Death of British comic novels?

Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim is one of my all-time favorite novels. Not only is it hilariously funny, but also I’ve always identified with its title character, Jim Dixon, a man who finds himself adrift in the absurdities of academia. Better to identify with the Jim of Lucky Jim than with the Jim of Lord Jim!

The British have a long tradition of wonderful comic fiction, from Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat to P. G. Wodehouse’s stories about Jeeves. From Evelyn Waugh’s vicious satires of the upper class to David Lodge’s send-ups of small-time academic life. This small island has always been large on this particular stage.

In this week’s Guardian, Jonathan Coe, no slouch himself in the comic fiction department, muses about the possible death of this tradition. He speculates:

Indeed, the rational case for the stifling of laughter until our global problems have been soberly addressed and sorted out seems unanswerable. Jim Dixon may have had the cold war to worry about, but in other respects he seems to have been living in a fool's paradise, a bubble of provincial ignorance which today's novelists are simply not permitted to share. Where are the laughs in massacre, famine and climate change, exactly? What's so funny about the Middle East, North Korea and Afghanistan? Who's going to chuckle when they pick up the London Review of Books and find John Lanchester arguing, effectively as always, that the banking habits of the British people pose a greater threat to their own security than terrorism?

Ultimately, though, Coe, rereading Wodehouse, realizes that the “pure, unpolluted” zaniness of the Jeeves stories offer an escape from the realities of living in such dispiriting times.