The unlikely (and not especially funny) Bugatti Veyron.

Writing Funny
About Cars
In Praise of Tom McCahill, John Phillips,
and Jeremy Clarkson (Among Others)

Remember the old self-aggrandizing comedians’ line: "Dying is easy; stand-up is hard"?

Well. Writing about cars is easy. Writing funny about cars is really, really hard.

Tom McCahill with 1961 Chrysler Newport.

1. Tom McCahill.
The first to do so successfully, some 50 years ago, was one Tom McCahill (known to fans as "Uncle Tom"[!]), whose venue for practicing his low-comic art was the unlikely Mechanix Illustrated, a kind of Yankee-ingenuity pulp monthly known mainly for its wildly futuristic front covers ("In 1975 EVERYONE will have a flying car in their garage!") and its weirdly homoerotic Charles-Atlas back covers.

Uncle Tom, whose knowledge of cars was slightly less than that of the mechanic’s assistant at the local Texaco station, every month was to be seen barreling about the U.S. of A. in Detroit’s latest befinned land-barge, praising the vehicle to the heavens. One thing set McCahill apart from the suck-up bilge coming out of Motor Trend: his love of metaphor and simile.

The result was hardly great (or even very good) humorous writing, but given the sycophantic car-culture of the day ("What’s good for General Motors is good for the country"), he at least tried to get a chortle or two out of his over-testosteroned MI readers:

Brooding nostalgically about the four-wheeled behemoths of the 1930s, he remarked: "These long-hooded brutes had more sex-appeal than a boatload of starlets anchored off Alcatraz."
Of a 1966 Dodge (remember Dodge?) with its 426-cubic-inch V-8: "It is as furry as a mink farm and as snarly as a bengal tiger in a butcher shop… This family sized rig has all the belt of a two-mile swim in a whiskey vat."
The 5,000-pound 1957 Chrysler Imperial would "get down the pike like a vaselined arrow, and with no more effort than skipping off a cliff." Two years later, the same model "was as loaded as an opium peddler during a tong war."

Not exactly Shakespeare, but not bad coming out of the American automotive dark ages.

2. Car and Driver, Brock Yates, and John Phillips
As the century droned on and as oil-price reality and the consumer demand for quality and reliability slowly penetrated the hallucinatory world inhabited by "the Big 3" (remember when there were only three car companies in the world worth talking about, and they were all in Detroit?), automotive journalism even more slowly picked up the pace.

On the west coast, a new monthly appeared given to sober analyses of American cars and smitten takes on tiny European vehicles with only two(!) seats but that were fun to drive. Road and Track found a sizable audience that shared its enthusiasms as well as its tone of noblesse oblige and its eternal quest for automobiles worthy of zipping about Big Sur and possibly even entering in the Monterrey Concours d’elegance. It was all extremely posh and serious, California-style, don’t you know.

Then in the early 1960s a ragtag publication called Sports Cars Illustrated morphed into Car and Driver, which became the world’s first car mag with tude.

Though the early staff was heavy on male persons with engineering backgrounds, C&D somehow developed an editorial stance that included thorough, even expert tests and evaluations of cars, but with a certain take-no-prisoners edge.

Many months, the best thing in the magazine was the letters column, where dumb epistles from readers were printed unedited and to which were appended often quite funny put-down replies from the editor.

Then came "The Cannonball Baker Sea-to-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash." This venture, which was nothing more than a no-holds-barred race on public roads to see who could get from New York City to Los Angeles the fastest, was the brainchild of one Brock Yates, a staff member of Stone Age political persuasion but with some awareness of the barely repressed fantasies ("Me Juan Manuel Fangio, you Jane, you watch me go really fast, then we fuck!") of the magazine’s hormonally hooked audience.

The Cannonball Baker Dash was run a few times in the 1970s, generated lots of publicity, more than a few serious speeding tickets, some moderately humorous writing about unlikely entrants and their pratfalls along the way, five(!) movies, one book, and a transcontinental automotive record that still stands (32 hours, 51 minutes, in Jaguar sedan).

