Andrew Sean Greer on Comic Novels
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- Andrew Sean Greer argues in a Guardian essay that comic novels are 'books that could just as easily have been tragedies,' with the author simply deciding the material is funny, citing Melville's Moby-Dick and Nabokov's Pale Fire as examples most wouldn't classify as comedy yet seem to him 'a hoot'
- Greer describes a 'double-processing' technique for writing comedy: first working out characters' hardships and frustrations 'as realistically, even tragically, as possible,' then writing the same material 'as if it's all just a funny story'
- Villa Coco, Greer's latest novel published by Sceptre, draws on diary entries from his time living in Tuscany, where he had promised to turn each day's events into a 'funny story' while still excavating grief, a broken heart, and the death of a dear friend
- Greer recounts incorporating a visit to forced labour plantations in the American South into Less Is Lost by portraying himself and other white visitors as 'the comedy,' their guilt-ridden statements 'utterly absurd,' yielding scenes that aren't 'funny' but are 'definitely comic'
- Greer contends that comic writing expands a novelist's permissible vocabulary, allowing words like 'hullabaloo,' 'brouhaha,' 'hubbub,' and 'chivaree' where a serious novel would require the austerity of 'noise'
- Greer places comic novels in a lineage stretching from Don Quixote and Chaucer's 'fart joke' to Shakespeare, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Thornton Wilder, while recommending readers seeking humor now pick up Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm amid 'endless apocalyptic films and novels'
- Greer closes with a reading list of ten laugh-inducing novels, including Coward's Pomp and Circumstance, Nabokov's Pnin, Updike's Bech: A Book, Paul Beatty's The Sellout, and Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle, which he rereads annually
Why it matters: Greer — who won the Pulitzer for Less — uses this essay to reframe comic writing as harder, not easier, than serious fiction, because it demands authors first stage the tragedy honestly before choosing laughter. The piece doubles as a launch platform for Villa Coco, giving readers a craft-driven framework for why his own tragicomic mix of Tuscan misadventure, grief, and absurdity deserves their attention.
