Authors Electric

 Most of my novels, even the ones with murders in them, end up being rather lightweight and frothy, no matter how much I try to introduce serious topics. Incidentally, the same kind of thing has always tended to happen on the occasions when I have presented a paper at a work-related conference. In one case, the colleague with whom I co-wrote the paper but who was unable to attend the conference himself, gave me strict instructions not to make people laugh. Needless to say a colleague from another organisation came up to me at the end of the presentation and said, ‘I did enjoy your paper – it was so funny.’ However, I’ve recently realised that during these dark days of late autumn and winter, my writing has taken a darker turn. It isn’t so much that the murders have become more gruesome or the peril faced by the main characters is more terrifying, but that I’ve given the characters moral dilemmas to try and resolve. This year in particular there seems to be a theme to the moral ...

 As a follow-up  (or -on) from my previous two posts (on the themes of 'what is laughter?' and 'where do writers get their ideas?') I offer this anecdote about an incident during a car journey I took many years ago with my daughter and her family. It was a totally insignificant event which nevertheless managed to achieve some momentum – and which I've decided I can twist into something connected with the writing process. I was in my daughter’s car, being driven from Glasgow to Loch Lomond. She was in the back, with h er two sons (aged 9 and 5), her husband was at the wheel beside me. In front of us was a VW Beetle. In the centre of its rear window dangled a plastic, half-peeled banana – exactly the same colour as the car. ‘Oh look, an amusing banana,’ said my daughter, with the devastating satirical tone which is obviously my legacy to her. Never one to be out-satired, especially by someone for whom I’ve striven to be a role model for years (with limited success...

There are plenty of theories about what makes things funny, lots of them stressing the cruel nature of laughter. They suggest it’s an expression of superiority over the person we’re laughing at, but that’s too crude. Laughter’s a shared reaction – and it doesn’t have to be at someone else’s expense. BMK / CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) The theory I like best is the one which says that laughter’s actually about thinking. If you like, it’s intellectual, critical. It’s your mind seeing something happening, assuming it’ll pan out in a particular way then having those assumptions undermined when something unexpected happens. At its crudest, it’s the banana skin scenario. e.g. A person (preferably one of rank and substance – a queen, a president, a supermodel, say) is walking along and suddenly becomes a disarticulated mechanism. If the result is a serious injury, the laughter dies at once, which kind of discredits the ‘laughter is cruel’ theory...

I'm opening this post with a seriously silly Christmas image of my totally anarchic Cornish family, very expertly photoshopped (they don't actually look like this!) There's something Lizzie Borden and rural America about it, and I do feel that one of the adults might be about to run amuk with an axe! I haven't yet played with Photoshop, but must, one day.  The possibilities it presents for serious mockery, or even libel, are endless.  The subject of serious mockery inevitably leads to the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris. We lived in Paris for two years, and have good friends there, so it felt very personal. Ruthless dictators, and the nastier of the invented deities, have one thing in common: they cannot bear to be laughed at - which is why we have cartoonists brave enough to do it. What a murderous, unfunny thug Hitler was, and such a gift for another Charlie - Charlie Chaplin.  Charlie Hebdo picks on everyone, not just Islamic extremists, and its style is bru...