ABSTRACT
Comic effects go hand in hand with other aspects of storytelling. Humour surfaces in every type of story and in many different forms, from the gently ironic to the fiercely satirical. The English writer Molly Brown specializes in comic science fiction, while the American Elmore Leonard turns out crime capers. There are comic dimensions to almost any story. Samuel Beckett’s pronouncements on futility, despair and death generate their own kind of bleak humour, a sly pessimism inherited by James Kelman. Humour often is in the eye of the beholder. The Argentinian critic Alberto Manguel says that his young daughter read Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’ as a comic tale. (I discuss this story in the next chapter.) For many writers, humour is an optional extra; you can enjoy their work without necessarily understanding it at a comic level. But there are others whose prime aim is to tickle your funny bone. If you are not laughing, their story has fallen flat. This is the case with the core examples later in this chapter, the American Garrison Keillor and the Irishman Patrick McCabe.
