'A Sense of Fun and a Sense of Proportion'

Last Sunday, on the centenary of the birth of Dennis Norden, Nige reminded us of the BBC radio show My Word! For years I listened to its rebroadcast in the U.S. on National Public Radio, when that network was still listenable. Norden and his writing partner Frank Muir indulged in word games and literary quizzes, and I always marveled at their casual erudition and the elaborate punchline puns they confected, much in the style of Myles na gCopaleen’s Keats-and-Chapman shaggy-dog stories. Their humor was at once witty and silly, never didactic, and sounded to my American ears distinctly English.

In 1990, Muir edited The Oxford Book of Humorous Prose: From William Caxton to P.G. Wodehouse. I love intelligently edited anthologies. I owe much of my education to them. Muir’s is generous -- 1,162 pages, with selections from more than two-hundred writers. Hardly a name is missing, so why no letters from William Cowper or anything from Henry James and Nabokov?  The top five writers represented, in terms of pages filled, are, in descending order, Dickens, Twain, Perelman, Wodehouse and Austen. Muir’s introduction is worth reading for its own sake. His first sentence: “This book is intended to be not only an anthology raisonnée but also a gesture of gratitude and commemoration.” Muir’s touch can be aphoristic: “Wit is the aristocratic aspect of comedy.” And he defines what he’s after:

 

“The English sense of humour is an agreeable mixture of a sense of fun and a sense of proportion, which is not at all the same thing as a taste for buffoonery. Perhaps a small axiom could be proposed: beware of people who only laugh at jokes.”

 

[Muir does include a sample of Keats-and-Chapman punnage. The final line: “Great mines stink alike.”]