World's funniest sentence

Not aphorisms, or witticisms, and certainly not jokes and smart-arse one liners. What I'm after are sentences (and sometimes a series of sentences) that are funny in themselves, but which rely on a context for their effect.

This was prompted by my off-the-cuff remark recently that the author Anthony Buckeridge - creator of the immortal schoolboy Jennings and his pal Darbishire - would be hard to beat, on the strength of Darby's flailing attempts to say, following a bicycle crash: "My black back brake block's broken!" (from Jennings's Diary). At the age of eight or nine I could think of nothing funnier, apart from his regular cry of "Fossilised fishhooks!"


I haven't given much thought to what follows but here, in no particular order, are some favourites:

1. 'Perhaps this will refresh your memory'. It's the caption to a cartoon by James Thurber. You'll need to look up the image of course, if you don't know it already.  Brace yourself.

2. 'I shall sit here,' the Footman remarked, 'till tomorrow - ' At this moment the door of the house opened, ... 'I shall sit here,' he said, 'on and off, for days and days. 

The great Peter Cook found these lines from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland  particularly hilarious. He 'did' the voice of the frog Footman as a dimwit yokel. 

3. From Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet. I can' find a copy but I recall the end of a lengthy episode in which the titular heroes decide to become farmers and after a scrupulous study of all the literature and heavy investment in infrastructure and feed, attempt to raise pigs, This culminates in the simple and deadpan line:

                             The pigs escaped and bit people. 

4. When Lauren Bacall first met Humphrey Bogart on the set of To Have and Have Not she reportedly told him: 'Without my glasses you're a good-looking guy.'

5. P. G. Wodehouse of course - but where to begin? I'd plump for 'Some girls are the sand in civilisation's spinach'. That will have to do for now. Or Jeeves, in his 'stately procession of one'.

6. "Advanced, forthright, signifficant".  It's Nigel Molesworth, nailing the modish young philosopher Colin Wilson. That double f makes me happy. Geoffrey Willans!

7. George and Weedon Grossmith's Diary of a Nobody. Too many bone-dry lines to savour. But I'll go of the moment when Mr Pooter lowers himself into a very hot bathtub (which he has recently decorated in Pinkford's red enamel paint). Here's the passage, and I'll reveal the particular sentence that melts my butter afterwards:

    On moving my hand above the surface of the water, I experienced the greatest fright I ever received in the whole course of my life; for imagine my horror on discovering my hand, as I thought, full of blood. My first thought was that I had ruptured an artery, and was bleeding to death, and should be discovered, later on, looking like a second Marat, as I remember seeing him in Madame Tussaud’s. My second thought was to ring the bell, but remembered there was no bell to ring. My third was, that there was nothing but the enamel paint, which had dissolved with boiling water. I stepped out of the bath, perfectly red all over, resembling the Red Indians I have seen depicted at an East–End theatre. I determined not to say a word to Carrie, but to tell Farmerson to come on Monday and paint the bath white.

What reliably makes me shake with laughter is "My second thought was to ring the bell, but remembered there was no bell to ring." We all have moments like that. Or days.

8. "The fleet's lit up" Lieutenant-Commander Thomas 'Tommy' Woodroffe (1899–1978) was a British naval officer, broadcaster and writer. After his retirement he became a commentator for BBC Radio. 

From the fairly-reliable Wikipedia entry on the great man:

   In 1937 he was to describe the Spithead Review from his old ship the battleship HMS Nelson. Apparently he met some of his former colleagues before the broadcast and drank to the extent that his broadcast, still known today by his repeated use of the phrase "the fleet's lit up", was so incoherent he was taken off air after a few minutes and suspended for a week by the BBC Director-General John Reith.

9. 'I'm picky'  Isabelle Huppert. when asked how she can be both a nymphomaniac and a virgin, in Hal Hartley's wonderful indie movie Amateur.

10. 'Nobody's perfect' Over-exposed perhaps, but still a hell of a line, from Billy Wilder's Some Like it Hot. And it's also true, which is a bonus.

11. 'He's not the Messiah. He's a very naughty boy'. 

12. 'Hard boiled eggs and nuts' says Ollie straight to the camera, understandably disgusted by Stan's 'gift' in County Hospital.

