Comedy does not age well. Aristophanes is pretty much the sole survivor of Greek comedy; Plautus and Terence of Roman. Some of the comic bits in Shakespeare, which make no sense now, are often best cut.
The same is not true of serious writing. Readers will excuse a mediocre tragedy, verse or prose, where they will throw rotten tomatoes at a dud comedy. The saddest section of many bookshops is the shelf labelled "Humour". Why this should be so is something of a mystery – but perhaps it has to do with the very personal nature of the things that make us laugh.
The attrition rate on the funny side goes on. From the last century there is any amount of light comic writing that has not made it through to the present day. Who now remembers WW Jacobs or Michael Arlen? Or the "comic" stories of AA Milne? Even with a master like Noël Coward, a lot of the material has dated badly. PG Wodehouse is an exceedingly rare example of a humorist who seems to remain evergreen – perhaps because he is also a great English stylist.
One book from the last century, an American comic classic – and here I probably illustrate the highly subjective nature of this topic – that I've always enjoyed is Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos (and its almost equally good sequel, But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes).
Loos began writing her Lorelei Lee stories for Harper's magazine in the 1920s, and quickly secured a mass audience for her faux naif tales of an extremely ambitious, romantically calculating, flapper. The two books were huge bestsellers, propelling their author into a career in the movies and magazines that sustained her long into retirement. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes has been parodied, imitated, spoofed and put on the stage. Some of its turns of phrase ("a girl like I", for example) briefly passed into the American language. It's a one-off, but a brilliant original that gives it classic status.
And here's the punch line: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is out of print.
I tried, the other day, to find a copy for a friend. Nothing in hardback; nothing in paper. Eventually, I tracked down some battered reprint editions from the 1960s. But I'm still astonished to think that such a title is not readily available in some current paperback edition. Just a thought …