Adding seasoning to C&D’s attitude during the 1970s were appearances by noted humorist (and latter-day Republican) P.J. O’Rourke. You could (and can) argue his politics, but O’Rourke, who has since moved on to greener (meaning: more dollars) pastures, was (and is) funny.

(In case you’re wondering why we’re not assaulting you with examples of this middle-period automotive humor, it’s because Car and Driver is even stingier with its archives than the New York Times is with its backfiles. And it’s beyond consideration, in this cyber-year of 2005, to even think about trudging down to a library [remember libraries?] to look up back issues.)

In the 1980s, the magazine bred an in-house humorist-star, in the person of one John Phillips. Phillips is still on staff and is still worth reading, though he’s mellowed with age. Some of his early, very funny adventures (driving the Al-Can Highway solo, doing one lap around Iceland, etc.) are now legend in the annals of automotive humor. On second thought, it probably is worth trudging down to the library to dig out the best of Phillips... For you, dear Reader, not for us already over-worked writers,

3. Jeremy Clarkson.
Then came the 21st century which, whatever plagues, wars, tsunami’s, hurricanes, and low-I.Q. presidents it has given us, has already improved the world of automotive journalism in the unlikely person of Jeremy Clarkson, he of London, given to posh thinking and posh talk along with curmudgeonly rantings about everything under the 21st century sun that bothers him, and politics so retro that he makes Brock Yates look progressive.

No matter, because on a good day, Mr. Clarkson is the funniest writer around. At his upper-class ease, he can make writers for The Onion seem tritely sophomoric (which they in fact usually are) and David Sedaris seem fey to the point of embarrassment.

Clarkson does a weekly car review column for the Times of London. The reviews generally run 1,000 to 1,500 words, the first half of which are invariably devoted to whatever is irritating Jeremy that week (aged drivers, Americans, Japanese cars, etc.). He then somehow manages a smooth segue into a review of the car at hand. Unless the car is one that really grabs his attention, more often than not more space is devoted to rant than to car.

Here, for example, is the age-ist lede to his recent test of the Honda Civic:

"And nor did I have much patience with the Rover that, from behind, was apparently being driven by four wisps of white hair. I lost my temper quite badly with this one, especially when it stopped at a set of green lights on a route I use to avoid a local double mini-roundabout which, for the past four years, has been home to an old lady in a stationary Metro.

"Of course it’s not hard to work out what’s happened. Old people are now a damn sight fitter than they used to be in the days of the Austin 7. My mother is 70 million years old but there’s not a hint of incontinence yet. She plays tennis three times a week, likes chainsaws, swears like a Dutch bargee and spends her days laying stone flag floors in whatever house she happens to be renovating at the moment."

(Click on the link below to see how he got from that into his judgment of the Civic.)

To say Clarkson’s car tests are subjective is like saying George W. Bush is dumb. One is only stating the obvious.

Not only are his remarks wholly subjective, he’s also completely open about what cars he’s owned (and owns). Only when you encounter such journalistic candor do you realize how rare it is in these days of writers and reporters building multimedia careers on layers of hypocrisy.

Let’s let Mr. Clarkson speak for himself. Here he is on the Bugatti Veyron (see photo above), the most expensive, most powerful, and fastest car in the world:

"When you push a car past 180mph, the world starts to get awfully fizzy and a little bit frightening. When you go past 200mph it actually becomes blurred. Almost like you’re trapped in an early Queen pop video. At this sort of speed the tyres and the suspension are reacting to events that happened some time ago, and they have not finished reacting before they’re being asked to do something else. The result is a terrifying vibration that rattles your optical nerves, causing double vision. This is not good when you’re covering 300ft a second.

"Happily, stopping distances become irrelevant because you won’t see the obstacle in the first place. By the time you know it was there, you’ll have gone through the windscreen, through the Pearly Gates and be half way across God’s breakfast table… From behind the wheel of a Veyron, France is the size of a small coconut. I cannot tell you how fast I crossed it the other day."

