In March 2020, when San Francisco's mayor ordered residents to stay home due to the pandemic, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Andrew Sean Greer's first instinct was to order every Agatha Christie book. He wasn't alone; many sought comfort in predictable narratives to drown out the chaos. Whether ending in marriage or murder, the reliability was what mattered. As the lockdown extended, his reading shifted to a different genre: the comic novel. With the world's endless supply of new terrors, comic novels now fill his reading hours.
Defining the Comic Novel
Nobody truly knows what defines a comic novel, and discussing it often drains the fun. E.B. White compared it to dissecting a frog—you're left with innards and a dead frog. Greer likens it to turning on all the lights at a party: everyone looks terrible, and the party is ruined. While most agree Wodehouse wrote comic novels, Greer turns to books rarely classified that way, like Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, which he finds hilarious. He believes these are books that decide something is funny, as Jerry Seinfeld once defined comedy. In Moby-Dick, it's a coin nailed to a masthead; in Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, it's the worst best poem you've ever read. Yet they aim for the same understanding of the human condition—grief, love, death—as the most solemn narratives. The comic novels he loves could just as easily be tragedies; the author simply decided they're funny.
Learning to Find Humor
Greer learned this from a wise friend who, after he angrily recounted a publishing story, responded: "That's not a very funny story." Shocked, he realized he hadn't processed the story and was serving it raw. He had to learn to turn old outrage into a funny story, and then she would listen. He did learn, and he incorporated that scene into his latest novel. Writing comic novels, he says, is more pleasant but very different from writing serious ones. The plots are no funnier, though. He offers two examples: a young woman in 1952 San Francisco joining her husband's gay lover to remove obstacles to her liberation and gain a small fortune, and a middle-aged writer traveling across a troubled United States while maintaining his relationship with a younger man. Even if you guess, the point is he decides it's funny, which requires double-processing.
The Double-Processing of Comedy
First, Greer works out the hardships and frustrations of his characters as realistically, even tragically, as possible. People die in comic novels; sometimes the world ends, or just the world we thought we knew. Characters don't know they're in a comedy. Second, he writes it as if it's all just a funny story, which takes great struggle and sometimes feels impossible. In Less Is Lost, about the middle-aged writer, he sat with notes on visiting three forced labor plantations in the American South. There was nothing humorous about them, but he didn't want to cut them; his protagonist had to confront that history. Reading over his notes, he realized the comedy was himself and the other white visitors, showcasing guilt and anxiety through absurd statements. He portrayed the visit almost exactly as in his notes, but with a different emphasis. Is it funny? No. Is it comic? Definitely. Why? He can't explain without turning on the party lights.
Finding Real Feeling in Humor
For Villa Coco, his latest novel, Greer had an easier time, working from diary notes of his time in Tuscany, already processed into "funny stories." Yet he sifted through them for the real feeling: the death of a dear friend, a turn of seasons, a broken heart. These had been expunged from his diary, but as a novelist, he had to get to the hardships and frustrations of his characters. Comedy, to him, is only great fun if it's about something hard and true. A writer friend told him, "I don't think of you as writing a comic novel. I think of you as working through something in whatever way you have to." His books aren't about women in 1952 or middle-aged writers or olive harvests; they're about marriage, growing old, and the terror of death. In a comic novel, those issues are temporarily resolved, often artificially, as if to say: life is a vale of tears, but let's fix this one small piece, briefly lift the weight of being. You can't do that without being honest first.
The Joy of Comic Writing
Greer relishes working on these books because every awful moment becomes material for comedy. He becomes more resilient; a trip on the sidewalk is no less embarrassing, but he laughs with anyone who notices. A dull wait at a bus stop becomes a delightful notebook experience. He jots down absurdities: "Cheese rolling contest May 20, Prize is the wheel of cheese" or "lady in black sequined dress yelling at a mailbox at nine in the morning. I think she mailed her purse by mistake." Comedy forces him into the present tense, a good place to be.
Language as a Feast
Language also gains richness. Writers think about words, not just plot or characters. In serious novels, you might say "down the street came a noise," anything more elaborate being pretentious. But in comedy, a feast of words opens up: hullabaloo, brouhaha, hubbub, chivaree—banging pots and pans to publicly shame or tease. His language becomes zestier, akin to tomatoes coming into season after months of cabbage and kale.
A Grand Tradition
No wonder the first "novel," Don Quixote, was a rip-roaring comedy. Chaucer wasn't above a fart joke, and Shakespeare loved puns. Great writers like Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Thornton Wilder dabbled in comedy. Having seen darkness pulls many to laughter. In difficult times, many pick up Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm instead of apocalyptic tales.
The comic novel is dear and beautiful—a friend to hold your hand when the lights flicker and tell a story until they return. For writers, it's a way forward through the tunnel into light. Greer found solace imagining a young American man delivered to a rural Tuscan train station "so fanciful one might unwrap it and find it was chocolate," seated next to a princess who hasn't mastered "the American dialect," with a wild animal thrown through the window and an overflowing septic tank. All to get at a simple truth: the world is trouble and full of sorrows, and we won't get out alive. But look closely: it's made of chocolate.
Ten Novels to Make You Laugh
Greer recommends these ten: Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, a satire that erased the genre it mocked; Pomp and Circumstance by Noël Coward, about a queen visiting a far-flung island; Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov, whose tortured Russian academic wins hearts; Bech: A Book by John Updike, about a Philip Roth-like novelist; The Sellout by Paul Beatty, turning slavery on its head; I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, a tear-jerking diary; Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene, a case of mistaken identity; Little Me by Patrick Dennis, a deluded memoir with photos; The Pursuit of Love/Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford, eccentricity and heartache; and Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, hilarious from start to finish, with an even better sequel.
