Comic Vision and Comedic Devices in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim

The aim of this article is to examine the comic vision and comedic elements in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. As a post-war realistic novel, Lucky Jim implements various techniques of comedy to ridicule and satirise personal and social flaws, focusing on the critique of the phoniness of the academic world. Amis employs parody, farce, irony and satire to deride affectation, rigidity and social flaws. The novel depicts the absurdity of the condition of the anti-hero in an alien society through the use of comedy, showing the incongruous coexistence of the serious and the comic, the lofty and the vulgar in a grotesque, carnivalesque manner. It can be argued that humour functions as a weapon to cope with antagonistic forces in post-war existence and helps the individual to overcome repressions and preserve self-respect in the face of a ridiculous and duplicitous reality. Laughter is remedial in the novel, which subverts the monolithic, and aims to satirise and correct social imperfections. This article will explore Lucky Jim by investigating and applying theories of comedy and humour, focusing mainly on the ideas of Bergson, Freud and Bakhtin.