So Allen, is the comic novel different from other funny books, or are all funny books comic novels?

That's a good question. I suppose that when I was thinking of this list and I thought about where it would start and where it would end there were lots of books that I could have put on there. But what I think maybe separates the comic novel is a certain consistency of spirit. I mean, there are a lot of funny parts in Pride and Prejudice, but I don't know that I'd call it a comic novel...

There are several books on your list that are approaching the idea of not taking life too seriously in different ways. But I'd like to start with James Wood. Because Wood is the only critic on your list and he's a very well respected critic, amongst academics and also with readers of the New York Review of Books and fancy literary magazines like that. You've chosen a collection of his essays called The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter And The Novel. Would you be OK to start with James Wood? Although we could perfectly easily start with another author. I mean, coincidentally, The Irresponsible Self was published in the same year (2004) as Gideon Defoe's The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists.

Although I have a feeling he would hate that book. I’ve never seen him review a book about pirates in an adventure with anybody…

Wood’s talking about the role of laughter in novels?

Yes. And one of the things Wood talks about is the way that laughter is used in a way that says a lot about the author. So that Evelyn Waugh uses laughter in an often contemptuous way, while authors like Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky or Chekov use it in a more philanthropic kind of way… And this gets close to what I’m interested in, because what Wood’s also talking about is a fundamental historical shift. With the exception of Shakespeare, who I guess is a big exception, comedy had usually been a judgemental, derisory sort of affair. But what Wood puts his finger on in the late nineteenth century is the emergence of what he calls the comedy of forgiveness, as opposed to the comedy of correction and the satiric mode. Before this shift the comic mode had its roots in a quasi religious idea of correcting people’s faults and passing judgement on them. The books which I’ve chosen do not really stand back in judgement on Bertie Wooster or Mr Pooter or whomever it might be. It would just be incredibly boring if that was all that happened. Too easy, over too quickly. Rather it’s that the person who has all these manifest flaws is still a person who commands our sympathy and identification and recognition. And that this is really a creation of the novel, a secular creation which Wood puts like this: ‘if religious comedy is punishment for those who deserve it, secular comedy is forgiveness for those who don’t.’

I read an article in The Guardian on Wood’s book. A very reverential article. But one of the things the article made clear was that Wood’s book was pretty high brow. People like Wodehouse, Flan O’Brien and Defoe didn’t make the cut.

Well Wood has written on Wodehouse. I think in the TLS, and I don’t know why it’s not in that volume. A marvellous piece on Wodehouse.

I’m a huge Wodehouse fan. And I guess the reason I’m bringing this up is that Wood’s written this book about the role of laughter in novels, but he’s talking about laughter in all novels. What I want to understand is – why do you want to talk specifically about comic novels? Why the interest in them collectively? As a genre?

I don’t know. It has something to do with the connection with the way I think of these novels now and the way I used to think of these novels when I was 13 or 14 years old, like science fiction or the Lord of the Rings or something, where there’s this kind of – a fantastic space opened up within the ordinary, where people are made of mirth instead of flesh and bone. It’s that magical thinking, that magical thinking that everybody is allowed to indulge in for that short space of time in which the novel is allowed to persist, in spite of the pressures and the problems of reality. I mean in all these novels there’s a kind of background pressure of anxiety which is always just left there in the shadows. Just a little bit. And is always about to fatally puncture the pretentions of the characters but never quite does.

Can we talk about some of these books specifically? For example, PG Wodehouse’s The Code of the Woosters?

Sure. Wodehouse became popular towards the end of the First World War and in its immediate aftermath – a very traumatic episode for everyone involved. An episode that shattered many of the assumptions of the pre-war period. But Wodehouse is one of those people who became famous for the art of ignoring all that… for being oblivious and yet also incredibly observant. It’s a totally preposterous range of characteristics in an author that he could have been at once so good at poking fun at people’s pretensions – that he could have had such an exquisite command of language and also, in his own way, of human psychology - and yet seem at times like he was bumping around the world like Bertie Wooster. Was it an act he was putting on? Wood talks in the article I mentioned about Wodehouse’s admiration for the Nazis. I can’t remember exactly how this admiration was described but I think it was something like: he liked the way they all marched in line and were nice to him. I mean it’s crazy stuff. But you just don’t know. Is it self parody? How could all these qualities exist in this person?

So Wodehouse is sometimes Bertie. And also sometimes Jeeves? I mean he seems so brilliant at removing any obstacle to the reader’s pleasure.

Yes Jeeves also… but if you don’t think of Jeeves as a servant, or not only as a servant, then he’s also a kind of Mephistopheles. You sort of feel that the Bertie Woosters of this world – the people who want or can consider the world as a great confection of pleasure and of fun and trivia and nonsense and everything, are left open to all kinds of manipulation and scheming. Bertie Wooster has this simplicity that is just at the mercy of the world, and it just so happens that Jeeves always uses his power to help his boss, unless Bertie wears the wrong coloured socks one day and Jeeves wants to teach him a lesson. In that relationship there’s a real susceptibility that obviously never comes to any tragic end, but the innocence is… Bertie just doesn’t realize how manipulated and vulnerable he is…