Books: A dream of making people laugh

British writer Nick Hornby. Photo / Sigrid Estrada.

In 31 Songs, a 2003 book about his musical tastes, Nick Hornby remembers his younger self's now-mystifying fondness for Suicide's Frankie Teardrop - "10 and a half minutes of genuinely terrifying industrial noise" about a man who "murders his wife and children, shoots himself and ends up in Hell". He then compares it with Teenage Fanclub's Ain't That Enough, which is "packed with sunshine and hooks and harmonies and good will". His conclusion? "I like the Teenage Fanclub song better."

A similar preference for the pleasurable over the punishing was reflected in Hornby's apparently controversial suggestion at the recent Cheltenham Festival of Literature that, on the whole, people should read books because they enjoy them - and not bother a the ones they don't. It also lies behind his new novel, which is both a heartfelt defence and a wholly convincing example of what popular entertainment can achieve.

When we first meet the funny girl of the title, she is called Barbara Parker and about to be named Miss Blackpool 1964. Fifteen minutes later, she renounces her crown and, within a week, heads to London to follow her dream of going on telly and making people laugh.

In a grimmer novel, this would presumably be the cue for an unsparing depiction of dashed hopes, loneliness and despair. In this one, Barbara bumps into a theatrical agent, changes her name to Sophie Straw, and auditions for a new BBC sitcom about young married life where she so impresses the two writers that they immediately decide to rewrite the show around her. By the end of the year, the television reviewer for the Times has hailed Sophie as "the most extraordinarily gifted comic actress ... since the war", and the show itself, Barbara (and Jim), as a triumph: warm, funny and often touching.

Before long, Barbara (and Jim) has become Britain's most popular television comedy, much to the irritation of the sort of chin-stroking BBC beardies who seem to think the corporation should ideally be putting on talks with titles such as Sartre, Stockhausen and the Death of the Soul. But as the novel demonstrates - again, in more ways than one - just because something is warm, funny and often touching doesn't mean it can't be winningly perceptive about human relationships and changing social trends. In fact, if I had to date the genesis of the book, I might make a guess at February 2011, when we know from Hornby's then-monthly column about his reading habits that he read and admired Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist.

"At some point," writes Baker in that novel, "you have to set aside snobbery and what you think is culture and recognise that any random episode of Friends is probably better, more uplifting for the human spirit, than 99 per cent of the poetry or drama or fiction ever published."

As a "quick-witted, unpretentious, high-spirited, funny, curvy, clever, beautiful blonde", Sophie might strike some readers as almost too good to be true - and Hornby certainly appears as smitten with her as every other man she meets. Yet the book is far more than just her story. If it were a sitcom itself, Funny Girl would be the kind with a large cast, all of them easily capable of carrying an episode.

One of the writers, for example, grows frustrated at merely writing the sort of stuff that 18 million people love, and so produces an autobiographical novel of gay life that, if he's lucky, might sell a few thousand. ("Bill knew publishing was different. He had no idea that it was a virtually uninhabited country, like Australia.") There's also the producer Dennis, unhappily married to a bluestocking who sneers at his television work - and, I suspect, wouldn't have approved of this book either, despite working at its publisher, Penguin.

Moreover, like all Hornby's novels, this one also has a distinct tug of melancholy, as Barbara (and Jim)'s glory days inevitably pass. In the end, Funny Girl not only beautifully captures the thrill of youthful success and of discovering your own talent, but also ponders the rather longer-lasting business of what happens when that thrill fades.