Other Writers Seem Asleep by Comparison
After Martin Amis’s death, Jennifer Egan reflects on his influence and his humor.
I learned how to be funny from Martin Amis.
I don’t mean in person—I’m not funny in person, and I don’t know if Amis was, either. Although our paths crossed a couple of times after he moved to Brooklyn, I never spoke with him for long enough to learn whether the caustic hilarity of his 20th-century novels—which I devoured in the 1990s and then studied, trying to understand how their humor worked—was a feature of Amis’s social persona or just his writing.
Amis’s approach to literary comedy is characterized, above all, by excess: Push the action to an extreme, then push it further, then further still, until events tip into a sublime synthesis of slapstick, stand-up, and cartoon. I try this displays the strategy:
