The great English satirist Tom Sharpe died today at 85. His novels, all of them vulgar, some of them spectacularly so, made life worth living when a new one was published. He ripped apart academia and its pretensions as lions might rip apart an antelope carcass. But Sharpe wasn't just a writer with a grievance heaping insult upon insult, hoping to provide a necessary corrective to bad form. Oh, no. He was funny, very, very funny, so his books didn't just provide readers with the glee that comes from seeing some pretentious faculty head knocked off his high horse, they also supplied passages that provoked gasping-for-breath laughter. In Porterhouse Blue, his evisceration of a Cambridge University college (Sharpe himself went to Pembroke College at Cambridge), there is a scene that should be considered one of the best examples in modern English of how to write an indelibly funny scene: a junior lecturer, hell bent on seduction, has a mishap with a gas fire and condoms and fills the air above stodgy Porterhouse with a squadron of floating rubbers.
As far as I know Tom Sharpe never made it to Hogtown, more's the pity. He had at least two fans here: yours truly and Leacock Award winner Terry Fallis. Perhaps as the reading series start to drift back in the fall some energetic type will do a humour night with extracts from Sharpe's books as the centrepiece. Certainly I hope an arts organization in England establishes a Tom Sharpe award for humour writing. He easily ranks with P.G. Wodehouse, Kingsley Amis and David Lodge.
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