Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

[solosundance]

Published: 1954
My edition: Penguin Modern Classics
Pages: 276

I noticed this the other day in one of those Top Ten Funniest Books Ever list.  And I also read an old review which said you shouldn't read it sitting on the bus because your howls of laughter would make people look at you funny.

Well.

Comments

My review: Meet the Pedants

[admnaismith]

Dixon ran his eye along the lines of black dots, which seemed to go up and down a good deal, and was able to assure himself that everyone was going to have to sing all the time. He’d had a bad setback twenty minutes ago in some Brahms rubbish which began with ten seconds or so of unsupported tenor-more accurately, of unsupported Goldsmith, who’d twice dried up in the face of a tricky interval and left him opening and closing his mouth in silence. He now cautiously reproduced the note Goldsmith was humming and found the effect pleasing rather than the reverse. Why hadn’t they had the decency to ask him if he’d like to join in, instead of driving him up onto this platform arrangement and forcing sheets of paper into his hand?

My last book of 2009 was one of the oddest. It was billed as a classic English comedy along the lines of PG Wodehouse and Jerome K Jerome, good for an evening or two of giggles. Aside from a few well turned phrases here and there ("Things are very difficult, very difficult", Caton said. Dixon gabbled into the phone, then mentioned a few difficult things which occurred to him as suitable tasks for Dr. Caton to have a go at.), I didn't find most of it funny. Maybe it wasn't my kind of humor.

The book reminded me of a "funny" Ben Stiller movie where the hero is forced into the company of a bunch of horrible people to whom he has to suck up and pretend to enjoy all sorts of "funny" embarrassing situations. Lucky Jim is a beginning lecturer begging for prestige crumbs in a tweedy college full of pretentious academic jerks, their hideous families, and predatory women. I kept expecting Jim's imperturable manservant to pop up and extricate him from bad situations by humiliating him in public, except that Jim, unlike the pretentious academics, isn't part of the British manservant-having class, and is treated contemptibly for it. Which is part of why the humor doesn't work for me. Bertie Wooster's situations are funny because he's an upper class twit whose pride is usually all that suffers; Dixon just gets stepped on. It's a lot funnier when the Emperor has no clothes than when the homeless have no clothes.

Similarly, the Dortmunder gang get into funny jams through criminal activity, while Dixon is (mostly) an innocent. It was also jarring to see professors depicted as idle rich; most of the higher ed people I know are neither rich nor rude nor stupid. Worth reading, but it's not something I'll be coming back to any time soon.