‘[Laughter] was something that drew people together. It was something shared’. (‘The Paradox of Satire [I]’): from laughing along to mislaughing oneself away and coming out in Jonathan Coe’s fiction

Abstract

While laughter may still ‘draw people together’ and create intimacy and connections of sorts in Coe’s fiction, narrative irony, for instance, is a first tool for Coe to isolate the character and break not only the novelistic illusion, but also the laughing community itself. Besides, what happens when the joke falls flat and the laughing bond never gets to be actualised? Or when we laugh when we are not supposed to? My contention is that it is precisely in these moments when one ‘mislaughs’ that Coe’s protagonists come out and assert themselves, show their own limitations and reveal their humaneness. This is when the (post)humanist drive in Coe’s writing comes to the fore, when the emphasis is first on the individual’s vulnerable intimate hurdles. I eventually suggest that this must be read as a response to Coe’s own doubts and disillusions regarding satire today. Mislaughing might thus be a guarantee to remain critical and at a distance, endowing the reader with the newly political role that Coe thinks is at the heart of the ethical responsibility of contemporary fiction.

Keywords

• Jonathan Coe
• humour
• satire
• community
• intimacy
• melancholy