Reading hitchikers guide for the first time was really funny because it was like ohhhh THIS the writing that every unfunny nerd has been trying to emulate from like ‘00-‘12 . But good.
#tbh my opinion on hichhiker's guide is that while i really enjoy it i feel like Terry Pratchett just kinda did everything Adams tried to do#but better and with more subtlety and greater depth of execution#So while i enjoy and appreciate it every time i pick it up im just kinda like#“whoah i should be reading terry pratchett”#and then i pick up praychett#and im like woah this guy was a fucking genius and did everything adams tried to do but more and better and in such a way to where its#hard for people to be annoying about it bc it possesses a lot of subtlty that#while adams is good he definitely lacks to the extent pratchet has#Also while pratchett practices absurdity he maintains a coherence of theme and idea that while carried by some overarching themes#adams definitley leans into the zany galaxy roadtrip at the detrement of coherence where pratchett generally succeeds
I think the key difference here is that Pratchett was a dedicated writer who wrote with intentionality and focus, whereas Adams was hurriedly throwing up half-baked radio play scripts in between his actual paying job of editing Doctor Who and then later procrastinating severely on forcing those scripts into novel and tv show formats while his agent tried desperately to figure out what pub he was getting drunk at so they could force him to come home and do some actual work.
#imma be so fr#comparing hitchhikers to any of pratchett's work is frankly insane#and makes me think you fundamentally misunderstood what at least one of them was trying to do#like these do NOT occupy the same conceptual space#this isn't one guy doing a thing okay and another guy doing it great#this is one guy doing one thing and another guy doing a vaguely related thing#you wouldn't say spaghetti is mediocre because fettucine is flat#like you recognize that that sounds insane right?
Looking at how those posters might have come to this idea, I think a lot of people encountering either Pratchett or Adams without reading other/earlier works probably feel those two authors invented that type of humorous storytelling, aka “stories with jokes in”. They didn’t! They really didn’t!
Pratchett and Adams wrote humour in a long-standing recognisable tradition of humour heavily influenced by the magazine Punch. Both authors clearly had their brain chemistry fundamentally altered by works like 1066 and All That, published in 1931. This was a joke history of Britain, showing some features recognisable to people who can read:
The wordplay, footnotes, arch tone, inaccuracies, long-payoff jokes and running gags, silly names, silly lists, references to shared/pop culture, references to classical culture, social commentary, use of absurdity, etc are features. These weren’t invented by Adams or Pratchett, and people who use them today actually might not be referencing those two authors at all; it’s a style of humour with a very extensive back catalogue, over 100 years old. Fun to read if you enjoy those authors; and since the inventiveness and wit are based on having a moderately clever author who is very well-read, it’s hard to write well in the style without at least being educated in the genre.
