Funny Ha, Ha
Page 1
www.headofzeus.com
First published in the UK in 2019 by Head of Zeus Ltd
In the compilation and introductory material © Paul Merton
The moral right of Paul Merton to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
The moral right of the contributing authors of this anthology to be identified as such is asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
The list of individual titles and respective copyrights to be found on page 625 constitutes an extension of this copyright page.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is an anthology of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in each story are either products of each author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (HB) 9781788544269
ISBN (E) 9781788544252
Design & illustration: Tom Gauld
Head of Zeus Ltd
5–8 Hardwick Street
London EC1R 4RG
WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM
For Suki
And my grandfather James ‘Jimmy’ Power.
I’m sorry I never knew you.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
1 Atwood, Margaret
There Was Once
2 Aymé, Marcel
The Man Who Walked Through Walls
3 Barry, Kevin
Beer Trip to Llandudno
4 Barthelme, Donald
Some of Us had been Threatening our Friend Colby
5 Benchley, Robert
“Take the Witness!”
6 Böll, Heinrich
Action Will Be Taken
7 Bulgakov, Mikhail
Bohemia
8 Carrington, Leonora
The Royal Summons
9 Carrington, Leonora
The Neutral Man
10 Chekhov, Anton
The Death of a Government Clerk
11 Chesterton, G.K.
The Tremendous Adventures of Major Brown
12 Cook, Peter & Moore, Dudley
Sex
13 Cook, Peter & Moore, Dudley
Father & Son
14 Coward, Noël
The Wooden Madonna
15 Crompton, Richmal
The Show
16 Denevi, Marco
The Lord of the Flies
17 Ephron, Nora
The Girl who Fixed the Umlaut
18 Fforde, Jasper
The Locked Room Mystery mystery
19 Galton, Ray & Simpson, Alan
from Hancock in the Police
20 Galton, Ray & Simpson, Alan
Sid’s Mystery Tours
21 Grenfell, Joyce
Story Time
22 Grenfell, Joyce
Committee
23 Grenfell, Joyce
Thought For Today
24 Grossmith, George & Weedon
from The Diary of a Nobody
25 Guareschi, Giovanni
A Sin Confessed
26 Guareschi, Giovanni
The Baptism
27 Guareschi, Giovanni
The Proclamation
28 Haddad, Saleem
Do I Understand That You Are A Homosexual, Sir?
29 Hamdi, Omar
Islam is not Spiritual, but it is a Useful Identity
30 Handey, Jack
The Plan
31 Handey, Jack
My First Day in Hell
32 Isola, Akinwumi
The Uses of English
33 Leacock, Stephen
My Financial Career
34 Malerba, Luigi
Consuming the View
35 Mansfield, Katherine
The Daughters of the Late Colonel
36 Marek, Adam
The 40-Litre Monkey
37 Mason, Bobbie Ann
La Bamba Hot Line
38 Maugham, W. Somerset
The Verger
39 McCall, Bruce
Hitler’s Secret Dairy
40 Mikes, George
How to Take Your Pleasure Sadly
41 Mikes, George
How to Die
42 Milligan, Spike
Foiled by President Fred
43 Mrożek, Sławomir
The Elephant
44 Novak, B.J.
The Man Who Invented the Calendar
45 O’Brien, Flann
Two in One
46 O’Brien, Flann
Scenes in a Novel
47 Oates, Joyce Carol
Welcome to Friendly Skies!
48 Parker, Dorothy
Just a Little One
49 Parker, Dorothy
You Were Perfectly Fine
50 Perelman, S.J.
Swindle Sheet with Blueblood Engrailed, Arrant Fibs Rampant
51 Perelman, S.J.
Why Boys Leave Home
52 Perelman, S.J.
Whose Lady Nicotine?
53 Pirandello, Luigi
You’re Laughing
54 Poe, Edgar Allan
The Angel of the Odd
55 Ray, Satyajit
The Two Comedians
56 Rich, Simon
Is It Just Me?
