Posted 6:27 PM by Gene

Someone named Malchow had to point to the winner of something UK called "the 2007 National Short Story prize" who says our literature has disastrously abandoned comedy for the self-referentially gloomy. We won't quibble with the deadly dullness of modern fiction, desiccated as it is by freeze-drying and vacuum packing in the academy, even if the complaint too often resounds like received opinion in an echo chamber; but the author gives her show away by citing the usual trendy pop-cultural favorites (you know who they are) as a source of comic inspiration and believing that the Web represents a wealth of something beyond logorhhea, and then by further believing it is possible to laugh out loud at writing. Trouble is the movies and television took the printed word's humor away through their ruthless efficiency. What college alumnus didn't slog through Tristram Shandy, the unfunniest book ever to accrue a "hilarious" fame? That she mentions A Confederacy of Dunces further annoys us as there's another book whose comedy comes solely from its reputation. And what is Rabelais in his essence but the inventor of fart jokes? (Just like Chaucer, whose alleged humor was but a bawdy version of Truth or Consequences.) And let us not forget most humor is rooted to its time and place like the sequoia, and transmogrifies into toothpicks. Ask the Artemus Ward Fan Club. One can further imagine the writing clique taking this Stale.com iconoclasm to its withered bosom and mass-producing comic novels every bit as award-winning as their gloom. No, the problem isn't that we can't produce comedy; the problem is we can't produce literature.