A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

New York 2001

I have not decided if Three Men in a Boat is the funniest book I have ever read, but I am sure it is the funniest I had never heard of. Many authors can make me smile but few can make me laugh out loud, laugh until innocent bystanders question their safety and my sanity. Jerome K. Jerome packs more laughs into one hundred and eighty-five pages (the length of my 1961 Penguin edition) than most authors manage over their entire careers. Of course most books are not meant to be funny in the least-usually referred to as "serious" literature.

Jerome’s book was panned by critics and beloved by readers. Its success was no doubt part of its failure, a trend that is continued to this day by those who are ashamed of sharing pleasure with the commoners. It is probably true that Three Men in a Boat is not great literature. The Victorian comic novels of Dickens and Thackery, and the later Wodehouse who often invites comparison with Jerome, are more well-known, especially for those of us on this side of the pond. But what makes Jerome’s work, originally meant to be a travelogue, so uproarious is how fresh the comedy seems to the modern reader. Not bad for a book published in 1889. And in retrospect, I am grateful to be an American living over a hundred years later. Considering how hard I laughed, my bodily integrity might have been in danger had I gotten all the jokes.

The key to timeless humor is an understanding of human nature. Now matter how far society comes or how fast society changes, the absurdity of our existence remains. Consider that Victorian England was experiencing the rapid expansion of the middle class, the growth of the suburbs, the dawning of idleness and consumerism, if you will. Suddenly people began to appreciate and indulge in the leisurely nonsense that breeds the kinds of social faux pas and crass commercialism seen in works like "The Diary of a Nobody," published around the same time and also quite funny, or to cite a more contemporary example, the television program Seinfeld. The self-referential absurdity is part of the appeal.

Our three heroes (to say nothing of the dog) are lazy, careless, and self-absorbed hypochondriacs. Their attitude towards work can be summed up thusly: "I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours."

The modern reader will justifiably bristle to the interstitials—momentary lapses into purple prose that can be eye-rollingly bad. However, Jerome can also turn an elegant phrase and leave us with a passage that is surprisingly beautiful for such an unserious work:

Slowly the golden memory of the dead sun fades from the hearts of the cold, sad clouds. Silent, like sorrowing children, the birds have ceased their song, and only the moorhen’s plaintive cry and the harsh croak of the corncrake stirs the awed hush around the couch of waters, where the dying day breathes out her last.

Here Jerome catches us off-guard with an alliterative, though perhaps overly rhetorical image that, although the concrete use of "moorhen" "corncrake" might be lost on many readers, will be familiar to anyone who has camped out and enjoyed the dusk. The entire story is held together with what is essentially a camping trip. With the attendant annoyances of packing, planning, dealing with the weather and other campers. The plot is a series of events that are strung together and used to remind the narrator of other events.

Jerome’s liberal use of hyperbole and personification (where every inanimate object seems to have a mind of its own and a decidedly inconvenient temperament) gives the minor annoyances a typically human flash of the dramatic. Nothing goes quite right throughout the trip but then nothing particularly tragic happens. But Jerome’s wit and comedic timing is just what the reader needs to see the hilarity in every day events. In this sense, again, I have to draw a parallel with Seinfeld. In both cases we are reminded of that old saying about the definition of comedy and tragedy: comedy is when something bad happens to you. Tragedy is when something bad happens to me.

The story itself was drawn from the author and his friends, the dog being the sole embellishment, though Montmorency is so personified it’s no wonder the author admitted that the dog was drawn from his own personality. Trip up the Thames. A trip that has been copied several times since.

The use of personification is rampant. Every object, however seemingly benign, takes on an air of anti-human malice. Anyone who owns a computer will no doubt relate. Whether it’s a teapot, a steam boat, the river itself, or even the weather, in Jerome’s world, everyone and everything has it out for you. The good-natured ineptitude of the companions is also a source of much of the book’s humor. Typically, they find fault with others and not with themselves. But we can’t be too angry with them because they so resemble people we know (but certainly there’s no resemblance between the characters and the reader himself!).