When You're Smiling

I've read somewhere, and I just can't remember where - an increasingly common condition, in my case - that a colleague who worked with J. M. Coetzee when he was still an academic said he only ever saw the great man laugh once in the whole time he worked with him. Readers of Disgrace would find little surprising in this. It must be up for some award as one of the least humorous novels ever written. (Next to it Siddhartha is a regular laugh fest, English A1 students please note.) But what I find particularly interesting about this little story is the question of what it actually was that made him laugh. A joke? An ironic situation? Somebody breaking wind? What could have, albeit briefly, opened the floodgates? And would it have made me laugh?

It's increasingly rare for me to suffer a bout of uncontrollable laughter but there was one recently brought on by a reference in Bennett's Untold Stories to the message on a Christmas card from one of his friends. It's far too vulgar to repeat in this very public far place but it's on page 301 on my edition, in a diary entry for December 2001. And every time I think of it I crack up.