ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a claim for the significance of comedy in contemporary fiction, and argues that it has taken an identifiable funny turn. It examines the short stories of George Saunders and the ways in which Saunders represents the postmodern workplace as an affective or, in the terminology of Sianne Ngai, ‘zany’ space. The chapter looks at the stylistics of comedy and the ways in which style and humour are bound up with questions of class in the recent fiction of Martin Amis. It highlights the relationship between comedy and community in the fiction of Zadie Smith. Comedy is the genre or ‘representational practice’ that incorporates the zany, and Saunders’s comedy may be zany but it is not light; it is representative of the fact that ‘the zany is not just funny but angry’. Comedy does not soften or diminish serious topics but rather provides ‘rapid-truthing’, unencumbered by the niceties and circumlocutions of other modes.
