Comical Side of Scoop

A detailed Summary of Comical Side of Scoop

"Evelyn Waugh was one of literature's great curmudgeons and a scathingly funny satirist. Scoop is a comedy of England's newspaper business of the 1930s and the story of William Boot, an innocent hick from the country who writes careful essays about the habits of the badger" ("Editorial Reviews"). "With this book England's wittiest novelist sets a new standard for comic extravaganza...the real message about SCOOP is that it is thoroughly enjoyable, uproariously funny and that everyone should read it at once" (The New York Times). This is just one example of the popularity of the comical relief hidden within the bindings of the book Scoop.

This book sets forth a new standard for comic extravaganza. The novel reads as though it had been formed with "slapstick", but it is architecture of amazement. For example, his delightful style of the keys of typewriters in the personal quarters of one of Fleet Street's greatest press lords made no more sound "than the drumming of a bishop's finger tips on an upholstered prie-dieu"; the buzzers of the telephones "were muffled and purred like wart cats"; the massive double doors, encased in New England rosewood, by "their weight, polish and depravity of design, proclaimed unmistakably,

Other additives were set forth with just the names of the newspapers and of the characters. Newspapers have fabulous names- the Brute, the Beast. A Communist named Pappenhacker, "one of the cleverest men in Fleet Street," (Waugh 92) has difficulty finding places to eat because of his "bullying of waiters" (Waugh 92). "This bullying has sound theory behind it. Every time you are polite to a proletarian, Pappenhacker believes, you help bolster up the capitalist system" (Gelder 1). Pappenhacker hated the lower class. Another character, Cruttwell, was a teacher in college that he disliked and in this book he uses his name to get back at him by using that character as the butt of a lot of his jokes written in the book.

The Pension Dressler stood in a side street and had, at first glance, the air rather of a farm than of a hotel. Frau Dressler's pig, tethered by one hind trotter to the jamb of the front door, roamed the yard and disputed the kitchen scraps with the poultry. He was a prodigious beast. Frau Dressler's guests prodded him appreciatively on the way to the dining room, speculating on how soon he would be ripe for killing. The milch-goat was allowed a narrower radius; those who kept strictly to the causeway were safe, but she never reconciled herself to this limitation and, day in, day out, essayed a series of meteoric onslaughts on the passers-by, ending, at the end of her rope, with a jerk that would have been the death of an animal of any other species. One day

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Approximate Word count = 1001
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Music