57 Saki
Tobermory
58 Saki
Filboid Studge, the Story of a Mouse that Helped
59 Saki
The Toys of Peace
60 Selikovich, Getsl
The Institute for Facial Reform
61 Semple, Maria
Dear Mountain Room Parents
62 Simms, Paul
Talking Chimp Gives His First Press Conference
63 Smith, Ali
The Child
64 Spark, Muriel
The Executor
65 Sumalavia, Ricardo
First Impressions
66 Thurber, James
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
67 Townsend, Sue
from The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 3/4
68 Twain, Mark
Aurelia’s Unfortunate Young Man
69 Vonnegut, Kurt
Tom Edison’s Shaggy Dog
70 Wells, H.G.
The Man Who Could Work Miracles
71 Wilde, Oscar
Aristotle at Afternoon Tea
72 Wilde, Oscar
London Models
73 Wilde, Oscar
The Canterville Ghost
74 Willett, Jincy
The Best of Betty
75 Wodehouse, P.G.
The Spot of Art
76 Wodehouse, P.G.
Mulliner’s Buck-U-Uppo
77 Wodehouse, P.G.
A Day with the Swattesmore
78 Wood, Victoria
Girls Talking
79 Wood, Victoria
Kitty: One
80 Wood, Victoria
Giving Notes
Extended Copyright
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
My favourite subject in school was English. I thoroughly enjoyed writing essays – or ‘compositions’ as they were called when I was ten. I suppose they were short stories of a kind; peopled with strange characters and the odd joke borrowed from The Goon Show. Spike Milligan’s scripts were my first intr
oduction to surreal humour, and a fondness for the absurd, strange and bizarre has stayed with me since those very early days.
The first comic short stories that I remember reading were by Richmal Crompton, whose immortal creation Just William – aka William Brown – captivated me from the start. William, the scruffy-socked rebellious hero, was a boy to look up to. He and his gang of Outlaws had endless adventures in 1920s rural England, a time and place that seemed far removed from my own world. This is where I first experienced the pure and delightful escapism a good story can provide.
As I progressed through school, my appetite for composing fiction grew year by year. Sometimes I tested the teachers marking my efforts. One composition, featuring a budgie called Amos the Turk, was considered good enough for me to read out loud to the rest of the class. One of my first experiences of performing my own material to an appreciative audience was, however, marred by my English teacher’s disdain for what I considered to be a legitimate comic ending: I then ran out of the hotel, hailed a passing taxi, and was never seen again. ‘You can’t say that!’ my teacher said, ‘only other people can say “you were never seen again”.’ I knew he was wrong, and I refused to accept limitations being imposed on what I was beginning to look upon as my craft. My next composition finished with the words: so there I was in the Amazon jungle surrounded by dozens of small threatening men, holding poison-tipped spears to my bare chest, when I suddenly hailed a passing taxi and was never seen again. The teacher wrote, ‘yes, alright!’ in red ink at the bottom of the page, and I remember feeling a keen sense of victory as, for once, comic writing had vanquished the voice of authority.
The comic short stories I wrote during my school years were an invaluable preparation for my first experiences in showbusiness as a stand-up comedian. The first piece I performed in front of a paying audience was of a policeman giving evidence in court describing a hallucinogenic experience he had suffered after unknowingly ingesting LSD. It went really well. My love of the surreal came shining through on such lines as, I saw Constable Parrish approaching me, disguised as a fortnight’s holiday in Benidorm. I found this type of character-driven monologue easier to write than bog-standard jokes – I was tapping into my school experience of creating fantasy worlds where a taxi could appear in a jungle, and a budgie could be named Amos the Turk. Clearly, my taste in comic writing leans heavily towards the fantastic.
Some authors in this collection are new to me. Before I began researching this book, I had never heard of Leonora Carrington. She was British born, but lived most of her life in Mexico City. She was a surrealist painter as well as a writer of short fiction and I have included two of her stories in this collection. They are prime examples of imaginative imagery combined with dazzling prose. In ‘The Neutral Man’, she describes the title character in one stunning sentence: I saw a man of such neutral appearance that he struck me like a salmon with the head of a sphinx in the middle of a railway station. Naturally, such a description is right up my street, but I mustn’t give the impression that all my selections are surreal in tone. There are many that are down to earth, although comic exaggeration always plays a part.
A word now on how the stories were selected. Firstly, most authors do not write short stories, and those that do seldom compose purely comic ones. There are very few P.G. Wodehouses out there, who delight in creating charming scenarios where nobody dies and the hero always emerges triumphant. Wodehouse is one of a handful of authors that I simply couldn’t get enough of, so I have chosen three of his works for this compendium. A Jeeves and Wooster story was unavoidable, and ‘Mulliners Buck-U-Uppo’ has been a favourite of mine since I first read it forty years ago. But I didn’t want to simply pick stories that would be familiar to the well-read reader, so my third Wodehouse choice, ‘A Day with the Swattesmore,’ is hopefully an obscure delight that only the most devoted of fans would have been previously aware of.
