At the end of his life, PG Wodehouse, one of Britain's greatest comic writers and a master stylist, admitted (with few regrets) that he never expected his work to be taken seriously by what he called "the intelligentsia" who, he said, tended to look down on comic writing. Today, it's still true that even a third-rate tearjerker will be given more consideration than a comic romp. Would Wodehouse have won the Booker prize for Code of the Woosters or Joy in the Morning (his finest novels)? Probably not.
And yet, from Shakespeare's many clowns and fools down to Kingsley Amis's Jim Dixon, Sue Towsend's Adrian Mole, DBC Pierre's Vernon Little and Carl Hiaasen's Skeet (to pluck a handful at random), the comic tradition in English writing is vigorous and important. Dickens, Sterne, Peacock, Chesterton, Waugh ... take humour out of the tradition, and it loses a vital element.
So it's a welcome innovation – rare for Booker – that Howard Jacobson has taken the prize at last. The Finkler Question is a bittersweet novel, not a romp, but it has scenes that are unequivocally comic. And never before has the Booker allowed a smile to appear on its face.
Now that this prohibition has been overturned, perhaps we shall see the emergence of a new and fashionable genre: comic-literary fiction.
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