Matthew Dooley's debut about ice cream wars in the north west of England, Flake, won the 2020 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction, and his second graphic novel has been much anticipated. Aristotle's Cuttlefish uses the same rundown locale - Dobbiston, and there's another odd couple, this time, Mr Daniels, the elderly manager of… Continue reading Aristotle’s Cuttlefish: a rare treat
Category: emotion
Miranda July: All Fours
Miranda July's new novel, All Fours, continues her preoccupation with mediation and role play in the service of intimacy, and her challenge to the notion of an authentic or consistent sexual identity is as daring and disruptive as ever. Several things have changed, however, one being a shift in tone away from her first novel,… Continue reading Miranda July: All Fours
Mike Birbiglia: orchestrating anxiety
Mike Birbiglia creates masterful endings. It’s not good form to talk about endings, especially in stand up, when an effective ending can be so transformative. With tension such a key component - both at the level of individual jokes and of fully developed sets or specials, with punchlines and closers providing the release (or… Continue reading Mike Birbiglia: orchestrating anxiety
Comic naivety in George Saunders’s ‘Ghoul’
The pleasure we find in naivety is complex: it’s partly superiority at a lack of social sophistication or adroitness about social conventions, and partly relief at the failure to maintain those norms – a chance to vicariously share in a momentary respite from the ceaseless self-consciousness and responsiveness required of us as social creatures. There’s… Continue reading Comic naivety in George Saunders’s ‘Ghoul’
The Darkness of John Robins
Emotional honesty has long been John Robins’ stock-in-trade, but the Netflix special, The Darkness of Robins, a recording of a show about the end of a relationship, which won him the joint Edinburgh comedy award in 2017, takes self-exposure to a new level. It seems to answer a challenge: if emotional honesty is central to… Continue reading The Darkness of John Robins
Coronavirus memes: visual banter
There’s much that is positive in the abundance of coronavirus comic memes: in their assertions of shared experience and collectivity they clearly do provide a degree of relief. But as units of communication to be exchanged and circulated, they are often only placeholders for real emotion or feeling. Given that the experiences of strain, anger,… Continue reading Coronavirus memes: visual banter
Humour in the Arts 