A Box of Books

On fighting over what's funny.

“What’re you doing?” my dad asked when he called one evening. I was doing nothing, bored, so I sat up straight when I caught the excitement in his voice. “Get over here, I’ve got a haul to share with you.”

When I got to his house, there were cardboard boxes spread across the floor of the living room, and he was rubbing his hands the way you do only if you’re the villain in campy movies. There were dozens of books in these boxes, and they’d been poached from a school library.

Poached is the wrong word. The school librarian wanted rid of them to make space in the library (for more books, I have to hope), and my dad was working back then as a teacher’s assistant, so he was sent home with several boxes full of hardbacks. He called me over so we could go through them together, deciding which of us would take which books.

If a person’s love of reading can be traced back to an origin the way eye colour goes back to a gene from one parent or another, I definitely got my bookishness from my dad. He also handed down to me his love of the pun and of puerile wit.

One of the boxes we looked through had the full works of Anthony Trollope, which neither of us wanted, but my dad and I laughed when I pointed out we had a box of Trollopes. It was the unsophisticated humour of homophones and the asinine pleasure of an archaic insult. It was also memory-making to giggle together like schoolboys. The comradery of the moment was underscored by a well-timed eyeroll from my stepmum. (My wife sided with her by suppressing a grin beneath an unconvincingly straight face.)

All of the books my dad had here were from the Everyman’s Library series, a publishing imprint whose founder promised to publish 1,000 of the world’s classics at a price anyone could afford. He wanted everyone to have Marlowe’s “infinite riches in a little room”. My dad and I spent a fun evening dividing that infinity to share between us.

I took home two wobbling stacks of books including Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Updike’s Rabbit novels, Proust in four volumes, three novels by Penelope Fitzgerald, and Hemingway’s short stories. Each book was stripped of its dustcover — a bibliophile’s sin committed, inexplicably, by the school librarian — but each book’s birthday suit is a fabric that’s nice to touch, in a colour that’s nice to look at. My wife and I agreed the books would look good on display. We had the perfect place for them.

There’s a fireplace in our living room that looks nice but can’t be used unless (an inspector told us) we feel like dying of carbon monoxide poisoning. It had almost killed us once. My brother and I built a large fire the first winter that my wife and I were living in this apartment. We started a blaze, settled in for a movie, and an hour later had lethargising headaches.

“Man, I really need a nap,” my brother said.

“Huh?” I said, waking up.

Neither of us thought about the fact that the apartment has no carbon monoxide detector and no ventilation. All the windows and doors were closed. It was only because we decided to take a walk in the snow to shake off the sleepies that we got reacquainted with oxygen.

The upside of all this is that the fireplace is useless, except the mantelpiece, which makes a great bookshelf. So we lined our Everyman’s collection on top of the defunct fireplace, an unfortunate metaphor for being functionally useless but nice to look at.

I worry about this sometimes when I think about the fact that I have this long row of beautiful books in my living room, a collection every visitor sees as if it’s some kind of announcement about their host, yet I’ve only read a third of them. Maybe I’m a poser, an imposter, one of those people who confuses Instagram for real life. Or: Let me decorate my place as I like, please. I’ll read them eventually, and then they won’t just be things of beauty, they’ll be meaningful additions to my library. There’s just no avoiding that until these books are opened and read, they’re like the fireplace itself — functionally useless but nice to look at.

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One that I have read from this collection is Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, which I’ve re-read a few times since. There’s infinite riches in that not-so-little book. And it’s a book that reliably makes me laugh. Honestly, that’s what I value most about it. I know it’s saying tons about war and violence, free will and futility, and the machines of bureaucratic bullshit, but what I think about when I think of Catch-22 is that it’s funny. It makes me laugh. Simple as that.

Turns out Heller would have been surprised to know his book would make so many readers laugh. He told an interviewer for The Paris Review that he’d supposed what he was writing was funny, but it surprised him to find out it was funny ha ha. He says a friend was reading an early draft of Catch-22 in another room of Heller’s apartment, and the friend kept laughing loudly, which made Heller realise he had a gift for the comic. It took an audience to reveal what he was showing them.

When I think about what makes me laugh in Catch-22, I often think about the colonel in the hospital ward with a “vortex of specialists who were still specializing in trying to determine what was wrong with him”. He has a “pathologist for his pathos” and a “cystologist for his cysts”, despite the fact that there’s no such thing — it’s a misspelling of “cytologist”. Best of all is his “cetologist from the zoology department at Harvard” who’s roped in to help the colonel because of a fault in the machine that allocates jobs. This misplaced expert in whales spends his sessions with the colonel “trying to discuss Moby Dick”.

I’m a sucker for the comedy of upset expectations, of reversals and non-sequiturs, when a punchline takes you by surprise. The humour I like best is like that old adage about playing chess with a pigeon; you’ve got the pieces lined up, you think you know the next move, and the bird just flips the board over, scattering the pieces and your expectations. Catch-22 is full of broken or absent chains of causality that imply a deeper meaning yet never deliver on it — like when Yossarian quits playing chess with the artillery captain because “the games were so interesting as to be foolish”.

Then there are the jokes that are only funny after you’ve seen the shape of the whole book, like the opening line, which I only laughed at when I re-read the novel. It goes:

“It was love at first sight.
The first time Yossarian saw the chaplain he fell madly in love with him.”

Why’s this funny? Because it never comes up again. It has nothing to do with nothing. Heller’s telling us, Sure, Yossarian’s fallen in love, but does it matter? People fall in love every day. When I re-read the first lines and realised that they go nowhere, I giggled at this authorial mischief, the dangled carrot tossed casually aside as if Heller is shrugging at us, saying, This is life: full of things that sometimes matter and sometimes don’t. Blame the inexplicable and esoteric workings of a person’s sense of humour, but I find that funny.

A friend recently picked up Catch-22 to read for the first time, which makes me happy and deeply anxious. Catch-22 is one of my personal shibboleths for assessing nascent friendships: if it can’t raise a smile, we’ll be on two sides of a chasm wondering how the other got over there. This friend is embedded in my life with no chance of losing my admiration, but we’re both the kind of person whose affection is increased by a passionate, well-argued dispute. If he doesn’t find Catch-22 funny, we’re going to have words.

In Howards End is on the Landing (which I wrote about last month), Susan Hill strikes a note of taste-related caution when it comes to comedy:

“Humour in books is a very personal thing and not a subject about which to be superior.”

Superior, no, but occasionally mystified. I meet smart people who enjoy movies that pass off the dullest clichés as jokes, and I can’t make sense of it. Friends who’d throw out any book full of banalities will giggle mindlessly at the same in sitcoms, as if their intellectual nerve-endings are numbed by a laugh track.

Then I remember sniggering at the box of Trollopes and realise there are many, many stupid things I find funny. Laugh and let laugh, I guess.

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