Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2011 September 30 • Friday

Fans of Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister will enjoy this combination of memoir and professional advice from Jonathan Lynn, co-creator and co-writer of those series, as well as a successful actor and director and writer of other programs and films.

It's a short book, under two hundred pages, divided into 150 rules, as suggested by the title. Rule 42, for instance, is "Comedy attacks the institutions of society" and Rule 93 is "Be brief, usually".

Rule 42 is followed by a short list of things comedy mocks and the observation that "Art is criticism of life, and comedy is criticism by ridicule".

Rule 93 prompts Lynn to remind reader that it was Polonius "who originally said that brevity is the soul of wit in the course of an immensely long and comically tedious speech". This is followed by one of Sir Humphrey Appleby's marvellous marathon obfuscations.