Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

Kuttner -- Volumes One and Two).
In See you Later, the Hogbens fall foul of another hillbilly family known as the Tarbells. The eight Tarbell
boys:
...all come over in a bunch with their shooting irons and busted their way in. We didn't want no trouble.
Uncle Lem -- who's Uncle Les's twin except they was born quite a spell apart -- he was
asleep for the winter off in a holler tree somewheres, so he was out of it. But the baby,
bless his heart, is gitting kind of awkward to shift around, being as how he's four hunnerd
years old and big for his age -- 'bout three hunnerd pounds I guess... then there was
Grandpaw in the attic and I'd got sort of fond of the little Perfesser feller we keep in a
bottle...
Saunk Hogben, the narrator of the story, finally solves the feud by splitting himself into two billion, two
hundred and fifty million, nine hundred and fifty nine thousand nine hundred and nineteen parts,
travelling forwards in time, standing in front of every person in the world, handing each of those people
a stick of firewood and then spitting in their faces.
It says a lot for Kuttner's sense of plot that he managed to make you believe that this preposterous
nonsense was the only possible solution to the problems raised in the story!
Kuttner had a thing about blue eyes. He seemed to find them irresistibly funny. One of his most famous
opening lines, from a short novel published under the pseudonym of Lewis Padgett and called The Far
Reality (also published as The Fairy Chessmen) is:
The doorknob opened a blue eye and looked at him.
That one, along with L. Sprague de Camp's famous "Yngvi is a louse!" have entered the folklore.
Until it was killed by the paper shortage during the second world war, the magazine Unknown published
an amazing number of satisfyingly funny stories. It was edited by John W. Campbell, a man not known
for his sense of humour, and yet his lightness of touch on this magazine proved, if proof were needed,
that he really was an editor par excellence. It was in this magazine that L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher
Pratt chronicled the misadventures of Harold Shea, the incomplete enchanter. Even writers whose major
works tended towards the serious produced light-hearted pieces that fitted perfectly into the mood of
the magazine. Lester Del Rey's stories about the elf Ellowan Coppersmith appeared here as did H. L.
Gold's Trouble with Water.
Campbell's clown prince, though, was Eric Frank Russell, a British writer who, in the 1940s and 1950s,
published story after story in Astounding. He was very good at lampooning the bureaucratic mind and
he poked fun at the military. His masterpieces are the fix-up novel The Great Explosion and the novels
Wasp and Next of Kin (sometimes published under the title The Space Willies -- it is one of the
funniest novels I've ever read, and if I hadn't quoted from it extensively in another article, I'd quote from
it again here). In 1955 Russell won a Hugo for his short story Allamagoosa, an anti-bureaucratic satire
which packs a tremendous punch
An author whose name is not often associated with comedy is Philip K. Dick. This is a shame, because
many of his stories demonstrate a wonderful sense of the outrageous and bizarre and contain moments
of genuine comedic genius. I defy anyone to read Galactic Pot Healer without cracking up. Joe
Fernwright, an unemployed ceramics technician (the "pot healer" of the title) is employed by an alien
being called the Glimmung to help repair the pots in a cathedral which is to be raised from the bottom of
the ocean on a distant planet. Joe receives the job offer from the Glimmung as a message in a bottle
which he finds floating in his toilet bowl one day. The Glimmung seems fond of this means of
communication. Later in the novel he is engaged in mortal combat with his deadly foe the Black
Glimmung at the bottom of the ocean. Joe and Willis (a robot whose ambition is to be a freelance writer)
row out to the scene of the fight.