FUNNY LIT
Stephen Fry's
Paperweight, while out of print, is well worth the
thruppence or so you'll plunk down for it down at your local
previously owned book shoppe.
(By the way, that's Stephen Fry and NOT Stephen Frey, as in the
egregrious hack who's doing for Wall Street and literature what
Tom Clancy's done for military weapons manuals and literature.)
In this volume Fry "collects together the swarf of six or seven
years [1985-1992] of occasional toiling in the workshops of journalism." In a remarkable bit of prefatorial prescience, Fry
offers:
It may be that each article of the book should have been flagged
with a number or symbol indicating the length of time the article
would take to read, that number or symbol corresponding with the
health of a reader's bowel. In this way the reader could determine
which sections to read according to his or her diet and general
enteric condition.
The first part of the book consists of radio commentary performed
in the guise of a Professor Trefusis, "an ageing Cambridge
philologist of amiable but sometimes vituperative character."
In his initial commentary on television violence, Trefusis offers:
My predecessor on the Queen Anne Chair of Applied Moral
Sciences here always held that television, already an
etymological hybrid compounded, as it is, of the Greek 'tele'
and the Latin 'vision', was also a social hybrid, a chimera
that awaited some modern crusading Bellerophon, athwart
a twentieth-century Pegasus, to slay it before it devoured our
culture whole in its filthy, putrescent, purulent maw.
This is followed by a section of reviews and occasional pieces,
and then by a series of columns written for The Listener over
a two-year span.
The latter parts of the book consist of 200 pages worth of
columns from the Daily Torygraph and a two-act drama
called "Latin! or Tobacco and Boys" which, written as an
lad at Cambridge, attracted the sort of attention that led to his
present fame.
All in all, it's a fine collection full of the verbal prestidigitative
fireworks Fry apparently concocts with a swiftness and aplomb
equalled perhaps only by Peter Cook in the annals of British
comedy.
Fry's verbal wit can also be viewed in
A Bit of Fry and Laurie, a collection of the best of the sketches
performed by he and Hugh Laurie in a BBC comedy series.
One can (and should) also view the marvelous collaboration of
Fry, Laurie and the inimitable P. G. Wodehouse in the
Masterpiece Theatre
Jeeves and Wooster series.
posted by Steven Baum
3/20/2000 10:32:59 PM |
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