The other authors who merit a three-story selection are Saki, Joyce Grenfell, Giovanni Guareschi, S.J. Perelman, Oscar Wilde and Victoria Wood. They each create such captivating worlds that I found it very difficult to tear myself away – or to choose just one. Although Joyce Grenfell and Victoria Wood are not traditionally seen as short story writers, I have no problem stretching the definition of the form to include them here. After all, this is a book of my favourite comic writing, so it must include my favourite comic writers. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and the writers of ‘Hancock’s Half Hour’ Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, are also included simply because they are too good to leave out. Ray and Alan’s first entry, an extract from ‘Hancock in the Police’ featuring Tony Hancock and Kenneth Williams is, for my money, one of the funniest routines ever written. I urge you to listen to the actual recording of the programme. Every line gets a huge laugh from the studio audience. The sheer density of the jokes is phenomenal and I know of no other sketch that packs so much laughter into just a few minutes. A comparison between the script as written and the final version performed live reveals the material that was added after the cast’s initial read through. No doubt inspired by Kenneth Williams’s sublime performance, the writers added extra lines. The performance pieces in this volume are ones that I grew up with, but they also stand up as literature on the page.
S.J. Perelman was somebody I first read when I was in my late teens, and back then I simply didn’t get him. I knew he was highly regarded and that he had written a couple of Marx Brothers movies, but his prose struck me as highly mannered and simply not funny. For the purposes of this anthology, I revisited Perelman and found, much to my delight, that in the intervening years, his comic writing had improved dramatically. (I jest, because of course it was me who had changed.) I suppose I am no longer intimidated by his genius. Now, I can finally appreciate the musicality of his words as they flow effortlessly across the page.
Only one of the authors enjoying a three-story status was completely unknown to me before I began working on this tome. Giovanni Guareschi’s tales of Don Camillo, the Italian priest with a hefty left hook, are absolutely delightful in their satirical swipes at human weakness in priestly form. One of the chief delights in concocting this collection has been discovering authors I might not have otherwise read. Looking down the contents list, I see that just over half the entries are by people I had never heard of a year ago.
I have listed the stories alphabetically by the author’s surname, which has the effect of grouping the writers into coincidental clusters. A surreal enclave emerges around Spike Milligan, Sławomir Mrożek, B.J. Novak and Flann O’Brien, who follow one another completely accidentally and yet so fittingly. The order could not have been bettered by design. At the end of the book, Oscar Wilde, P.G. Wodehouse and Victoria Wood make an excellent trio of dinner party guests who would, no doubt, have a lot to say to each other. In Oscar’s case, although he has three titles, two of them are reviews, chosen because they give us his undisguised voice, rather than that of the dramatist hiding behind his characters. In these pieces, we hear Oscar as a dining companion sitting across the table from us, being wittily snobbish about the working-class poor. For a greater understanding of working-class culture, Victoria Woods’s ‘Girls Talking’ is a brilliant capture of no-hope kids stuck at the bottom of the pile.
Although the authors vary wildly in background, they all share common aims. To distract, to divert. To create entertaining worlds. To melt away the misery of reality and replace it with a world of imagination, fun, excitement. A world where absurdity meets illogicality. Where animals talk to us and secret diaries become huge best-sellers beloved by millions. Having read so widely for this book, I have reaffirmed my view that comedy is particularly suited to the short story form. By its very nature the short story is a concise medium. Brevity is the soul of wit. Complicated plots are rarely funny – simplicity is often key.
You are at liberty, dear reader, to treat the following contents as if they were a box of chocolates. By all means, pick your favourites first or save them till last. T
here is no right order. It is my sincere wish that you will find much to delight you in the following pages and, unlike chocolate, I guarantee that none of the stories will rot your teeth.
Happy reading.
PAUL MERTON
London, 2019
THERE WAS ONCE
Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood (1939–) is an award-winning Canadian writer. She is the author of more than forty works of fiction, poetry and critical essays, and her books have been published in over thirty-five countries. Although she’s now probably best known for her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, this story displays brilliantly her wise wit and creative imagination.
— There was once a poor girl, as beautiful as she was good, who lived with her wicked stepmother in a house in the forest.
— Forest? Forest is passé, I mean, I’ve had it with all this wilderness stuff. It’s not a right image of our society, today. Let’s have some urban for a change.
— There was once a poor girl, as beautiful as she was good, who lived with her wicked stepmother in a house in the suburbs.
— That’s better. But I have to seriously query this word poor.