Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)

Mallory was reading to me a list of classic books the other day -- determining which ones I've heard of and trying to select one for a school project -- and when she got to Three Men in a Boat, I asked, "What's that one?" She told me that the description on her list said, "Probably the funniest novel in the English language", so I promptly made a trip to the library (of course). Written in 1889, this may have been the funniest book of its time, but of all time? Although it's more than a strictly comic novel, I did find this line:

It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.

Who knew that joke was that old? Based on a real boat trip up the River Thames that Jerome K. Jerome took with two friends (to say nothing of the dog), this book is part travelogue, part memoir, part history book, and part farce. As the book has never been out of print, it is apparently still popular for modern rowers to retrace the three men's route, with the added bonus that every pub and inn mentioned in the book still exists.
     
                                           

The comedy in Three Men in a Boat tends toward slapstick, but told in a mock serious tone. The following (assembling a tent over the rowboat at night) could have been right out of an I Love Lucy or Three Stooges script, and I was repeatedly impressed by how ahead of its time the comedy felt in this book (I found it funnier than anything in Dickens, for example):

It looked so simple in the abstract. You took five iron arches, like gigantic croquet hoops, and fitted them up over the boat, and then stretched the canvas over them, and fastened it down: it would take quite ten minutes, we thought.

That was an under-estimate.

We took up the hoops, and began to drop them into the sockets placed for them. You would not imagine this to be dangerous work; but, looking back now, the wonder to me is that any of us are alive to tell the tale. They were not hoops, they were demons. First they would not fit into their sockets at all, and we had to jump on them, and kick them, and hammer at them with the boat-hook; and, when they were in, it turned out that they were the wrong hoops for those particular sockets, and they had to come out again.

But they would not come out, until two of us had gone and struggled with them for five minutes, when they would jump up suddenly, and try and throw us into the water and drown us. They had hinges in the middle, and, when we were not looking, they nipped us with these hinges in delicate parts of the body; and, while we were wrestling with one side of the hoop, and endeavouring to persuade it to do its duty, the other side would come behind us in a cowardly manner, and hit us over the head.

But Three Men in a Boat, being primarily a travelogue, also takes many opportunities to wax on about various settings, sometimes in the purple prose popular in Jerome's day:

They awe us, these strange stars, so cold, so clear. We are as children whose small feet have strayed into some dim-lit temple of the god they have been taught to worship but know not; and, standing where the echoing dome spans the long vista of the shadowy light, glance up, half hoping, half afraid to see some awful vision hovering there.

And sometimes the prose and setting is used to moralise:

The Cistercian monks, whose abbey stood there in the thirteenth century, wore no clothes but rough tunics and cowls, and ate no flesh, nor fish, nor eggs. They lay upon straw, and they rose at midnight to mass. They spent the day in labour, reading, and prayer; and over all their lives there fell a silence as of death, for no one spoke.

A grim fraternity, passing grim lives in that sweet spot, that God had made so bright! Strange that Nature’s voices all around them—the soft singing of the waters, the whisperings of the river grass, the music of the rushing wind—should not have taught them a truer meaning of life than this. They listened there, through the long days, in silence, waiting for a voice from heaven; and all day long and through the solemn night it spoke to them in myriad tones, and they heard it not.

And sometimes, Jerome makes surprisingly poignant observations:

Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd?

But, this book is mostly about the laughs, and they can be found in unexpected places. At one point, after Jerome was fantasising about being present at King John's signing of the Magna Carta, I flipped back to the chapter summary and spotted this:

                                            

Three Men in a Boat is an odd duck to pin down, and being quite short, I'm happy to have read it; to have filled in this gap in my knowledge of classic novels. I smiled at many one-liners (Everything has its drawbacks, as the man said when his mother-in-law died, and they came down upon him for the funeral expenses), but for a contemporary (meaning: funny to the modern reader) take on the same milieu (deadpan-funny-travelogue), I'd be more likely to recommend Tony Hawks' Round Ireland With a Fridge (while stopping short of recommending one recreate Hawks' pointless journey. Rowing up the Thames sounds like a much nicer holiday.)