Discovering Comedy

Abstract

Discussing A Burnt-Out Case, Greene says of his critics, ‘they were too concerned with faith or no faith to notice that in the course of the blackest book I have written I had discovered Comedy’.81 The central characteristic of his early work, the ambiguous nature of the absurd, of jokes which cannot quite amuse and mishaps which almost can, develops in the four major post-war novels, The Quiet American (1956), A Burnt-Out Case (1960), The Comedians (1966) and The Honorary Consul (1973) and becomes more complex. The quiet American, Pyle, is what Scobie or Bendrix might have been, a comic character who is frightening because he is unaware of what makes him comic, and because the trouble he causes blackens his humour, stressing that comedy depends on one’s point of view. Monstrously funny, humourless characters appear, again causing catastrophes, in A Burnt-Out Case. These are comic creations of the same species as Anthony Powell’s Widmerpool in A Dance to the Music of Time; A Burnt-Out Case introduces, by implication, the idea, fundamental in Powell and pervasive in British fiction, that a sense of humour is an essential feature of a sane mind.