Scoop by Evelyn Waugh

If you can divide anything into two groups, then humorous novels can be split into the sweet and the tart. Sweet is more popular, I think - Wodehouse is the great British exemplar, the most relevant for today's discussion. But also think Three Men in a Boat or The Importance of Being Earnest: sweet humor is often silly (Douglas Adams is another example from a later generation), and the stakes in the book might be important, but they're rarely dangerous.

Tart humor can edge into the sour - and here I might start mentioning Evelyn Waugh - with an undertone of disgust and unhappiness with humanity in general. If sweet humor thinks people are generally amusing and is fond of them, tart humor thinks people are inherently flawed, broken things, and all you can do is laugh at the awful things they do. On my side of the Atlantic, the great tart humorous novel of the last century is Catch-22; a lot of Kurt Vonnegut falls into that category as well.

Waugh is one of the masters of the tart humorous novel, and Scoop is one of his best books. It was published in 1937, loosely based on a trip he took two years before to Ethiopia as a correspondent for the Daily Mail to cover an expected war there. It follows one of the traditional humorous novel plots: a naïf is tossed into a situation he doesn't expect or understand, where he is too innocent to see the true picture, and where he blunders through mostly due to that innocence.

You see, the novelist John Boot asks a friend, the wife of a cabinet minister - I'm not sure if we're supposed to assume he's also having an affair with her; if so, he's only one of perhaps dozens - to help get him out of the country quickly and on a newspaper's dime, to avoid a woman he has become entangled with. She pushes the appropriate levers, but the Beast newspaper's functionaries and proprietor (Lord Copper) instead send one William Boot, who writes a twee weekly here's-some-random-rural-color feature for the Beast from his ancestral manse somewhere in the green and pleasant heartlands.

William Boot is not a foreign correspondent, and not really a reporter of any kind. But he's outfitted at vast expense and to a massive extent, and packed off to Ishmaelia, where everyone who's anyone is sure a civil war is brewing. There is no sign of a civil war in Ishmaelia, where the Jackson family - originally imported from America a few generations ago, and having proliferated to the point where one of them runs nearly every major commercial operation or government agency, up to the Presidency - are firmly in control, and vaguely popular with the people.

But of course the joke is that journalists create wars by reporting on them, and that's more or less what happens in Ishmaelia. The Fascists and Communists - or one could say the Germans and Russians, if you want to be more geopolitical and less ideological - are maneuvering, we at first think to get Ishmaelia into their spheres of influence. (We later learn that they, and various capitalists, are much more interested in Ishmaelia's mineral wealth, which is the real source of all the conflict - money, and potentially a lot of it.)

Boot - William, who we follow for the majority of the novel - is thrown into Ishmaelia and into the society of reporters, most of whom are friendly but competitive. He falls in love with a young woman whose husband - they are possibly not quite legitimately married, and he may have run off on her - is conveniently away. He wanders through his life there, not filing any dispatches for long stretches of time because nothing is actually happening. (Of course, Waugh's point is that reporters' job is to make up things, because nothing is really happening.) This makes his masters back in London unhappy, but it's the mid-30s, so communication is by cable - a few words at huge expense - and transportation takes months, so they send oddly-worded threats demanding more and better news from him, which he often misses seeing in the first place.

Boot ends up reporting actual major news, when there actually is something like a coup in Ishmaelia, and does the reflexive right thing - as defined by Waugh - because he's that kind of decent upstanding rural British upper-class chappie, and eventually gets to go back to England, returning home to his decaying manse and collection of oddball relatives. It's more-or-less a happy ending; he doesn't get the girl, but she was someone else's wife to begin with.

Waugh tells this story in often very short scenes; he had the knack, so important in humor, of dropping into a scene, showing just exactly what he needed to, and then bouncing back out to something else. Humor relies on speed and contrast and insights and reversals and precision of language, all of which Waugh brings to bear brilliantly in Scoop. It is a tart novel, verging on a sour one, with a message that the world is essentially corrupt and horrible, but it gives us a deeply amusing, penetrating view of that world, distanced enough than the darts don't pain us.