★★★☆☆ Pies and faces

Bellwether

Connie Willis

I admire Connie Willis -- she's a great science fiction writer. I particularly like the way she manages to be light-hearted about very serious subjects. Her Oxford Time Travel books are probably my favorites, from the very serious Doomsday Book to the resolutely tongue-in-cheek To Say Nothing of the Dog. But this one, Bellwether (which, to be clear, is not an Oxford Time Travel book), just doesn't work for me.

I don't know what makes a thing funny. Obviously surprise is an element of a good joke -- that's why we speak of punch lines. But it is not surprise in the straightforward way. There are Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck cartoons I still find funny, even though I have them memorized almost frame-by-frame. Somehow Daffy shouting "Duck Season -- Fire!" never gets old for me, even though I know it's coming. There's a sort of intellectual surprise that never goes away.

Things like this lead to what I call iconic humor -- the idea that certain objects are reproducibly, intrinsically, funny, and that if you include these icons in your story/movie/whatever, it's guaranteed to be funny. Pies in the face might be the most obvious example. For an iconic humorist, a pie in the face never gets old. Of course, this doesn't really work. In 2023 a pie in the face barely gets a chuckle, unless you manage to combine it with something else. (For instance, if you can work in a taboo -- link it to sex, for instance, you may be able to make it work.)

And that's the way Bellwether feels to me. I mean, read this from the publisher's blurb

Sandra Foster studies fads -- from Barbie dolls to the grunge look -- how they start and what they mean. Bennett O'Reilly is a chaos theorist studying monkey group behavior. They both work for the HiTek corporation, strangers until a misdelivered package brings them together.

If that's not a barrage of pies to the face, I don't know what is.

Nothing in Bellwether made me laugh -- it was all a very obvious attempt to be funny in very obvious ways, and it left me cold. *YOU* may love it -- I wouldn't presume to know what tickles anyone else, but I did not.

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