As a 20-year-old student I didn't laugh very much. Then I read Tristram Shandy
Circa spring 2008, I was struggling my way through an English literature degree. I’d always been an avid reader, though not, it was now apparent, a very fast one. Gone were the days where I could take three months over Nineteen Eighty-Four or Pig Heart Boy, bagging a few pages in the gaps between Championship Manager binges. To read at least two big books a week was the thing now, and write essays about them too. By this point, I was close to giving up, instead devoting most of my time to standup comedy, the perfect displacement for an ill-disciplined, attention-seeking undergraduate.
Each title on the reading list text brought with it more angst, none more so than The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne: another stupid, old-fashioned book with a stupid, old-fashioned name and a stupid, old-fashioned cover illustration of stupid, old-fashioned men.
Hungover and haunted by my reception at the previous night’s student union comedy gig, I shambled along to the seminar room, where I learned that Tristram Shandy was first published in 1759, that its characters were called things like “Dr Slop” and “Widow Wadman”, and that it contained a 19-page digression about a man with a very long nose called “Slawkenbergius”. I felt confirmed in my suspicions.
But as the seminar progressed I learned that the book was packed with form-busting jokes and philosophical digressions, its catastrophically self-aware narrator (a thinly veiled alter ego for his creator) trying to set down his entire life’s experience and opinions, while shifting between self-congratulation and deprecation with each new chapter (of which there was one almost every page; ideal for an inattentive, quick-to-tire reader like me). It seemed, in short, to represent everything I had come to love about standup, everything I wanted my own act to be.
I went straight to the library where I finished the 500-page tome within a couple of days (which I obviously should have done before the seminar), marvelling at how conversational, how prankish it felt. Setting about my extratextual research with a new vigour, I began to fathom Sterne’s importance in the comic tradition, and the lineage he shared with the Augustan satirists. But while Sterne, like his forebears, treated with irreverence all manner of contemporary subjects, his humour was humane, mirthful, even kind, primarily in his portrayal of Tristram’s father, Walter, and his Uncle Toby, the latter described by literary critic William Hazlitt as “one of the finest compliments ever paid to human nature”.
Essentially good, kind, decent and striving always, often against the odds, to understand and assist one’s fellow creatures are the qualities, in Sterne’s vision, that best exemplify man. And I use “man”’ deliberately, because the women in the novel are – and I see this far more starkly than I did 12 years ago – incredibly marginal. “They are indubitably there, though they seldom have a voice,” as the Canadian scholar Juliet McMaster put it.
Sterne’s men, though amiable, are at the same time absolute idiots – for aren’t we all? – and it’s from the imperfection and hubris of the human mind that much of Sterne’s comedy derives. Walter is every bit the Enlightenment patriarch, beholden to schemes, systems and hypotheses. Sterne draws on the contemporary ideas of the philosopher John Locke to depict how it is the “unhappy association of ideas” in the mind, and our proneness to singular obsessions (known as “hobby horses” in the Shandean register), often so out of step with reality, that get us into trouble. In a typical joke, we learn that Tristram’s father actually despises the name Tristram but, naturally, it is the name he ends up giving his son, via a farcical multistage accident that always makes me think of the immortal line from Brass Eye: “This is the one thing we didn’t want to happen.”
It’s the spirit of humour rather than satire that carries things. Tristram tells us that if his book is “wrote against anything … ‘tis wrote against the spleen”, the bodily organ that was then considered the “seat of melancholy”. Tristram goes on to detail how his intention to provoke laughter in his reader will do all sorts of weird things to different parts of their anatomy, all of which is supposed to be, in some way, good for us. Laughter was apparently only just coming into fashion in Sterne’s era, having been considered before then, according to the critic Ian Watt, “vulgar and foolish”.
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I wasn’t much prone to laughter myself back in 2008, miserable misanthrope that I was. But Tristram Shandy certainly had a remedial effect on me and I went on to write my dissertation about the restorative nature of comedy in Sterne’s writing, for which I, to my not-all-that-surprised disappointment, earned a 2:2 (I can laugh about it now).
I acknowledge that it’s easy to be put off by the book’s cover, or its blurb, or, to be fair, its actual content, instantaneously fussy and whimsical and digressive as it is. But I think it’s worth sticking with. Great claims have been made about its influence on modernist and postmodern writers, in some cases by those writers themselves. Virginia Woolf, for example, wrote that in reading Tristram Shandy “we are as close to life as we can be”.
For my part, Tristram Shandy for ever altered my view of comedy, of literature, of that cock-and-bull story we call life.
• Liam Williams is a writer and comedian. His debut novel Homes and Experiences is published by Hodder & Stoughton, available now on Audible and from August in hardback
