In 1889 a broke ex-actor sat down to write a serious history of the River Thames. He meant to cover the abbeys, the charters, the battles, and the kings. His editor cut all of it. What survived was a book about three incompetent men, a fictional dog, a tin of pineapple that could not be opened, and a cheese so powerful it emptied a railway carriage. It has never once been out of print.

The Comedy of Ordinary Life is the story of how Jerome K. Jerome accidentally invented the most durable form of English humor: the joke that has no victim. Before him, comic writing required a target, and the audience was invited to feel superior to somebody. Jerome removed the target. He put himself and his friends in the boat, made them ridiculous, and refused to punish them for it. The result was a kind of comedy that feels less like an attack than like company.

This book takes the jokes apart to show the machinery inside them, and follows two journeys eleven years apart: a rowing skiff on the Thames in 1889, and three bicycles in the Black Forest in 1900. It reconstructs the England that produced them, when the bank holiday, the cheap railway ticket, and the safety bicycle handed leisure to millions of people who had never had any and did not yet know what to do with it. It explains why the critics of the day loathed Jerome so violently that one newspaper called him a menace to English letters and another blamed his popularity on educating the poor.

And it follows the man himself: orphaned at thirteen and made the family breadwinner, ruined at thirty-eight by a libel suit he lost for a farthing in damages and nine thousand pounds in costs, and, at fifty-seven, driving an ambulance for the French army because his own country judged him too old to serve. He came back from that war and never sounded quite the same again.

A book about laughter, class, leisure, friendship, and the peculiar courage it takes to be gentle in print.