I am more likely to laugh at a movie than a book. I’m sure this is true of many people, and I’m sure there are a host of social-emotional reasons for this disparity, but I can think of at least one craft-based reason, too.
In a movie, the moment of comic release comes and goes in real time. It hits me, or it doesn’t, and then I’m onto the next scene. But when I’m reading, I am always re-reading. I can’t help it. If there’s a false step in the comic setup, I’m going to circle back to it, to see if I missed something, and by the time I’ve retreaded it a dozen times I have annulled the proto-chuckle that had been happily gestating in my belly. But I don’t think I came upon a single false step in the entirety of The Dog of the South, because its author, Charles Portis, has absolute control of the space on the page. Every sentence is cunningly constructed and pretty much every page got a laugh out of me.
