This has to be the funniest book that I have ever read. It is absolutely outrageously disgustingly funny. I kneel in the shadow of Fry's excellence. The book see-sawed between passages of elegance and delightful character sketches, and ludicrously over-the-top, effulgent even, caricatures. The story was slight, and reminded me of a bastardised PG Wodehouse in its archaic country house mannerisms, but rewarded the doggedly determined with an absurd ending which despite being delivered at the end of a particularly turgid stream-of-consciousness from the main character, seemed to make some sort of sense. members and guests attended this screening. Although it is easier to leave your response to the film, only 8 did so. The pompous arrogance and traits of Stephen Fry come blaring through at you this entire movie. The verbose lavatorial narrative was actually quite wearying and excessive to the point that it became irritating. The attempted 'humour' was dull and boring, I don't believe I was brought to laughter once. Fry's own slanted view of women and sex is brash to say the least, along with weak characters and dialogue, dare I go on..

Hippopotamus | Godalming Film Society The Hippopotamus | Godalming Film Society

While the sum of the movie is much less than the sum of its parts, the parts are often quite witty. The lead is well played by the excellent Roger Allam. Some may say it’s contrived – I’d say well of course it is, the level and complexity of the contrivance is what makes it so hilarious! Ted Wallace is an old, sour, womanising, cantankerous, whisky-sodden beast of a failed poet and drama critic, but he has his faults too.

Stephen Fry ranks among my favourite persons on earth. There's something about his terribly English combination of wit, erudition and a dirty mind that never fails to delight me, and it shines brightly in The Liar, the first of the four novels he has published so far. An irreverent and intelligent take on such British institutions as the public-school novel, the Cambridge novel and the spy novel, it is best appreciated by people who have an affinity for such things, but really, anyone with a taste for British humour should enjoy it. It's basically a late-twentieth-century P.G. Wodehouse update with some smut thrown in for good measure, and if that doesn't appeal to you, you're not a proper Anglophile. The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared [Hundraåringen som klev ut genom fönstret och försvann] If you think that there is a discrepancy between giving a book 3 stars and placing it on the "disappointing" shelf, remember that the author is Stephen Fry, someone I think of as being awesomely smart and very funny. His intelligence is evident in this book, but much of the attempted humor falls flat. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that much of it is the kind of humor that might have flown a generation ago (think Kingsley Amis, Wilt Sharpe, Roald Dahl), but is completely jarring in 2010. What puzzles me is that it would have been equally jarring in 1994, when this book was published, and Fry is smart enough to know this, so it's obviously a conscious choice that he made. It's unclear why he did so, because it detracts quite a bit from the enjoyment of the book. It's a toss-up which was more offputting - the incessant vulgar misogynistic musings of the splenetic, Kingsley Amis wannabe narrator or the paragraphs of ridiculously mincing poofter-talk inflicted on the reader. There is really no excuse for this:

The Hippopotamus (2017) - IMDb The Hippopotamus (2017) - IMDb

We follow Ted Wallace, a 60-something has-been journalist-cum-poet, who is outwardly and verbally a cynical misogynist. He travels to a country house in an attempt to unravel some rather strange goings-on in a family and finds a bit more than he bargained for. He goes there because he is the godfather of a son of said family, though he had practically forgotten this fact, and because he has to help out a niece of said family, who is his goddaughter, which he had also more or less forgotten. You get the picture. I didn’t really like any of the characters for a long time, but that wasn’t necessary to enjoy the novel nor, I suppose, was I meant to. The reader’s feeling towards the narrator, Ted, change, however, and I enjoyed how this was done – the tone and story balancing strangely between sentimentality and cynicism. Nevertheless that I didn't enjoy particularly the reading experience with the book, I think that it was a book presented in a very unique way, that always it's a good thing. This novel is shown as something made of several kind of documents, like poems, newspaper articles, letters, etc... with obviously too some standard novel prose parts. As it emerges that David has convinced the entire household of his “gifts,” the story pits Ted’s blunt pragmatism against the New Age wishful thinking of everybody else. The theme also plays out in a concise exchange between Ted and his godson, the latter subscribing to the romantic notion of writing as an expression of pure spirit, while the poet who hasn’t written a poem in nearly 30 years insists that literary output is the result of not just inspiration but hard work. The screenplay crystallizes this idea effectively, even amid the comic busyness — pratfalls, fellatio interruptus and equine molestation among the doings.The novel has a cynical and ironic tone which only a British novel can have, but it ultimately also has a heart. And despite the fact that the novel is twenty years old, it doesn’t feel dated. The sign of a good read, surely, is also that the reader immediately wants to read something else by the author, and this is exactly how I feel right now. As much as I enjoy (nay, love) reading, however, I would prefer an audio-version again when it comes to Stephen Fry’s writing; his reading aloud is simply priceless. Poet Ted Wallace is summoned to his friend's country manor to investigate a series of unexplained miracles. Stephen Fry's five novels are The Liar (1991), The Hippopotamus (1994), Making History (1996), The Stars' Tennis Balls (2000) and Revenge: A Novel (2003). He has also published a collection of work entitled Paperweight (1992); and Rescuing the Spectacled Bear: A Peruvian Journey (2002) – his diary of the making of a documentary on the plight of the spectacled bears of Peru. His book Stephen Fry in America was published in 2008.