‘I’m Here to Make you Laugh?’ by Ian Moore
‘Funny? Funny how?’
So demanded a chilling Joe Pesci in Good Fellas channelling not, as many think, a psychotic wise guy hood, but actually literary agents and editors the world over when asked to consider a submission that includes jokes, comedy or farce.
But why? Why are there so many nerves surrounding the use of ‘funny’ in publishing, and particularly in crime publishing? Now obviously humour is subjective and if you try to analyse what makes it work then it’s like catching bubbles, the comedy becomes more elusive or it bursts altogether. Inevitably then, publishing’s decision makers largely, though by no means all, tend to break out in a cold sweat if the audience or the hook isn’t immediately obvious or able to be pinned down.
When I first started to write crime fiction, the warnings were clear, and I felt like I was on the end of a Philip Marlowe warning: play it straight kid, comedy and crime are like dames and guns, they don’t mix.
Let’s be clear what I mean here. I’m not talking about sardonic wit, nor sarcasm, nor gallows humour, they’re the loner detective’s only friends. What I’m talking about is knockabout stuff, comic set-ups, pratfalls, cringe, spoof – massively popular types of comedy entertainment that have kept vaudeville, theatres, cinemas and living rooms full since mass entertainment began. But in books, apart from a few exceptions, you’ll only find them in the ‘Humour’ section. And this is what traditionally has had commissioning editors reaching for the ‘thanks, but no thanks’ reply to an aspiring author taking those comedic traditions and working them into a suspenseful and even original crime story.
I’ve been a successful stand-up comedian for nearly thirty years, should I suppress my natural instincts then, becalm the impish side of my creative brain to suit what I was told was the market? The advice was conflicting. ‘Write What You Know’ is one of the first lessons any writer is told, (as if ‘Write What You Don’t Know’ is an option). Well, I know comedy, I know how to set up a comic situation, how to build a joke; I know timing. But I didn’t want to just be boxed on the ‘Humour’ shelves, I wanted to put my low-wattage expertise into a crime setting. I wanted to be a cross between PG Wodehouse and Agatha Christie, or more realistically, I wanted to be included with the rare successes who have mixed those genres, and proved it can be done, the few that slipped through the gatekeepers’ nets, Donald Westlake, Janet Evanovich, Christopher Brookmyre. A modern great of crime comedy is Caimh McDonnell (also known as CK McDonnell), another former stand-up, wanted the same. ‘When I went looking for a publishing deal for my books in 2015,’ he confided to me, ‘I was told that comedy and crime didn’t mix. They’ve gone on to be a million selling series translated into several languages. I think the reality is that crime with a distinctive comedy voice has always been popular, it’s just that sometimes publishing can be scared to bet on what is funny.’
There’s more than subjectivity involved from a publisher’s perspective though, there’s a moral angle which, put simply, is this – should criminal activity even be a source of comedy, is it right to laugh at murder? Human beings have always used laughter as a defence mechanism, a comfort blanket. Sometimes it’s a consolation, sometimes it’s a cover masking pain, like when a chimpanzee ‘smiles’ to show fear, but is it right to mine that fear for real laughs? Cosy crime does just that and it’s no surprise in a post-Covid world determined to wrestle itself into a divisive dystopia, that cosy – another word for comfort – has made an enormous resurgence.
Authors like Richard Osman and Janice Hallett who weave intricate, humane stories with real-life warmth and humour to the forefront, have changed the crime fiction market – smiles are back in fashion. That doesn’t mean murder is received with any less revulsion than it should be, but cosy has its rules: little or no blood, no in-depth forensics, the investigators tend to be ‘real’ people as opposed to officers of the law. There’s also no sex. I explained this last rule to a startled audience of French people at a Whodunnit Festival just outside of Paris, ‘No sex?’ they questioned, ‘So cosy crime is very English then?’
What this change in the market has meant, what the huge success of cosy crime for modern readers and writers means, isn’t a watering down of grit or of detail. It’s not a cop-out for the squeamish, an excuse for the less bloodlusty to come out from behind the sofa, it’s an opening up of the genre itself. In fact, I would argue, that by bringing more humour back to the subject it’s even made crime fiction more realistic.
Ian Moore Bio
Ian Moore is a British stand-up comedian and best-selling author who lives with his family and an ever-growing number of animals. Death and Fromage, the murderous story of what happens when vegan cheese is served in a French Michelin-starred restaurant is out this spring. He has performed all over the world and appeared on many TV and radio shows then in 2021 his first novel, Death and Croissants, reached the best-seller charts for ‘The Times’ newspaper. Since that time, he has written a further four crime novels, cosy and not-so cosy, and so while he is performing less stand-up, he’s able to take himself less seriously. Ian lives in rural France where he runs a writers’ retreat and occasionally teaches crime writing.
All information is on Ian’s website www.ianmoore.info