{"id":23314,"date":"2010-05-04T12:58:48","date_gmt":"2010-05-04T12:58:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/?p=23314"},"modified":"2010-07-19T18:30:10","modified_gmt":"2010-07-19T18:30:10","slug":"3am-cult-hero-bs-johnson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/3am-cult-hero-bs-johnson\/","title":{"rendered":"3:AM<\/i> Cult Hero: B.S. Johnson"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"bsj2\"<\/p>\n

“Telling stories is telling lies, and I want to tell the truth.”<\/i><\/div>\n

David Quantick<\/a> on the humour of B.S. Johnson:<\/p>\n

B.S. Johnson is one of my favourite comic authors. Dry, yes. Sometimes a bit fond of using long words you’ve never heard of, for comic effect. But he makes me laugh. There’s a deadpan quality to the writing. There’s the odd epigram. There’s a great visual humour in Johnson. But most of all, there’s the Milligan-esque surreal. Johnson’s obsession with form, with constantly going Look it’s not real!, went back to Laurence Sterne \u2014 Jonathan Coe has written that something about B.S. Johnson reminded him vaguely of Monty Python \u2014 and for me, reading Christy Malry in the mid 1970s, it was the whole kicking in the fourth wall bit.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don’t know,” said Headlam, crying into his beer\u2026 \u201cBut since I seem to be the comic relief in this novel..” \u201cIt needs it,” said Christie.<\/i><\/p>\n

Christy Malry<\/i> is stuffed with that sort of thing. Characters live solely because Johnson says he likes them.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

More:<\/b> B.S. Johnson website<\/a> \/ B.S. Johnson’s Fat Man on a Beach<\/i><\/a> [YouTube] \/ Richard Marshall interviews Paul Tickell<\/a>, director of Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry<\/i> \/ Andrew Stevens<\/a> reviews Jonathan Coe’s Like A Fiery Elephant<\/i> \/ ‘B.S. Johnson, Brutalist’<\/a> by Sukhdev Sandhu \/ ‘Let’s have a BS Johnson day<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Telling stories is telling lies, and I want to tell the truth.” David Quantick on the humour of B.S. Johnson: B.S. Johnson is one of my favourite comic authors. Dry, yes. Sometimes a bit fond of using long words you’ve never heard of, for comic effect. But he makes me laugh. There’s a deadpan quality […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-buzzwords"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}