Chocolate and Cuckoo Clocks. Alan Coren
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know about all that. Not necessarily about him, but about that generation of 1950s grammar-school boys – the Alan Bennetts, the Melvyn Braggs, the Dennis Potters – that brief window between two educational Dark Ages, when a certain kind of lower-middle-class boy got a chance, went to Oxford and had a crack at the Establishment. That’s the irony of the antagonism between Punch and Private Eye later in the ’60s …
V: Exactly. Private Eye tried to mock Punch for being fuddy-duddy and Establishment, but Punch was run by the working-class boys, the grammar-school boys, the revolutionaries, while Private Eye was a bunch of right-wing, privileged public-school boys, sons of diplomats, who looked down on the staff of Punch because they thought they were common. And, in Daddy’s case, Jewish. In public, Private Eye pilloried them for being Establishment, in private Barry Fantoni was telling everyone: ‘Alan Coren looks and sounds like a cab driver.’
G: Which is why cab drivers liked him so much.
V: The Establishment is one of the things Daddy was sentimental about. He was so proud to feel part of it. And of Englishness – Keats, Shakespeare, churches, rolling hills, striding through the New Forest in a tweed cap, slashing at the ferns with a shooting stick. He actually enjoyed horseriding. And he was strangely good at it. Despite his grandfather having come over from Poland, he really did feel part of all that.
G: His proudest moment was meeting the Queen. Closely followed by meeting Princess Margaret. Closely followed by meeting Andrew and Fergie. He loved a royal. Almost as much as he loved a punctual postman.
V: But we were talking about America. He was so dazzled by it. All those hamburgers and giant steaks after the austerity of ’50s Britain. And better cars. And the literature, all those garish 1960s paperbacks of Augie March and On The Road. He started sending pieces to Punch from there, and they offered him a job so he chucked in the academic plans, came home and went to work in Fleet Street. El Vino’s, Punch lunches, Toby Club dinners, fellow writers, the old Punch table, the line of editors going back to 1841, he loved it all.
G: It was strange reading back through those first pieces from the 1960s. The fledgling him. You can see what was coming in a piece like ‘It Tolls For Thee’, a domestic comedy about trying to get a phone installed. But the writing is politically engaged, he was still taking things seriously – like racism in ‘Through A Glass, Darkly’ and the bombing of North Vietnam in ‘The House That Jack Built’. He flips them around and makes his own sorts of jokes, but they developed out of a genuine concern for civil rights and social issues of the time – in a way that he left behind by the 1970s, when it started to be all about the jokes.
V: He hadn’t decided not to be a novelist yet. If he ever decided that. But he hadn’t even decided not to be a serious writer. He wasn’t completely a humorist, in the ’60s.
G: He was already doing the Hemingway parodies though. ‘This Thing With The Lions’, that was his first one.
V: How many Hemingway parodies are we going to put in the book, by the way?
G: Any fewer than thirty would be unrepresentative. But it might skew things a bit.
V: He must have written a Hemingway parody a year.
G: Let’s have a couple. The book will be full of parodies anyway – Chaucer, Coleridge, Kafka, Conan Doyle, Melville, a lot of Melville – they’re some of the most enduring pieces. They work in an anthology. All jokes need a context, and the context of the parodies is, to some extent, eternal. They’re not dependent on immediate social or political or cultural context. Humorous writing doesn’t last as long as serious – look at Shakespeare’s comedies compared to the tragedies. Or Carry On films compared to … well, almost anything. Lots of Daddy’s pieces are still very funny, but the parodies all are. The passage of time doesn’t do the same damage to a literary pastiche as it does to a joke about the 1964 general election. We need to use the stuff which still works. He was so proud to be compared to James Thurber and S.J. Perelman – but who reads Thurber and Perelman now?
V: That’s all very well, but I see you’ve put two Winnie the Pooh parodies on the list. Do we need two?
G: But which would you remove – ‘The Hell At Pooh Corner’, or ‘The Pooh Also Rises’?
V: Isn’t ‘The Pooh Also Rises’ a double parody of Pooh and Hemingway? We don’t want to make his frame of reference seem limited.
G: But we must include it! That one’s part of a complex triptych of adult/child fictional parodies. Lose ‘The Pooh Also Rises’ and we lose ‘Five Go Off To Elsinore’. We lose ‘The Gollies Karamazov’.
V: Speaking of political relevance, what are we going to do about Idi Amin?
G: Yes. Idi Amin. That was always going to be a problem for so many reasons. The Idi Amin parodies don’t operate in a timeless context like the literary ones. The Idi Amin of now isn’t the one he was writing about. Daddy said himself that he wouldn’t have written those pieces later, once it turned out that Amin was such a monster. In 1974, he just thought he was writing about someone funny.
V: In a funny African voice. That’s the bigger problem. Even if Amin hadn’t turned out to be a monster, those pieces wouldn’t read the same now. ‘Wot a great boom de telegram are!’ ‘Dis international dipperlomacy sho’ payin’ off!’ Monster or not, if you were writing a column about Robert Mugabe, you wouldn’t do him like that.
G: Tempting though it would be.
V: But I don’t want anyone to think he was racist. He wasn’t racist. He went on civil rights marches in America in 1961. And his Idi Amin … he’s not a ‘generic African’, he’s a fully fledged character: childish, megalomaniac, charming, violent, funny. With this comedy voice – ‘Ugandan’ sent up no more squeamishly than if it were Cockney – but people might not read it like that.
G: Maybe we shouldn’t put it in.
V: It would definitely be safer not to. But The Bulletins Of Idi Amin was his best-selling book ever. It sold a million copies. They made a record of it. It made him famous. It’s because of the Amin books that The Sunday Times called him ‘The funniest writer in Britain today.’ Richard Ingrams ran a spoof in Private Eye with Daddy’s picture at the top. Do you remember what that was called? ‘The Bulletins of Yiddy Amin’, of course. They must have cracked open the champagne when they thought of that. Anyway, the point is, those pieces make us nervous and they might give people the wrong impression of him, but I don’t think we can just censor them out.
G: Hang on. Think about Team America, one of the best adult comedy films of modern times; a serious, anarchic, liberal and right-thinking movie. And think of the hilarious pastiche of Kim Jong-Il. He is a very decent parallel with Idi Amin, except even more powerful and even more sinister – and when Trey Parker and Matt Stone make an entire film based on his dictatorship, the centrepiece of it is his hilarious Korean accent. When Jong-Il bursts into tears and sings ‘I’m So Ronery’, it’s pure Alan Coren. People might have been a bit squeamish about Idi Amin in the 1980s and ’90s, but you only have to look at South Park – also created by Parker and Stone – to see that we have come back into a world where everything’s fair game, and exaggerated ethnic mimicry doesn’t make you a racist. I’d hate to think that future generations of South Park viewers would have to watch edited versions, from which Chef has been removed because not all black men sound like Isaac Hayes.
V: Maybe we could put Idi Amin in an appendix?
G: Okay, put those pieces in an appendix, at the end of the 1970s. With a perforated line down the page so people can tear them out if they want,