what happens to humour

Because I have a plan (semi-flagged a few months ago on this blog) to write a journal article about Make Mine Mink, I bought a few cheap books online some time ago to help with a bit of colour. One arrived today - so long after I ordered it that, in fact, I had assumed that I had forgotten to buy it - Terry-Thomas' 1990 memoir, Terry-Thomas Tells Tales. It was published posthumously, in the year that he died, with an afterword by his co-author explaining that, although they had essentially completed the book in 1984, T-T got a bit obsessive about it and insisted he was going to pepper it with more amusing elements, but Parkinson's got the better of him. He kept the manuscript by his side for years, apparently, long after he lost the ability to speak, but could do nothing with it beyond a few amendments to the first third.

I am not going to go on and on about it or even attempt to pull together anything like a reflective overview of the book, mainly because it's so flippin' depressing. Every single joke, every anecdote and funny story, even every observation intended to amuse, doesn't just fall flat; it's from a universe that looks incredibly familiar, in fact a world I engage with in some way or another every day (via ideas from the 30s-70s, as absorbed-projected in films, tv, books, music etc) but in which the humour is just completely bleached out of the picture. T-T's world of entertaining ideas and concepts are not even banal, they're just like flavourless food. It's almost impressive for its ghastly shallowness, but it's also horrendous.   

What happens to humour? On facebook yesterday someone linked to a Stewart Lee clip, with a comment about whether they weren't sure if he was joking or not. I watched the whole ten minute clip (the 'playing the room as it's dealt' schtick) although I've seen it numerous times already, and marvelled at it. It's an extended riff on the audience's complicity in the comic's misery, and it's exceptionally clever. Terry-Thomas would presumably have barely understood it as comedy, I suppose (though it does mention Tony Hancock and T-T also talks about Hancock's, and other comedians', depressive phases). It made me think that, if and when Stewart Lee comes to Australia again (I've never seen him live) I think I might just go to as many shows as I can, perhaps even across a few cities, I'm that impressed by him. 

The T-T book on the other hand is the saddest thing, and not in a good way. Which is a shame because when he's good in a film, he's very good, although he's also (as he makes clear, unabashed about following the biggest-paying roles in any film, not out to make art) a hack, but I can admire a lot in hackdom. 

By the way one of the most interesting things in this pretty awful tome comes right at the beginning when T-T comes closest to self-awareness/analysis; he says that his parents had four boys, trying for a girl. He was the second-youngest (so presumably a disappointment) and when his sister came along he was no longer even the baby; so he played up for laughs, the only way he knew to retain his family's interest. That and the gap in his teeth, which was a quirk that presumably if nothing else made him self-conscious in good and perhaps bad ways. He says his sister had the same, incidentally.