13.  'Swipe me how glittering' (or any number of glum ejaculations from the lad himself, Tony Hancock).

14.  Hardly a joke, more an expression of a world view, and therefore admissible: an opening line from Ken Dodd, at the start of an epic one-man show exploring the limits of language and human endurance: "What a beautiful day! What a beautiful day for sticking a cucumber through the vicar's letterbox and shouting "THE MARTIANS HAVE LANDED!"

15. O could hardly overlook this one: Collapse of stout party It's not so much the mildly salacious sentence that triggers the moment, but the inexorable descent into inarticulate sobs and gurgles that's so compelling. A worthy conclusion - and companion piece to number 8 (above).

More to follow, perhaps.

On Julian Maclaren-Ross

Last week - Tuesday November 3rd to be precise - marked the anniversary of the death, in 1964, of the wonderful writer Julian Maclaren-Ross.

So this is a belated blog, prompted by the great Soho chronicler's passing, just over half a century ago. He died broke and it was only a few years ago that, thanks to the heroic efforts of the  journalist Virginia Ironside and members of the Sohemian Society, a gravestone was belatedly commissioned and put in place. I was present at the ceremony and delivered the following heartfelt doggerel, as whiskey was poured over the elegant headstone and cigarettes left, for what use is an afterlife without booze and baccy?

Maclaren Ross is the subject of one of the very best literary biographies you'll ever read:  Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia by Paul Willetts.

The poem was, and is, dedicated to Julian's son Alex.


Lines to Mark the Unveiling of a Headstone

For Alex Maclaren-Ross

Dear Julian Maclaren-Ross,

     You wouldn’t give a tinker’s toss

     For all this fuss. This is for us – the living.

We’re here to perpetrate an act of giving.

It’s true our congregation’s small in number -

     Not sure what quorum constitutes a wake.

     We’ve interrupted your eternal slumber

To celebrate a dandy and a rake,

Who loved the rough sodality of pubs,

     Cocoon’d by fugs of gossip, banter, quips,

     Spoofing the hours away in coppers, tanners, bobs;

And pints of  bitter, scotch and filter tips.

You have a headstone now. It’s kindly meant -

     Confirming you as WRITER AND BOHEMIAN,

     And elected unopposed as president

Of a club that we - don’t snigger! - call Sohemian.

We’ve gathered here today for this unveiling -

     Your unmarked grave now marked for all to see.

      I’m pleased to say the atmosphere prevailing

Is one of simple camaraderie.

Alex is here, your son - a grown man; 

     (There wasn’t time for you to get acquainted);

     He knows you now as well as a son can,

Aware you’re never likely to be sainted.

We love your tales of squaddies, spivs and chancers;

     Of clots and colonels, pukka sahibs, drunks;

     Of chaps in digs, of salesmen, tarts and dancers,

How some are decent types and others skunks.

Your style, M-R, is simple, tough and supple -

     You buttonhole your reader with each word;

     You’re free of bullshit, cliché, cant and waffle,  

And have a master’s sense of the absurd.

Are you surprised you’re more read now than ever?

     That most of what you wrote is back in print? 

     Your critics and your public think you’re clever,

(Of Love and Hunger must have made a mint).

You have an active afterlife as Trapnel,

     It can’t be long before you get a plaque

     Or some such reputation-forging shrapnel.

It’s fair to say at last you’ve made your mark.

But where are they, those other Forties spirits?

     Where’s Sister Anne and Tambi, Nina, Ruthven?

     Well thanks to your biographer Paul Willetts

They’re here, and still by fear and loathing driven,

As though they’ve just nipped out to bounce a cheque,

     To lunch with Rotha, hoping for a break;

     At work to salvage something from time’s wreck -

A paragraph that isn’t glib or fake.

Their fading Wheatsheaf shades prop up the bar,

     A pissed-up mist of spite and spleen and ink;

     They’ve settled in, they won’t be going far;

A miasma of pills and fags and drink.

But let me at this point bring in and honour

     A quondam Chelsea Bird with whim of iron

     Who got Tom Waugh to carve your name upon a 

Granite block (with words that suit Lord Byron).

You’d really like Virginia, I think:

      A writer too – commanding large advances.

