Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

Funny Business
Phlogiston Forty-One, 1994
It doesn't pay to analyze a joke too much. There is a terrible risk that all the humour will disappear. It
probably isn't all that wise to try and describe a joke either. Second hand humour is never funny. But
let's try anyway.
If you look closely at the SF of the so-called golden age and later, you find a surprising amount of
humour and light-heartedness. Perhaps the first sign that a genre is growing up is its ability to laugh at
itself. Far too much of the Ur-science fiction from the 1920s and thirties is ponderously serious and dull.
The authors who came after were more laid back, willing to indulge in a joke, sometimes for satirical or
allegorical purposes, but more often simply because it was fun.
Science fiction is a genre that lends itself well to humour. After all, so many of the stories are so
outrageous and the gadgetry so surrealistic that it always borders on the absurd anyway. It doesn't take
much of a shove to cross the barrier. (Many of the Goon Shows were arguably SF).
So, equipped with the spaceships and ray guns of an earlier generation we now have writers such as
Bob Shaw who have no compunction in describing a spaceship with a matter transmitter in the rear and
a matter receiver in the front and which travels the universe by being repeatedly transmitted through its
own length. Or Harry Harrison with his coal powered robots and even (in A Transatlantic Tunnel,
Hurrah) a coal powered aeroplane!
This latter is also a perfect demonstration of the total lack of a sense of humour that many SF fans
exhibit. After its first magazine publication, the magazine received a letter (Analog Nov 1972) discussing
the story in general and the coal-powered aeroplane in particular. The tone of the letter was such that it
was perfectly obvious the gentleman in question had not realised that the story was an enormous legpull.
It burbled off into arcane engineering points that Harrison had "got wrong", but eventually
concluded that yes, perhaps the aeroplane was feasible after all. I seem to recall a rather spluttering
reply from Harry Harrison which said, in words of one syllable, "It was a joke, you cretin!" (all right -cretin
has two syllables, but I'm paraphrasing).
Perhaps the golden age writer who first and best realised the essential absurdity of many science
fictional situations was Fredric Brown. The short story Placet is a Crazy Place takes place on a planet
which meets itself coming back in its orbit, causes hallucinations and is inhabited by widgie birds which
are made of matter so dense that the planet itself appears to them as thin as air appears to us. They
have a habit of flying through the foundations of buildings, thereby making the buildings unstable. In his
novels What Mad Universe and Martians Go Home (in my opinion his best novel) he has enormous
fun with SF clichés. The first describes an alternate world in which the SF clichés are actually true history.
The second is, quite literally, about little green men.
A writer who seems to have fallen into obscurity these days is Henry Kuttner. He died young and his
reputation has been eclipsed by the writers who came after him. But both on his own and in
collaboration with his wife C. L. Moore he produced some of the funniest stories I have ever read. Some
have been collected -- though long out of print Robots Have No Tails occasionally surfaces in second
hand bookshops. Make it your business to seek it out. It contains all the stories about Galloway
Gallagher, a man whose subconscious is a brilliant scientist. When he is sober he is just an ordinary
person, but when roaring drunk his subconscious takes over and makes the most incredible inventions.
The stories concern the efforts of a hungover and very repentant Gallagher trying to figure out just
what he's built this time. Why, for example, could he possibly have built a robot with a transparent
body? And having done that, why did he make it so vain that all it wants to do is stand in front of a
mirror watching its cogs go round? To find the answer to that conundrum, read The Proud Robot.
As far as I know Knutter's other connected stories have never been collected into a single book. The
stories about the Hogbens, a very unusual family of hillbillies, are unfailingly funny and virtually
impossible to find. I have one or two in a collection published by Mayflower in 1965 (The Best of