Jane Austen is funny!
Yes, she is!
Alert Janeite Lisa let us know about an article in The Times about women comic writers, including Jane Austen.
It was when I entered the sixth form that I learnt that women could be funny too. The lovely, sexy Mr Vanwyck introduced us to Jane Austen, and reassured us that, even though it was Great Literature, we were still allowed to laugh. The boys had all gone off by then to do physics or woodwork or something – good luck to them. We didn’t want them getting in the way of our dalliance with Mr Vanwyck.
Still, it took a while to dawn on me that Jane Austen was actually quite a lot funnier than Billy Fleming. And it took Colin Firth in wet riding breeches to convince me that Mr Darcy was even sexier than Mr Vanwyck.
[. . .]
I think the real change, pace Christopher Hitchens, is that men themselves are changing, in ways that are allowing women more space to be funny. It’s not that women have changed; as Jane Austen shows, they’ve always been funny.
Is it a coincidence that the new wave of women comedians started to hit our screens round about the same time that cooking and woodwork merged into “technology”, taken by both boys and girls at school, and personal and social education took over from the biology lab as the source for information about sex?
But while women comedians are happily frisking off into fields that were traditionally the preserve of men, there is another area of comedy where women have long held sway – since the days of Jane Austen, in fact.
Of the six finalists for the new Melissa Nathan Award for comedy romance, five are women. So maybe women do have a different outlook on life. We like a happy ending.
Now we wish someone would inform the well-intentioned sorts who are reviewing our book that Jane Austen is funny…*cough*
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