One of my earliest experiences of primary school being a really dumb place was getting told off for laughing during mandated silent reading time. The thing is, I wasn’t being naughty or goofing around with other kids. I was sitting there laughing at the book I was reading. It was an old novel that had somehow found its way into my hands, Puckoon by Spike Milligan. It’s ostensibly about a small village split in two by the Partition of Ireland, but is full of all other kinds of nonsense. Look it up if you want, though I’ve a sneaky feeling some of the racial, sexual and political humour of 1963 might not have aged so well. But to a pre-woke nine year-old it was mind-blowing. I remember a main character spoke back to the narrator, and sex scenes full of the most ribald adverbs you could imagine. So, I laughed, out loud, during silent reading time, and a teacher immediately intervened to tell me to stop.
Was she right to do it? Is fiction a place for laughter? Are books funny? On the one hand, obviously, yes, there’s a long history of comedic novels aka “funny books” and people have always read them. But thinking in terms of where humour lives in our mediated world, you’d have to say that books have been pretty well surpassed in terms of providing genuine, hearty, face-creasing laughter. If you want a good solid chuckle in 2024, are you going to turn to your bookshelf, or to the 8000 sitcom episodes on a streaming service? Are you going to turn a page, or hit play on a goofy ironic podcast? Look at your message history with your best friends – how many memes, and how many photos of funny sentences from the novel you’re reading?
Maybe I’m more curmudgeonly than your average book-head. And again, I’m not saying books are not funny full-stop. It’s just the kind of funny you’re getting from them is mostly not the laugh-out-loud kind. Sure, there’s a whole bevy of writers churning out relatable, wry observations that are light-hearted in tone – to give some popular examples, Dolly Alderton, Richard Osman, David Sedaris, Zadie Smith. But this style is so different from straight-up funny comedy that Americans even use the term “humorist” to distinguish it. I don’t want some dry, intellectual recognition that something I’m reading is amusing – I want happy tears, I want barely suppressed snorts and giggles, I want literal LOL-ing!
Anyway, all this is a roundabout way of setting my own punchline: a strong recommendation of only the second ever book to make me laugh out loud, since that notorious silent reading time incident at Serpell Primary School in 1999 – Brad Neely’s You, Me and Ulysses S. Grant.
The author, Brad Neely, is someone who has never found a roadworthy vehicle for his generational comedic talents. His body of work amounts to a string of cancelled animated shows, dead links to webcomics, and thirteen year-old YouTube uploads – all brilliant, but not exactly a coherent oeuvre for a new fan to explore. His magnum opus is also probably his least accessible piece: Wizard People, Dear Reader, a sort of audiobook/director’s commentary designed to be played in unison with the DVD of the first Harry Potter film. In 2007, this required some effort – you had to procure a physical DVD, connect your iPod to some speakers, and synchronise your pressing of the play buttons perfectly. It’s easier now thanks to helpful YouTube uploads, but the reward remains as great. In a gravelly, nasal voice, Neely narrates an alternate telling of the Harry Potter story that exaggerates its hero arc to the point of absurdity (“Harry, the wizard who was destined to vanquish all evil and if he so wishes bring it back again!”), and then spikes it through with a kind of cynical adult realism (“Harry in a spiral of depression, produces many a Wine-Out-Of-Nowhere spell, and is drunk every day before noon”). It’s one of the most bizarre yet funniest things anyone has ever made, and it has lived in my head for many years now.
Neely’s new comic novel is another sharp left turn from the man. It’s nothing less than an alternative comic biography of Ulysses S. Grant, covering his rise from army cadet to victorious general of the US Civil War (I’ve written before about civil wars both real and fictional). But even in this leftfield concept, true Neely heads will see spiritual continuation of Wizard People. It has the same absurd, lofty narration, the same simultaneous reverence and undermining of grand hero legends, and Neely also reads the audiobook in the same gravelly nasal voice.
You, Me & Ulysses S. Grant expands on these previous riffs on famous fictional wizards, basically by being grounded in reality. Wizard People is very funny, but it’s obviously completely silly. The new book appears to be just as completely silly, but it possesses what you might call “real heart”. As a comic biography, the biography element is actually very solid – the framework of Grant’s life is pretty much as Neely describes. You may know more or less of the story, but it’s basically this: from an ordinary background, Grant fights his way up to being a hero in the Mexican-American war, one of the most despicable acts of imperial aggression in US history (and that’s saying something). Afterwards, Grant was, frankly, a loser, a lush barely able to take care of his family. When the Civil War hit, he found his purpose again, working his way up the ranks thanks to his own rough and ready competence, as well as the incompetence of the other Union generals. He delivered a victory in one of the most morally righteous campaigns you could imagine, and would later become President himself, very nearly becoming the first man to serve three terms.
Grant’s tale of alternating rises and falls, victories and defeats, is rich material for Neely’s comedy. But it also seems to genuinely inspire him. While his novel doesn’t deliver anything as gauche as a moral, it does put real effort into teasing out deeper meaning from Grant’s life. How can we look honestly at the mistakes of our past and move beyond them? How much blood can be spilled in order to defend what is right? What is it to lead? Where does greatness end and hubris begin? Neely detours away from jokes and directly addresses the reader, providing long, considered asides on the national stain of slavery, and taking pains to point out the severe misjudgements of Grant’s life, which included owning a slave at one point. It’s not naturally funny stuff, and Neely is to be commended for addressing these points head on. It elevates the book from goofs’n’gags to what just about passes for critical history, and could almost be life advice.
But we’re here talking about whether books can be “ha ha” funny, and I’m trying to put forward You, Me & Ulysses S. Grant as an argument for the affirmative. I think books have certain disadvantages at eliciting laughter compared to, say, a TV show. For one, you have little control over timing. The music under Jerry Seinfeld’s monologue, or the cut to a reaction shot in Succession, can be timed to perfection, but once your words are on a page you have no control over the rhythm in which it is read.
From another angle, though, your disadvantages can be strengths. When it comes to the sheer joy of playing with words on a page, novels have basically everything beat, and Neely leans into this, luxuriating in language. There’s not a single sentence in this book that doesn’t have an interesting turn of phrase, not a single cliche metaphor or lazy simile. It’s almost to a fault – you go through pages at a snail’s crawl as you double-back on every line to double-check the semantic loop-de-loops.
But why describe it when you can read for yourself – here’s a few lines I just plucked at random flicking through my copy:
Bullets whirred. The flesh-seekers warped sound up into a twittering giggle that tickled the ear.
Or:
Arkansas: home of the toothpick. People played music with bones, jugs, and feet. God couldn’t see due to the tree canopy, and the men took clear advantage.
Or:
It was 1863. Lincoln had cast the Emancipation Proclamation Incantation, and I am unworthy to define it; my four or five foul words would overheat in the blast furnaces of your ears.
Or how about this, just a one-paragraph aside as the Civil War rages through the countryside:
It was a sad boy’s birthday in a house by the river, and he got a present supposedly from Dad, but the boy knew when he saw it that the gift had been picked out by Mom because Dad would have never gotten him fucking pencils when they, the boy and his paw, hated writing and shared a love for articulated Army men with wunder weapons.
“Truth is, Paw’s dead, ain’t it?”
“It’s ‘isn’t’, but it is.”
Silliness! Pathos! A grammar gag! The whole book is like this, absolutely overstuffed with little reader’s treats. They sparked joy, and I laughed. Books are funny again! Take that, long-dead primary school teacher Ms. Bartlett!