If neurosis (Woody Allen), corpulence (Oliver Hardy) and stupidity (Krazy Kat) continue to attract paying customers, who wants to see an Allen with his problems licked, a Hardy signed up with Weight Watchers, or a Krazy Kat enrolled in college? So, at the worst, one domesticates one’s problems by proxy, resigns oneself to their status as spoiled pets, and chuckles at their semi-permanence, rather than make any effort to solve them.Īll of John Kennedy Toole’s preposterous characters seem mired in this condition - to the profit of nothing but the author’s despairing, affectionate scorn and slapstick. There’s an explicit economic reason for most Reactionary Humor. Following this narrow philosophy - a familiar form of Southern comfort - one quickly arrives at the conclusion that one’s character, idiosyncratic warts and all, is as inescapable as one’s skeleton. They live according to an improbable cosmic law that declares human personality to be an unalterable given, incapable of undergoing any development or improvement.

The heroes and victims of Reactionary Satire are usually the same people. Or at least we get it until that terrible moment at the end of Cervantes’ novel, when the dying Don suddenly repudiates his delusions and finds himself. One can even say that Reactionary Humor is what we get from Don Quixote - a figure mentioned twice by Walker Percy (along with Oliver Hardy and Thomas Aquinas) in the foreword to this remarkable, posthumous New Orleans novel, whose author killed himself at the age of 32. Fields, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Archie Bunker, and Woody Allen. Broadly speaking, it’s what we learn to expect from the perennial antics of Blondie and Dagwood, Amos and Andy, Franny and Zooey, Laurel and Hardy (and Marie and Bruce, in Wallace Shawn’s recent play), not to mention W.C. What I mean by Reactionary Humor is the boring literary schemes of Tom Sawyer, not the expedient escape tactics of Huck Finn.

I suspect it would have been less warmly received - one reason, perhaps, why it wasn’t published way back then. Is it by mere chance, or through some form of subtly earned tragic irony, that this brilliantly funny, reactionary novel is being published during a reactionary period, apparently about a decade and a half after it was written? God knows what it might have been like to read this in the mid-’60s.

I was moved to repost this review some time ago by the generous recent reference to it made by Sam Jordison in the Guardian. This book review appeared in the Augissue of The Soho News.

A confederacy of dunces book review