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The Art of the Goof
“It’s good sportsmanship to not pick up lost golf balls while they are still rolling.” – Mark Twain.
The gentle art of good-natured humour in a nutshell. Graceful, cheerful, and honest. It’s also a line that speaks to me. It says: Honesty in life makes life worth living. And always try to keep a light heart and hold on to your sense of humour – they’re the only things keeping you afloat sometimes.
Occasionally there comes along a Mark Twain or a P. G. Wodehouse or a Terry Pratchett. They make the world lighter for their passing through. They make the daft jokes, the soppy jokes – the jokes that dare not speak their name, sometimes – because if they didn’t make them, who’d be enough of a goof to do it?
They’re not particularly interested in politics, and they certainly don’t confuse it with real life. They are honest and gentle and quite often kind.
Wodehouse is possibly a slight outlier in that group, because it’s much rarer to come across him angry – but a certain honest anger is part of the art of the goof.[1] I say honest anger because it’s generally rooted in the truth. It sees through to what’s really going on and shines a big, bright shiny light on it, and then starts cracking jokes that are at once genuinely funny and at the same time deadly bloody serious. Terry Pratchett was a master at it – all the more so for being scrupulously honest and fair-minded.
(You’ve all heard the one about morality being about ‘shades of grey’: in Terry Pratchett’s book Carpe Jugulum, you hear the line ‘There’s no greys, just white that’s got grubby’ and sin ‘is when you treat people as things. Including yourself.’ And this in a book that gleefully has all manner of fun with every horror movie cliché it can get its hands on, and does it in a thoroughly good-natured, kind-hearted way. There are reasons I admire Terry Pratchett so much.)
And having said all that, you may associate P. G. Wodehouse with Jeeves and Wooster – but behind the ever-so-English (supposedly not very intelligent) voice of Bertie Wooster is often an extremely sharply written novel. There’s a reason so many people seem to say Wodehouse is what they read when they’re down in the dumps: first he makes you smile, then he makes you laugh, then he makes your heart sing.
When a writer makes you wish he’d written more, that’s probably about as fine a tribute as you could ask. When a writer makes you laugh and feel and cry, that’s reason to be grateful they lived. But when someone makes the world lighter, and the light brighter, for his having been there, and is soppy enough to make the joke that is, so to speak, hanging there in the air – that’s reason to believe in angels.
Sometimes we’re beyond their help.
The rest of the time they make it so much easier to dance in time with the music.
[1] Though I owe Wodehouse at least a nod for the title.
Published in Humor
I’m with you. Wodehouse never gets old.
OK. Can I tell a daft joke? It was the first real joke that my granddaughter “got.” She was about six, and her mother was teaching her simple math concepts.
“General!” Shouted the King. “How many soldiers do I have?”
“Your Majesty, you have 391 soldiers,” responded his top general.
“Round ’em up!” shouted the King.
The General thought for a moment.
“400, Sire!” He yelled.
I still laugh myself into paroxysms over that. Not so much over the rather lame joke, but at the absolute delight it engendered in a little girl who had discovered, and six years later, still loves, wordplay.
She’s a lot more jaundiced at the advanced age of twelve, though. The other day I was talking to her on the phone, and moaning about the unreliability of meteorologists, who’d been promising, and not delivering, much-needed rain, every day for at least a week.
“They’re such liars,” I said. “You can’t trust a word they say.”
Without missing a beat, and with perfect timing, this sweet child said
“Yes. They’re almost as bad as politicians.”
So wise, for one so young.
Simply. Lovely. Post.
It takes an accomplished author to depict a character who might not be all that bright, but is endearing nonetheless.
And then there’s Twain’s splendid essay “On the Decay of the Art of Lying“.
The truth is in the tale that tells the tail of the wag.
A daft joke is always welcome in good company.
You know that’s true. Now that I think about it, it’s surprising how fresh it feels to wander off into Wodehouse. Not to mention how welcoming it feels too. It’s like each story is its own collection of little places you can just sit down out of the way with a cup of tea and rest easy for a bit.
Probably my favorite passage:
The “P” is silent, as in ptarmigan and pneumonia.
I have not read anything by Woodhouse or Pratchett although I see their names fairly often. That is something I will rectify. Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) has captivated me for decades. He combined the insightful wit and humor of Tom Wolfe and Will Rogers within the society that he lived in. Huckleberry Finn was considered the quintessential American novel until the word
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became unspeakable and Clemens’s reputation in the pantheon of American writers began to be erased. If there is a heaven where authors can look back on their legacy, Twain is still smiling, somewhat ruefully, but still smiling along with anyone who had read his words.
If you love Twain, you’ve got to give Wodehouse a read.
Pericval, I will. I have already loaded my kindle app.
I wasn’t sure what ‘ptarmigan’ was. Jeeves, consulting the dictionary, informs me that it is ‘a northern grouse of mountainous and Arctic regions’. You learn something new every day.
I was reminded of a bit I saw that Kipling had said about Mark Twain and had to look it up. It’s from a piece he wrote when he met him I think (I type out of the book it’s in, I hope accurately):
It is a glorious thing to have all of those two other two ahead of you to read for the first time, though.
Terry Pratchett seems to have once later cautioned (half jokingly, perhaps) against starting at the beginning of the Discworld books (The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic — they are very different books in some ways), adding ‘this is the author saying this, folks’.
With P. G. Wodehouse, I’m fond of Thank You, Jeeves, which I think may be the first full-length Jeeves and Wooster novel (before that there are short stories) and his golf stories (some of which are published in The Clicking of Cuthbert and, naturally enough, The Heart of a Goof), but there’s also Blandings and lots of stand-alones.
Related to the partridges without the pear trees.
And then there is the Psammead or sand-fairy. Or should that be psand-fairy?