Evelyn and Me

n the middle of the twentieth century, mums were not funny. Mums were smart and capable. They held the reins of power, and everybody knew it. They laughed a lot, especially among themselves, and they were often fun, but they were not funny. Funny was for dads. Dads told jokes. They had comic routines and party pieces. They imitated accents and wore silly hats. Dads cut up.

I was an amenable child, generally willing to accept the status quo, but this gender distinction presented me with a problem, because I, too, wished to be funny. I had the complete “Beyond the Fringe” repertoire memorized, and my family was ever-patient with my recitations. (Their hearts must have sunk when I started in yet again with “Will this wind be so mighty . . . ”) But I sensed there was nowhere to go with this. Alan Bennett & co.’s “Beyond the Fringe” was a world of men. The Goons were all guys.

The solution to my dilemma came unexpectedly. A stray theological student left a box of books in our attic and never returned to collect them. Mum said I could have what I wanted. I chose a double handful of paperbacks by a writer named Evelyn Waugh. I jumped in, gulped them down, and was never the same. In these books I found a kind of funny I had not yet encountered. The writing was witty, dark, absurd, and satirical, and there was an edge of grade-six-girl meanness to it as well. Here was somebody being funny on the page and, best of all, it was a woman!

Well, of course I was wrong. There was nobody to enlighten me, and who would ever think that somebody would name a boy Evelyn? When I finally found out the truth, it was okay, because by then I had discovered Nancy Mitford. I had role models for being funny on the page, and some of them actually were women. I had found my people, those for whom Jane Austen spoke, “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and laugh at them in our turn?”

Things have changed. Now mums are funny, free to make sport for the neighbors. How liberating for girls with comedy in their souls. Somewhere out there is a female Alan Bennett, waiting in the wings. I look forward to reading her.

From the September/October 2007 issue of The Horn Book Magazine