THE TIMES

Funny Ha Ha: 80 of the Funniest Stories Ever Written, review — Paul Merton’s miscellany

This is an odd comic compendium, but it will make you laugh, reckons James Walton 

If there were an annual award for the best book with a wildly misleading title, Funny Ha Ha: 80 of the Funniest Stories Ever Written would be a shoo-in for 2019. More than a quarter of the offerings aren’t stories at all, but essays, comedy sketches, excerpts from novels, radio scripts (with opening and closing credits from the announcer) and whimsical magazine pieces.

Many, if not most, are firmly in the category of “funny peculiar” rather than “funny ha ha” — and some don’t seem intended to be funny in any way. Satyajit Ray’s The Two Comedians is perfectly charming and Katherine Mansfield’s dazzlingly good The Daughters of the Late Colonel is a lot more than that. Their authors, though, would surely have been startled, and possibly a bit miffed, to learn that anybody considered them among the funniest stories ever written.

Paul Merton’s introduction, which acts as a kind of small print to the large print of the title, does acknowledge that the book won’t be quite as advertised. “After all,” he tells us, “this is a book of my favourite comic writing, so it must include my favourite comic writers” — even those such as Joyce Grenfell, Victoria Wood and others who are “not traditionally seen as short-story writers” (mainly because they aren’t). He also explains that his taste in humour “leans heavily to the fantastic”, hence the preference for the absurd and surreal over the “purely comic”.

And yet, in the admittedly unlikely event that Merton were to be prosecuted under the Trade Descriptions Act, the world would be deprived of a real treat — because while Funny Ha Ha may not remotely do what it says on the tin, the tin is packed with goodies. There’s scarcely a dud among them. Of course, they’re not uniformly strong but the weaker ones tend to be weak in intriguing and sometimes revealing ways, with old comic warhorses such as Stephen Leacock and SJ Perelman, for instance, now feeling distinctly off the pace.

There’s also the sheer range of authors that Merton has picked: from the virtually obligatory but still great (PG Wodehouse, Dorothy Parker, Mark Twain) to the more obscure but still great (Jincy Willett, Simon Rich, BJ Novak). On the whole, the non-stories work well too, although The Goon Show doesn’t seem very funny to me without the silly voices. (Then again, it doesn’t seem very funny to me with them.)

Merton also includes several writers in translation and, for me at least, offers several welcome chances to assuage readerly guilt by catching up on people that you probably should have read before. Who knew, for example, that Donald Barthelme — normally given the unalluring label of “academic postmodernist” — would be so much deadpan sinister fun?

The book’s winning randomness receives a further boost from Merton’s unusual but in the end triumphant decision to arrange the stories by alphabetical order of the authors’ surnames. At times, this leads to neat coincidences, as when the alarmingly articulate ape in Paul Simms’s Talking Chimp Gives His First Press Conference is immediately followed by the alarmingly articulate baby in Ali Smith’s The Child. (Both stories are also properly funny ha ha.) At others, the juxtapositions are just enjoyably weird: Anton Chekhov, GK Chesterton, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Richmal Crompton.

I could have done with more hard information about the writers than we get in the slightly banal paragraphs that preface each story (“Heinrich Böll was one of Germany’s foremost writers of the twentieth century”) — and are simply repeated word for word if the writer appears more than once. Unforgivably, for quite a few of the stories, we’re not even given their date. Nonetheless, I suspect that anybody who dips into Funny Ha Ha, or better still reads it through in that crazy alphabetical order, will emerge many hours later filled not only with pleasure and delight, but also with a sense of gratitude to Merton for choosing so well.
Funny Ha Ha: 80 of the Funniest Stories Ever Written, selected and introduced by Paul Merton, Head of Zeus, 633pp; £25

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/funny-ha-ha-80-of-the-funniest-stories-ever-written-review-paul-mertons-miscellany-20dzqbsv8