      She’d match you yarn for yarn and drink for drink

And show you how to cope at beat club dances.

Now let’s agree, before we get the rounds in -

     What‘s great about your stuff? Why does it last?

     What is it that your writing most abounds in?

What keeps it fresh, unfettered by the past?

Good questions all, but I don’t have a clue.

     Can’t do lit. crit., and think it would be mad to.

     But here’s a wonky insight, partly true:

You wrote the way you did because you had to.

Hounded by creditors, landlords and editors

     Clobbered by taxes and exes and sex, 

          Fizzing with benzedrine, twitchy with dexies 

               Years of bad eating and mountainous debts.

You fabulous, bibulous arch self-inventor -

     With cane and dark glasses and camel-hair coat.

          Seductive, productive, intransigent mentor

               To thinkers and drinkers and this pisspoor poet.

Enough! It's nearly time for us to go.

     So from us all and all your readers too,

     It's “Toodle pip old man” and “Cheerio”,

We're off to raise a glass or three to you,

     

Dear Julian Maclaren-Ross,

     Who wouldn’t give a tinker’s toss

     For all this fuss. Please join us – the living.

'Mildew' by Paulette Jonguitud

The great Mexican print-maker J. G. Posada (1852-1913) specialised in the strident, the melodramatic and the grotesque, portraying a vividly strange world of grinning dios de la muerte skulls and bewigged demon brides and epic biblical catastrophes, of freaks and omens, of random explosions and collapsing churches.

Readers familiar with Posada may be prepared for what goes on in Mildew, a wonderfully shocking debut novel by the young Mexican writer Paulette Jonguitud.

A day before her daughter's wedding Constanza, a theatre designer, discovers a small blemish on her upper thigh. This very quickly spreads, a combination of the titular mildew and something more momentously invasive and accelerated, as if she's been trapped in a David Cronenberg movie. The mould, part vegetable part mineral, rapidly consumes her leg. 

The alarming physical symptoms are accompanied by a mental and emotional malaise that accompanies the change - or  perhaps we should say Change, as this is clearly a menopausal metaphor, among other things. As Constanza rots she becomes increasingly less visible to those around her. There are awkward encounters with her husband, her niece, her children - although 'awkward' is hardly the word.

Past events have a spectral purchase on the present - an aborted foetus can be found alive and (fairly) well in her husband's guitar case; there's a very strange grandmother who teaches herself palmistry;  the narrator is step-mother to her own niece, who has an affair with her husband.

This haunting fable cites Hieronymus Bosch, Macbeth, travelling freak shows, torrid television melodramas and modernist surrealism. The presiding spirit, though, is Kafka. A really impressive novella, deftly translated from the Spanish by the author.

You can read more about Mildew and order a copy from the reliable CB editions

Save the Horse Hospital

News from my friend, the writer and hepcat Cathi Unsworth, about The Horse Hospital.

This place is a stone's throw from Russell Square, and for a quarter of a century has been London's pre-eminent centre for exhibitions of Outsider Art (and much else besides). It's a wonderful venue, of great architectural and cultural interest and an antidote to the slick corporate blandness of other cultural hubs. It's now under serious threat from (three guesses).

Cathi writes:

Like me, most of you will have spent at least one of the best nights of your life at the Horse Hospital in Bloomsbury, where for 25 years Roger K Burton has been offering a platform and a refuge for genuine outsider art, across every permutation of that word that you can think of. […] Now it is in danger of becoming lost to us all and instead turned into that thing that we dread the most - luxury flats. 

Roger has spent nearly two years trying to fight off his landlord to remain in the venue that he has built up over all this time, but needs more money than he can generate on the door alone to be able to meet the legal bills required to go on fighting. So he has set up a crowdfunding camapign. You don't have to give very much, and everything you do give is rewarded with a special bit of very exciting HH-related art. 

If the HH is forced to close, we will probably never know anything like it again. So please, try and help in any way you can, by spreading the word as far as you can. And if you can see your way to a small contribution, the site is HERE.

There's also a WEBSITE. 

Dig deep. Don't let The Horse Hospital become a knackers' yard.

Remainder - the film

To Tate Modern last night, to see the world premiere of Remainder, a highlight of the BFI London Film Festival. 

