In an interview on The Comic Novel

In most of the other books you’ve chosen here, class is a very significant issue, and I wondered if you’d like to talk about The Diary of a Nobody, the first on your list, written in 1888-9 by the Grossmith brothers. The hero of this book is a bank clerk, Mr Pooter, lower middle class, who is always chaffing at those who look down on him from above or trying to squash those beneath him, tradesmen and so on, who he thinks are getting above themselves.

Yes. Class is just all over this book, class jokes about Pooter’s aspirations to respectability – but to me, those jokes are the least charming parts of the book, like when Pooter sees his name in the paper and he’s really excited but it’s spelled wrong and so he writes a letter and it gets in the next day’s paper but it’s spelled wrong in a different way. You know. Laughing at that desire to be noted, and it’s funny and pitiable, but I think that there are subtler and stranger moments in that book that I find more intriguing. For example there’s a dinner party scene when Pooter is at an American businessman’s house, and this American, whose name is Mr Franching, is railing at middle class vulgarity, and he’s going on and on speechifying at dinner, about people who don’t understand their station and people who wear clip on ties and who hire waiters to make them seem like they’re more important when they throw a dinner party, and what’s so funny to me about that scene is that Pooter’s reaction is so mixed. There’s a sense in which he sort of recognizes himself in this depiction of this middle class aching after respectability, but he also doesn’t recognize it, so that sitting there listening to this guy – even though this guy is almost describing Pooter without actually having met him, rattling off one characteristic after another – Pooter’s having this slight queasy feeling, but is fascinated by it too, and laughs when the American laughs…

He doesn’t recognize himself?

He sort of does and he sort of doesn’t. I mean, that’s what’s so interesting about it to me – it plays on that truth… that nobody thinks of themselves as vulgar. You think of other people as vulgar. You never imagine that you’re vulgar. So that even as this guy is standing there painting a portrait of Pooter, right in front of Pooter, Pooter is looking at it and doesn’t recognize himself and still wants to be on the side of the guy who looks down at the masses. So he’s sort of offended but he wants to let it be known that he wants to be this guy’s friend and doesn’t take it personally, and of course at the end of the book he takes a job with Mr Franching…

We’re laughing at Pooter because Pooter is a fool, not a dangerous person. But aren’t we very similar to Pooter in that Pooter is a portrait of us and we, like him, are laughing at that portrait? I mean aren’t we laughing at ourselves?

So you mean that the way Pooter is reacting to the guy at the dinner table is the same way that we’re reacting to Pooter? That we have that mix of recognition and refusal of recognition?

Yes.

I think there’s a lot to that. That’s probably why The Office is so hard to watch. You’re pretty sure you’re not David Brent, so you can sit back and laugh. But it’s not without that inner wince… Pooter was probably the David Brent for the 1890’s, and perhaps now he doesn’t provoke quite the same kinds of anxieties, just because the historical difference allows enough separation. But that aspiring to be a greater man than he ever will be provokes a similar queasy reaction.

I remember hearing a neurologist say that monkeys laugh to signal to the tribe. They’re saying, ‘I’ve seen something weird but it’s ok’. Laughter is a kind of hysterical expression of ‘phew!’. Is that something that connects these books you’ve chosen?