[This entry was updated by Gerald H. Strauss (Bloomsburg University) from his entry in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, volume 8, pp. 255-265.]

Although John Mortimer has said that comedy "is the only thing worth writing about in this despairing world," humor functions in much of his varied work primarily as a means of tempering an underlying seriousness. Even the many stage comedies of manners, sex farces, and Chekhovian one-act plays that first gained him prominence on the West End of London between the late 1950s and early 1970s were intended, as he put it, to "chart the tottering course of British middle-class attitudes in decline." Though some are mere whimsies, most are expansive social commentaries in which humor is incidental. In 1969 Mortimer described a play as "a demonstration, in which an audience can recognize something about themselves." The same can be said about the novels with...