Amusing The Jungle

A failing comedian accepts a six-month contract to entertain the staff of a remote research station, on the reasonable assumption that a captive audience cannot walk out. They can, it turns out, simply stop laughing, which is considerably worse.

Amusing The Jungle is the funniest book I have written and, I suspect, the saddest. Dev is a man who has confused being liked with being known, and the rainforest is spectacularly indifferent to the distinction. The birds are the only crowd that never heckles, largely because they are not listening.

“He had a routine for every kind of silence except this one, which was not waiting for him to continue so much as it was simply weather, enormous and green and entirely unconcerned with the timing he had spent twenty years perfecting.”

I spent three weeks at a field station while drafting this, mostly getting in the way of people doing serious work. What struck me was how quickly a small group invents its own comedy, private and unrepeatable, and how firmly it excludes anyone who arrives with prepared material.

The novel laughs at Dev for three hundred pages and then, very gently, forgives him. That felt like the right ratio.