Great comedy for everyone – except those sitting next to you

By Simon Demetriou

Review: Big Time by Jen Spyra

There’s only one method to gauge the standard of a piece of comic fiction: how much does it irritate the friends, loved ones, or strangers who have to share your reading space? Big Time, Jen Spyra’s collection of short stories, annoyed my wife a lot. It was mostly the snorts that did it, but the giggles and occasional violent guffaws were also pretty effective at disrupting her Instagram browsing or Hallmark Christmas movie watching. So, it’s fair to say that Jen Spyra has done a good job with her first piece of book-length fiction.

My personal favourites have literary origins. I loved ‘The Adventure of the Mistaken Right Swipe’, in which a narrator who chronicles her ‘adventures in the dating world’ inadvertently ends up going on a series of dates with Sherlock Holmes – Watson attached, of course – culminating in a less than successful meet-the-parents experience. Meanwhile, as a fan of the Bourne books and films, the story of a man fished out of the Mediterranean with no memory but a dawning awareness that he ‘possesses advanced boyfriend skills’ left me tittering away like mad. Elsewhere, Spyra finds the comic darkness in Raymond Briggs’s Snowman and the Goosebumps series. If you prefer comic explorations of the absurdities of contemporary culture, then the story that gives the collection its name, ‘Big Time’, charts the successive endeavours of the same woman trying to make it in show-business, first in the 1940s, and then – by way of accidental time-travel – in 2021. We learn that while attitudes may be woke, and sexual exploitation at least somewhat diminished, it’s still a sick, mad world where getting covered in some kind of excrement remains unavoidable if you want to hit the big-time. This ability to tease the universal absurd out of contemporary culture is also showcased in stories on how being an influencer might have worked back when we all lived in caves, or what the reductio ad absurdam of obsession with getting a hot bridal body might be.

Ultimately, Big Time does what all good comedy does, and what makes comedy the most historically important – if not the most culturally esteemed – of genres. It shows its readers that with just a small shift in perspective, the world becomes a place of absurd fabrications, ripe for not just laughter but for potential reimagining and hope for change. Or, if you think I’m overthinking things, it does what all good comedy does: it makes you laugh even if you’re trying not to. And if you’ve ever read books or watched TV or used the internet, I would be very surprised if you didn’t find something in Big Time to prompt you to bother and potentially enrage those around you.

Big Time by Jen Spyra is published by Penguin Random House