Funny women
Novelist Rebecca Abrams once told me that the reason that men loved puns and women couldn’t see the point of them was because women’s brains worked in a different way. (A faster way, naturellement.) A woman’s brain moves with a speedy athleticism, skipping over the pun as something far too obvious to stop for, while the ponderous male pauses to wonder at the (usually very obvious) wordplay.
That said, I do wish there were more women who felt they had the license to be funny. Or had the energy, time and will to be playful (an ability that seems to desert them in adulthood). Chick lit may be out of favour but there is always room on the shelf for good rom-com. It is one of the hardest genres to do justice to, and probably the one for which Hollywood scriptwriters get most handsomely paid.
When an author does get it right, word gets around very fast and the cash registers go ting-ting. Cue Marina Lewycka, author of the wonderfully funny A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian and the recently published Various Pets Alive and Dead. Born in a refugee camp in Kiel after the war, it is a miracle she finds so much to laugh about.
It took Marina Lewycka a long time to get published – she was 59 when Tractors came out – which is another reason she is well-liked. (We all love a ‘Seabiscuit’.) Younger rom-com writers are generally nowhere near as good. In Lewycka’s books the jokes come thick and fast, but humour is just one excellent quality in a rich canvas that includes wisdom, astuteness and warm-heartedness.
Wanda Whiteley, former Publishing Director at HarperCollins, is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Manuscriptdoctor.co.uk, a literary consultancy
If you do, go for the Tractors book first. It's an absolute peach!
The women I know, including myself, scream with laughter at the things people do and say and the pickles they create for themselves. We also howl in self-mockery at the things we did ourselves sufficiently long enough ago that we've long since got over them. Observing the absurdities of disproportionate behaviour, others but also our own, is the order of the day when we 're in the mood for a howl-athon.
Men laugh at that stuff too, though not where it touches their own amour-propre, but women tend to tut and yawn at puns, whereas I noticed as a child that I could generally make my father or step-father laugh with a pun or sometimes a shaggy dog story.
I haven't read the Marina Lewycka book yet, perhaps I ought.