Revolutionary Humor

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Heard the one about the storming of the Bastille? Apparently, one of the last prisoners in the famous royal jail suffered from the delusion that he was Julius Caesar. Picture this momentous turning point of the French Revolution, punctuated by "possibly the greatest anticlimax in all history ... a decrepit old boy saying ... 'Did you know I came, I saw and I conquered?'" Ba-da-bum. O.K., it might not generate the laughs author Mark Steel gets in his stand-up routine, but that's not what he's trying to do in his new book, Vive La Revolution: A Stand-Up History of the French Revolution. Rather than regale readers with jokes, Steel aims to present the history of a serious subject leavened with irreverent observations and quirky tidbits. Infused with an unabashedly political viewpoint, it's a surprisingly informative read.

Sure, the airwaves are awash with an endless parade of history programs, but for Marxist comedian Steel most of the dons lecturing us about the Tudors or lamenting Britain's lost Empire "reek of pomposity." Steel's approach is to focus on things you don't find in the textbooks. Like the titillating contention that the most popular radical works of the Enlightenment, such as the influential Thérèse Philosophe, which follows a young woman's sexual and philosophical development, "were from the genre of philosophical pornography."

Vive La Revolution's chatty informality doesn't detract from its rigor. Steel is not a historian, but he's done his homework. Even Revolution buffs may find surprising new facts — like the 15-min. bathside chat Charlotte Corday shared with revolutionary leader Jean-Paul Marat before murdering him — or provocative takes on old ones. The tale of how Marie Antoinette trod on her executioner's foot, then begged his pardon, has been told. But while "her defenders cite this as an example of her sturdy harmlessness, civil and without malice to the end," writes Steel, his own view is less charitable: "The feisty cow meant it."

Steel doesn't limit his jibes to historical targets; he frequently invokes modern parallels — especially British establishment types — to emphasize a point. His mention of the guillotine as a liberal, more humanitarian method of execution prompts a riff on how shrill-voiced arch-Tory Ann Widdecombe would have complained that the Jacobins were soft on crime. You might not laugh your head off, but Vive La Revolution yields enough chuckles to distinguish it from most histories.