequence, allowing Muir to tell his story as a continuous historical narrative.

The book's only real weakness, it is that it is poised, rather uncertainly, between being a work of reference and one of critical scholarship. I would myself have preferred the authors to have been placed in alphabetical order to make the sections more accessible, but the book works, nonetheless.

There is a delicious piece by Dorothy Parker, for example, depicting a young man's growing recollection of a disastrous party.

Was I making a pass at Elinor?" he said, "Did I do that?"

"Of course you didn't," she said, "You were only fooling that's all. She thought you were awfully amusing. She was having a marvellous time. She only got a little tiny bit annoyed just once, when you poured the clam-juice down her back.". - - -

And here are Sellar and Yeatman, waxing historical, on Robin Hood:

"Amongst his Merrie Men were Will Scarlet (The Scarlet Pimpernel), Black Beauty, White Melville, Little Red Riding Hood (probably an out-daughter of his) and the famous Friar Puck who used to sit in a cowslip and suck bees, thus becoming so fat that he declared he could put his girdle round the Earth.


Saki is good for quotes:
Henry Duplis was by birth a native of the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg. On maturer reflection, he became a commercial traveller.

Waldo is one of those people who would be enormously improved by death.

HL Menkin, is known as an inhabitant of dictionaries of quotations, and there are some nice quotations, but it is also good to read some of his continuous prose. Here, one must put up with a quote:

Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.

Adultery: democracy applied to love

And then there are surprises: the fact that George Eliot could be humorous; that Johnson's dictionary was laced with witticisms (not just the one about the lexicographer); and that sixteenth century sermons could be hilarious.

The great joy of the book is that one can look up an unfamiliar author's name just to get a potted biography and an example of his/her work.. But if that seems an over-earnest approach to comedy, the book can be kept by one's elbow to be opened at random just to spend five minutes having a sly giggle.