Based on Tom McCarthy's outstanding debut novel, the script and direction was by the Israeli video artist Omar Fast, and marks his feature debut. It's a film worth seeing, and even worth going to see (and I  discovered that Tate Modern is open until 10pm on Saturday nights and with hardly a living soul in the building. A revisit soon seems in order, as the cavernous building works best without crowds).

Remainder's premise was achieved briskly in the novel but interminably in the film, which begins with twenty minutes of throat-clearing. In the novel all we are told is all we need to know: that the protagonist has received a colossal sum in damages for injuries and amnesia sustained in an accident he cannot remember, allowing him to spend - or fritter - lavish amounts of cash on realising increasingly elaborate, highly personal recreations of what may or may not be actual memories from his past. At a literal level this is about the negotiation of post-traumatc stress. McCarthy is too clever and accomplished a writer to investigate such a banal subject and his novel is a magnificent interrogation of - well, what it means to be human, and the contingencies of existence.

In the movie we get all the legal background in explicit but implausible detail, with unctuous lawyers and non-disclosure clauses and all that paraphernalia. A particular sum of compensatory money is specified (£8.5 million), which doesn't seem so much these days, given the grand projects that follow - and I wasn't alone in mentally ticking off the likely cost of acquiring a large London property, recruiting and training actors, building sets and so on (Think Synechdoche New York). I found myself wondering whether it could really be achieved, even in part. The literalist approach to finance made bean-counters of us all, and the realist grounding worked against the more phantasmagoric elements of the novel and, indeed, the film. I also found myself wondering whether the sum was a reference to the movie's modest budget. The film is a brave attempt at an uncommercial subject but in cinematic terms disappointingly inert (while the novel was richly and rewardingly inert, in common with much experimental fiction). There's a situation but no plot to speak of, no character arc, no development and, a few moments aside - when, for instance, the hero assembles and briefs a cast to inhabit his refurbished apartment building, there to perform, at a moment's notice, the same micro-tasks such as frying liver, practising Chopin on the piano or revving a motorcycle engine - we get a lot of faces interacting, with dialogue that veers between the cryptic and overly-explicit, untethered by McCarthy's smart reflections on consciousness and personality that made the novel such a brilliantly compelling original. 

McCarthy himself makes a brief self-referential (or selfie-referential) appearance as an image on someone's mobile phone - we needed more of this, I think. Film offers no end of opportunity for the director to comment on the process of production - one might have expected cutaway shots of the actors employed in the elaborate apartment reconstructions 'off role', as it were, commenting no-doubt-sceptically on the film they were making. Michael Winterbottom did this with wit and flair in A Cock and Bull Story, his under-rated take on Sterne's Tristram Shandy.

There are plenty of bright ideas jostling for the viewer's attention and it's a rare pleasure to watch a new film that repays close attention throughout, and one that prompts no end of (in my case) half-baked intellectual responses. The best ideas were those sourced directly from the novel - the departures were less achieved and convincing. In a clunky reference to Proust the South London apartment building where things unfold is named Madlyn Mansions (geddit?). As far as I recall this was not in the novel so please correct me if I'm wrong (and I suppose there's a further reference to the Kim Novak character in Hitchcock's sublime Vertigo). The most annoying departure is an entirely gratuitous snog between Sturridge and Arsher Ali, who plays Naz, the general factotum elicited to make things happen. In the novel Naz (an unflappable Jeeves-like amanuensis) becomes increasingly committed to, and complicit in, the project - a journey here crassly condensed into a hairy and prolonged French kiss.

Casting seemed off-kilter. Tom Sturridge has such a lean and chiselled expression that he always appears to be in profile, whichever way he's looking. At one point he wears the most preposterous beard and wig (not, I'm sure, intended as a joke). His look is mostly dazed and impassive, the exception being when he describes his need to have the smell of frying liver waft up to his room in the newly-repurposed apartment building. He gives the word 'waft' an engagingly connoisseurial inflexion.

