Both have the ability to use exactly the right word at exactly the right time. My last two favourites are writers rather than characters: Alan Bennet and Victoria Wood. It’s a domestic comedy written by a woman but if it were a non-domestic comedy written by a man it would be the most famous funny book in the world. If you haven’t read the book, go and find a copy immediately.

And, yes, it was The Diary of a Provincial Lady.

I heard a clip of something on the radio one evening and had to stop what I was doing because it was so funny. I’d see the book in bookshops and think that it might possibly be the most boring book ever written. We laugh a lot.Īnother diary I really love is called The Diary of a Provincial Lady. We sense her fear of being caught wearing comfy knickers. The diaries of Bridget Jones do this brilliantly. In literary diaries we often find ourselves witnessing some terrible/embarrassing/jaw-dropping situation in great detail and in slow motion. For readers, diaries are the equivalent of car-crash TV. It’s the immediacy, I think, and the fact that we’re there inside someone’s head witnessing them make mistakes in real time. Sue Townsend throws the reader right in the middle of this gap, giving us everything we need to understand what’s really going on, and then has tremendous fun with it (and us and poor old Adrian).ĭiaries, in fact, lend themselves quite naturally to comedy. Ditto for how he sees the world and what the world’s actually like. There’s real magic in the gap between how Adrian sees himself and what he’s actually like. Adrian is pretentious, judgmental, and a terrible poet but we love him. Adrian’s a character who’s been with me all my life - the first book came out when I was a couple of years younger than Adrian himself - and we’ve grown up together. Most of my favourite funny books and characters, though, are far more contemporary. These include classics such as Three Men in a Boat and Diary of a Nobody as well as Classics (with a capital C) like The Pickwick Papers and Tom Jones. I have always loved reading funny books and have a big list of books that make me laugh. One of these is easy to write about the other one isn’t. the secrets of writing great humour and 2. my favourite funny characters/books and why I love them. I’ve been asked to write about two things: 1.

Upworth a simple comic