Hilarity in the Halls of Academia

Author: Edward Pickering

Few professions are impervious to the satirist's pen, least of all the academic one. Students and professors live and work in a more or less enclosed society, peacefully sequestered in green quadrangles where the buildings face inward.
The academic world has its own peculiar rituals as well as mores.
Such a society easily lends itself to mockery and an able satirist can have a field day with it, which is precisely what Kingsely Amis had 50 years ago.
In "Lucky Jim," Amis savagely ridicules academic life with unparalleled comic brilliance.
Amis brings his devastating wit to bear on all the familiar parts of the establishment: professors, papers, students and intradepartmental liaisons.
Amis' protagonist is Jim Dixon, a young man working toward a professorship in medieval history, a confessedly useless subject.
Dixon is harassed, overworked and utterly repulsed by academia, the very society he strives to enter.
He loathes it in all its ugly and pretentious trappings.
He especially abhors his advisor, Welch, the man who has "decisive power over [Dixon's] future."
Welch's inanity, self-conceit and general ineptitude drive Jim to unimaginable lengths of disgust, fury and comic invention.
Invited to spend the weekend at the Welches', Dixon drinks himself into a stupor with the foreseeable result that he neglects to extinguish his cigarette before collapsing in bed.
He wakes to find burns in the bedclothes, rug and on the nightstand of the guest room in which he has been staying.
Frantically Dixon rearranges the room. In doing so, he enlists the help of Christine, the beautiful girlfriend of Welch's son, Bertram, a pompous, beret-wearing artist who antagonizes Dixon.
Dixon falls for Christine, but complications ensue as Dixon entangles himself in a hilariously evasive game with Mrs. Welch and Bertram. Mrs. Welch will discover the damage to her home and seek retribution forthwith, and Bertram will fight Dixon for Christine.
Dixon's situation is dire. On a week's notice, Welch burdens Dixon with the dreadful task of delivering the evening lecture for College Open Week.
A more inane topic could not have been devised by even the most unfriendly of gods -- Dixon must speak for 50 minutes on "merrie England."
Dixon is plagued by Margaret, a fellow would-be professor and an incurable neurotic, with whom Dixon has had a muddled, maddening and, sadly, sexless relationship. Then, the editor who accepted one of Dixon's recent articles disappears from England, leaving Dixon unpaid and his career un-advanced. Further obligations and frustrations compound Dixon's plight.
In this brilliantly comedic tale, Dixon extricates himself from them -- in effect how he removes himself from academia -- and in the process wins the girl. Dixon's speech parodies academic rhetoric.
Throughout the novel, Dixon forever invents on-the-spot evasions and vents his rage in ridiculous ways such as making infantile faces.
Once, in the presence of Welch, Dixon determines to speak his mind, a proposition that, like so many of his plans, never comes to fruition.
"He no longer wanted, for example, to inscribe on the departmental timetable a short account, well tricked out with obscenities, of his views on the professor of history, the department of history, medieval history, history, and Margaret and hang it out of the window for the information of passing students and lecturers, nor did he, on the whole, now intend to tie Welch up in his chair and beat him about the head and shoulders with a bottle until disclosed why, without being French himself, he'd given his son French names, nor ... No, he'd just say, quite quietly and very slowly and distinctly, to give Welch a good chance of catching his general drift: "Look here, you old cockchafer, what makes you think you can run a history department, even at a place like this, eh, you old cockchafer?"
However, Dixon does go through with many gags, tricks and ploys that will make you roar with laughter. Dixon's mishaps and premeditated pranks are riotous. In one memorable passage, Dixon torments a disagreeable fellow in his boarding house by materially altering the cover photo on a magazine the man has received.
"Working quickly but carefully, he began altering the composer's face with a soft black pencil. The lower lip he turned into a set of discoloured snaggleteeth, adding another lower lip, thicker and looser than the original, underneath. Dueling scars appeared on both cheeks, hairs as thick as tooth picks sprang from the widened nostrils" and so on.
"Lucky Jim" is a satire of such humor, and venom, that few students are likely to forget either its setting -- a college campus like our own -- or its harried protagonist, the wildly inventive and utterly likeable Dixon.