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Mountaineering: What’s so Funny About That?

The former publisher of MountainZone.com, joined by one of the biggest names in climbing today, explains why humor and danger go so well together that an entire anthology of mountaineering humor has been published.

According to Peter Potterfield, author and former publisher of MountainZone.com, and Greg Child, internationally known high altitude mountaineer and author, most climbing literature isn’t funny—and isn’t meant to be. Climbing is, after all, a dangerous pursuit. Although “most people who don’t climb regard [the sport] as a preposterous undertaking in the first place,” mountaineers tend to take climbing (and themselves) seriously.

But, as Potterfield points out in the introduction to Over the Top, “We’re all human beings, and even when engaged in physically demanding and potentially dangerous pursuits, the ability to laugh at ourselves dignifies our humanity.” The stories he selected for the anthology span 75 years in climbing narrative history. For the most part, the humor in these stories isn’t laugh-out-loud funny, but more subtle, reflecting the defensive sort of humor useful in warding off physical suffering, or the challenges to ego that come so frequently when humans take their measure against a mountain.

As Child explains in the foreword to Over the Top, the British were the first to get behind the climbing story as a vehicle for humor. The reason? “British weather is so lousy and British climbers are forced to spend most climbing weekends in the pub while it rains on the cliffs. A healthy and well-lubricated pub scene, with its witty and irreverent banter and practical jokes, cannot fail to spawn a good laugh.” Child doesn’t leave the Americans behind though, insisting that humor in American climbing writing has been there all along, just perhaps not with the same Monty Python tongue-in-cheek hilarity.

“Climbing is indeed a serious business, but sometimes we take it too seriously,” Child reminds us. We should regard the stories in this anthology as “an alternative to the side of climbing that dwells on the quest for harder routes and higher climbing grades, and on mountain epics in which, all too often, the outcome is tragic.”

Adapted from Over the Top: Humorous Mountaineering Tales, edited by Peter Potterfield, The Mountaineers Books, $16.95.

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