Lipsyte cites Wells Tower as one writer who isn't afraid to make readers laugh

Recently we discussed a Times article about why comic novels often get overlooked when it comes to literary awards. Over at BlackBook, author and Columbia professor Sam Lipsyte adds his thoughts on the status of funny fiction today:

Do you feel that literary fiction is afraid to make people laugh these days?

I think there’s a worry that if it’s funny then perhaps there’s something slight about it. That it’s not as important as a deeply researched, earnest, historical novel, or a kind of humorless tale of contemporary life. I think there possibly was a moment in the ‘60s and ‘70s when the serious books tended to be pretty funny. I don’t know if that’s as true these days. [...]

Who do you think is still doing that?

Well, Padgett Powell is still doing it, Barry Hannah is still doing it. Ben Marcus can be hilarious. Gary Lutz, Deb Olin Unferth. These are all people that are really dead serious and dead funny, and I’m interested in that as well. Wells Tower. I think it’s being done, but it’s not as front and center, not as widely read as it used to be, fiction that does that sort of thing. Maybe it’s also linked to readerships, how they’ve changed over the years. Or maybe it all got eaten up by Harry Potter and Twilight. I think, more and more, that’s what adults read now. All the people we’ve talked about are people who write hilarious, heartwrenching, and often horrific fiction, and they wrote for grown-ups. Maybe there aren’t enough grownups who want to read that sort of thing anymore.

Read the full interview, including Lipsyte’s thoughts on getting an arts education, reality TV, and his latest novel, The Ask, here. Via TEV.

Something similar happens in literature, Erica Wagner points out in the UK’s Times:

Comic novels — let’s call them terrific novels that happen to be funny — tend to fall through the cracks, especially where prizes are concerned. Publishers have to choose which books from their list to submit for a prize such as the Orange: is a book that makes a reader laugh really worthy of a prize? Or is it just, well, not serious enough?

But Wagner points out that being funny and being good are not mutually exclusive:

The thing about being funny is that it’s really hard. It’s a lot harder than being serious. It requires wit, grace, agility, sensitivity; it requires knowing how hard to push and when to stop on a dime. The reason the classic comic novels — such as Lucky Jim, or Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, or Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm, or Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle — stand the test of time is not because they are great comic novels: it’s because they are great novels, full stop. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22: comic novel or serious novel? Doesn’t matter. Brilliant novel.

To support her case, Wagner lists her top 10 comic novels, including Deaf Sentence by David Lodge and Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (”Yes, it’s about the Holocaust. But it’s really funny, too.”)

Are you convinced? And do you ever write funny, or do you stick to the serious route?