Cush Jumbo as the American girlfriend (not in the original novel) was given little to do. Danny Webb as the Gorblimey crime consultant blew in from another movie halfway through, lifting things considerably, but this was the point at which genre conventions began to take over. Webb has a chortling warmth that none of the other actors were invited to approximate, and with his arrival the film is repurposed into a more-or-less straightforward heist movie, with lots of shouting and shooting and bloodshed and comeuppance, with an existential top-dressing. Picture Rififi remade by Peter Greenaway (and I was more than once reminded of Greenaway's more purgatorial excursions of the 1980s). 

If you're looking for a metaphysical and philosophical movie exploring memory and consciousness and  identity I'd certainly recommend Remainder. I'd also recommend more mainstream crowd-pleasers such as Groundhog Day, or The Truman Show or, of course, Vertigo. And there's always Remainder the novel, which is superb. McCarthy's having a pretty good year - he's currently shortlisted for both the Man Booker and Goldsmiths Prizes for his most recent novel Satin Island. He was not directly involved  in the making of the film and I'm not sure what he made of it all - he was in the audience, and on the Q & A panel that followed the screening, but we had to leave before that kicked off.

You can read the very perceptive Variety review by Catherine Bray here.

London Lit Weekend

This Sunday I'll be in conversation with Jerry White (historian of modern London), Gillian Tindall (author, among other books, of The House by the Thames and The Fields Beneath about Kentish Town) and Tessa Mcwatt, author of Higher Ed, a novel about London today. 

We're expected to discuss "how London appears in literature – historically, architecturally and imagined – to insiders and outsiders."

I have no idea where this will take us, but I hope to work in a favourite paragraph, from  Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four, in which Doctor John Watson reflects on life before his momentous encounter with Sherlock Holmes:

I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air -- or as free as an income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such circumstances, I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.

Do come along to King;'s Place this Sunday at 5:00pm Details here.

Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms

I went last night to the launch of the latest book by my good friend Paul Willetts, Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms

As launches go this was one to remember. Not the usual hubbub fuelled by publishers' plonk followed by speaches followed by more booze (if there's any left) and purchase of a copy (bad form not to do so).

We had to turn up outside a specific pub in Marylebone at a specific time, where we would be approached by a 'contact' who would escort us to a secret destination nearby. The invitations were in the form of facsimile Ministry of Information documents on typewritten manilla paper, written in the mandarin Whitehall English of the 1940s. 

Paul is brilliant practitioner of what he calls non-fiction narrative. His North Soho 999 was a gripping account - or rather a meticulous re-creation - of a notorious gun crime in post-war London. His last book was Members Only, an absorbing biography of the Soho entrepreneur, property developer and strip club mogul Paul Raymond. This was the basis for Michael Winterbottom's film in which Steve Coogan didn't so mach act the part of Raymond as inhabit it.

Back to Marylebone High Street on a bright Autumn evening. A small group of us, some dressed appropriately in 1940s clobber and me in my usual shapeless subfusc, congregated self-consciously in the evening sunshine. Our contact was the actor Jon Glover, a friend of Paul's and mainstay of the Sohemian Society, which Paul co-founded. This is an irregular gathering of those of us who share a particular interest in the artists and writers and bohemians and deadbeats who used to hang around Soho and Fitzrovia, bitching about each other and drinking themselves to death.

Glover stood on a street corner like a scrap of flickering archive footage, in a brown suit and trilby, intently studying a period newspaper and drawing occasionally on what I suspect was a Craven 'A' cigarette, no doubt sourced in an archive. He led us up the road to the venue, which turned out to be nearby - the beautiful Daunts bookstore (and I'll admit to feeling agreeably disappointed, having expected a basement lit by a single bulb and tough-looking women in gaberdine trench coats drenched in cheap scent. I expected a tobacco fug. I mention this because Paul is startlingly, supernaturally adept at evoking the atmosphere and texture of places in the past - the light and aroma and furnishing so on).

Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms is a scrupulous and absorbing account of an extraordinary episode during the so-called phoney war.  It cannot be easily summarised, and involves haute couture, crypto-fascists, double agents and no end of strange goings-on. There's also a brief appearance by Raymond Huntley, and if you don't know he he is you're no friend of mine.

Paul has the best author's website  I've seen, a real piece of work. You can see it here, including a film trailer for Rendezvous at the Russian Tea Rooms directed by Guy Myhill. You can, and should, buy a copy here.