You will often read quotes on the back of modern greats that say things such as " hilarious" or "rip-roaring" but these will either be lies, or written by people who don't know what the words mean. This trend began with Shakespeare, who is always rigorously unfunny – if there is a worse sound in the universe than a theatre audience forcing themselves to laugh at Malvolio, I haven't heard it – and, with a bit of a break for Austen and Dickens (although, come on, who actually laughs at them without feeling like a teacher's pet?), continues into our own time. High literature can be witty, it can be ironic, it can be absurd, it can, of course, be comic but proper laugh-out-loud, Eric-Morecambe-pulling-André-Previn-to-him-by-the-lapels funny: rare as Shane MacGowan's teeth.
One of the things about 'high' literature is that it is almost never actually David Foster Wallace funny. I always put the book down happier than when I picked it up. The set pieces, such as Mr Milton diving disastrously from the high board ("He hit the water – impacted really is the word for it – at over six hundred miles an hour, with a report so loud that it made birds fly out of trees up to three miles away."), or the young Billy walking in on his parents having sex, still make me snort helplessly. There was an unbridled enthusiasm for all things atomic (from cocktails to motels and, of course, bombs) and unending culinary innovation, (spray-on mayonnaise, frozen salads, liquid instant coffee in a spray can). The Thunderbolt Kid captures the hilarious innocence of a time when men had flat-top hair cuts that left them "looking as if they were prepared in emergencies to provide landing spots for some very small experimental aircraft".
In between, he had become hugely successful, but his books were increasingly lazy, stuffed with stereotypes, and crushingly formulaic: cosy chuckles for tedious old farts. When was the last time a book made me do that? Actually, 1989, The Lost Continent, Bryson's first book. I had come to loath Bill Bryson, but on holiday a couple of years ago The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid was the only book around.
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