The joy of insults

Reading Bill Bryson's 1992 travel book Neither Here nor There I was reminded of a book I read several years ago called The Clumsiest People in Europe. This tells of Favell Lee Mortimer, a 19th century Englishwoman who wrote travel books for children without hardly ever leaving her own home.

Her books were full of insults. Italians are "ignorant and wicked," for example. The people of Greece "scream like babies."

Bill Bryson often sounds like Favell Lee Mortimer. Consider:

"The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience."

"Brussels is a seriously ugly place."

"Cologne is a dismal place, which rather pleased me. It was comforting to see that the Germans could make a hash of a city as well as anyone else, and they certainly have done so with Cologne."

"Eating in Sweden is really just a series of heartbreaks."

"The Italians' technological contribution to humankind stopped with the pizza oven."

Bryson's writing is superior to Mortimer's in at least three ways.

1. He actually visited the places he writes about.

2. His work didn't take a hundred years or more to become funny. It was funny when he wrote it and remains hilarious three decades later.

3. He praises as much as he criticizes. Praise is rarely as amusing to read, however, unless you are the one being praised. So as a result his sharp jabs tend to be more memorable than his many positive comments. He often delights in the very same cities and countries that he humiliated in a preceding paragraph. It is obvious that he loved his solo excursion through Europe. He points out whatever he likes and dislikes along the way, but when he ends his journey in Istanbul, he seems tempted to continue into Asia.

The reader knows Bryson doesn't actually regret the terrible food, the dreary hotel rooms and the unfriendly people he finds along the way. Those are the very things that make his book so much fun.