At the other end of the automotive scale, Clarkson on the Kia Rio:
"You may have seen The Fly II, in which a scientist attempts to teleport a dog. In one of the most gruesome scenes I’ve seen in a film it arrives at its destination completely inside out. Well the Kia Rio is uglier than that… With 1.3 litres under the bonnet you get more cubic capacity than you do from an equivalent Euro car, but as we chaps keep being reminded, size isn’t important. It’s what you do with it that matters. And what Kia does with its 1.3 litre pecker is nothing at all."

And on the Corvette Z6, beloved of ALL American automotive writers:
"I once span [that’s Brit-speak for "spun"] an early incarnation of the previous Corvette off the road while charging round the only bend in Arizona. But no ticket was forthcoming from the attending police officer because, in his words, "these things spin so damn easy, you could park one outside a store, and when you came out it’d be facing the other way"… There are levers at the National Coal Mining Museum that move with more smoothness than the gearshifter in a C6 Vette. To get second from third, you really need a second elbow."

The BMW 5:
"Unfortunately, however, the [BMW] recipe has been spoilt somewhat by someone who thinks pure engineering can be improved with a blizzard of technobabble… So before setting off for a 50-mile journey home on a lovely summer’s evening, I had to choose from 11 different settings on the seven-speed flappy paddle gearbox. Then I had to decide how ferocious I wanted the gearshifts to be, very fierce, quite fierce, moderately fierce, boring or very boring. And then I had to choose from three settings on the electronic differential.
And then, since I didn’t know where I was, I had to set the sat nav, which meant hitting a knob, twiddling it, moving it to the side and then twiddling it again.
It’s a good job this car has so much power because by the time you’ve set it up for the journey that lies ahead you’re already very late."

One week Mr. Clarkson took on a vehicle sold in the UK as the Daihatsu Terios. After reading quite a bit of Clarkson, it’s clear that the three things he likes best in the world (after cars) are 1) drinking, 2) shooting small animals and birds, and 3) and ranting. Equally obvious is the fact that Mr. Clarkson spends much of his time and energy looking for an opportunity to do as many of those things as possible at the same time.

Which the little defenseless Daihaitsu affords him. So the first page of the review is in praise—not of Daihatsu’s—but of shooting and drinking out on the heath or wherever, in the grand British tradition. Only then, after a small spot of killing and a big spot of drinking, does our trusty guide turn to the vehicle under review. Three sheets to the wind, he relieves himself of judgments such as:
"Actually, the biggest problem with taking the Terios on a shoot is finding the damn thing after each drive. Once it was under a leaf. On another occasion it was stuck between the treads on the sole of my wellington."

And:
"It may be the same engine that you get in a Toyota Yaris, but up past 4000rpm it sounds like it’s in pain. By 5000 you’d have to have the mechanical sympathy of a Luddite to go any further."

Like all curmudgeons, Clarkson is not entirely consistent or rational in his likes and dislikes. For instance, one Sunday he turned up in a Fiat Panda, a wee vehicle that we in the USA have so far been spared (See photo). Just the cup of bad Italian tea to get our boy’s dander up, you’d think. (Warning: read too much "humorous" car writing and soon you too will be mixing metaphors right and left.)

He starts off in that direction:
"I remember the old Fiat Panda well. Styled by someone who only had access to a ruler, it came with hammocks instead of seats, no interior trim and the top speed of a Galapagos turtle. It was fine for the walnut-faced peasantry of Italy but not really on for anywhere else."

But then, lo, Clarkson falls in love with the little beast.
"This is a car that puts a huge grin on your face. It waves its arms about and shouts, much like a waiter in an Italian restaurant. And sticking with this metaphor for a moment, the food it serves up, with aplomb, is delicious and tasty too. But the best thing is you’re rarely going faster than 24mph. And this means you can have all the excitement of driving with almost none of the danger. If the brakes were to fail, for instance, you’d coast to a halt long before you hit the hedge."

Given that Mr. Clarkson writes for a newspaper (though he also has a weekly TV show), he has to fill a lot of space with talk of practical cars. Which, as we’ve seen, he does with considerable, verve, elan, and no little humor. At the end of the day, though, like every car writer ever born, he’s a performance nut and total performance freak. As he puts it himself: