Dead Man Laughing

The Art of the Personal Essay doesn't feature a lot of essays by female writers. For those of you who are sensitive to such things (and for those of you who are just interested in reading essays by some successful contemporary writers,) here's the opening paragraph of an essay from the New Yorker that I read and enjoyed recently . It's by Zadie Smith (that's Zadie in the photo at right) and it appeared in the December 22nd, 2008 issue. The full title of the essay is "Dead Man Laughing: Jokes run through a family." It is labeled a "Personal History." This essay, and Rosenblatt's "Making Toast" (which I distributed in class), offer an interesting contrast to Steele's "An Hour or Two Sacred To Sorrow" in the different ways that they process the death of a loved one through writing.

My father had few enthusiasms, but he loved comedy. He was a comedy nerd, though this is so common a condition in Britain as to be almost not worth mentioning. Like most Britons, Harvey gathered his family around the defunct hearth each night to watch the same half-hour comic situations repeatedly, in reruns and on video. We knew the “Dead Parrot” sketch by heart. We had the usual religious feeling for “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.” If we were notable in any way, it was not in kind but in extent. In our wood-cabinet music center, comedy records outnumbered the Beatles. The Goons’ “I’m Walking Backward for Christmas” got an airing all year long. We liked to think of ourselves as particular, on guard against slapstick’s easy laughs—Benny Hill was beneath our collective consideration. I suppose the more precise term is “comedy snobs.”

If you are interested in reading the rest, click on this link .

The gentleman in the hat in the photo at left is Benny Hill.