A Sense of Humour and a Story to Tell

I’ve been experimenting, in my current project, with what Ursula K. Le Guin called the involved author (still known to some as omniscient narrative), but I’m not much pleased with the results.

Part of my trouble is that I just haven’t found much modern work to copy from, and we learn by copying. (You definitely want to try this at home, kids: don't believe any writer who claims never to have copied someone else.)

There is one exception to the my comment about absence of examples: comic writing. My three favourite authors who used omniscient narrators all had these things in common: they wrote comedy; they wrote in times other than their present (for the most part, anyway); and they wrote in a world of their devising that was inspired by a real-life period but which existed in a bubble independent of the period.

These three are P.G. Wodehouse, Georgette Heyer, and Terry Pratchett. Wodehouse’s world was a fanciful version of the late Edwardian period (with twentieth century knobs on); Heyer’s world was a rarified version of the Georgian Regency into which politics and Chartism and poverty (urban and rural) were not allowed to intrude; and Pratchett’s Discworld, or at least the Lancre and Ankh-Morpork locations within it, bears a startling resemblance to pre-modern rural England (well, I was startled).

Some objections can be raised concerning each of these writers. Wodehouse, for instance, is most famous for the Jeeves stories, which are written in the first person. But there are numerous standalone stories and novels (A Damsel in Distress, Uneasy Money to cite just two examples) using omniscient narrative. To say nothing of the Blandings stories.

I've already mentioned the fact Heyer is usually called a romance novelist, and my disagreement (parenthetical in the earlier post) with that claim. I strongly believe that what Georgette Heyer wrote was comedy of manners. If you don’t crack a smile at least once a chapter then you need to up your comedy game, I’m afraid.

Pratchett―okay, I can’t think of any potential quibbles about the idea that Pratchett was a comic writer who used omniscient narrative. He’s practically the poster boy for that.

So what is it about comedy that makes it permissible for a mouthy narrator to essentially become one of the characters? And why do we cringe when we read something like this that’s meant to be taken seriously? (Or am I simply not reading widely enough?)

This is not a rhetorical question...