Book: Golfing for Cats

Overview
Alan Coren's Golfing for Cats gathers a stream of sharp, affectionate comic pieces that first appeared as columns and sketches in Punch. The tone is urbane and mischievous: everyday situations are tilted into absurdity, social rituals are lightly decapitated, and language itself becomes a playground for sly jokes. The title captures the book's spirit , a gentle, whimsical mismatch that signals a catalogue of small surprises rather than extended argument.
The collection moves quickly between subjects, from domestic scenes and restaurant tables to pub talk and sporting foibles. Each piece functions as a miniature performance, where a particular human failing or fashionable affectation is exposed with brevity and precision rather than anger, leaving readers amused and oddly sympathetic to the characters caught in their own pretensions.

Voice and Style
Coren writes with an economy that masks a wide-ranging curiosity about manners, idiom, and the mechanics of social life. Sentences often land with a comic twist that depends as much on rhythm and timing as on punchline. Wordplay is frequent but never showy; the humor rests on the marriage of precise observation and a slightly mischievous moral point.
A satirical gentleness distinguishes the tone. Rather than savage invective, the pieces aim for bemusement: people are absurd, not evil. Coren's narrator frequently occupies the role of the amused participant, a figure who delights in folly while remaining complicit enough to make the laughter inclusive rather than cruel.

Themes and Content
Recurring targets include the rituals of British social life, the affectations of middle-class taste, and the peculiar seriousness with which trivial things are treated. Sports , particularly golf , appear as metaphors for vanity and ritual, while domestic episodes illuminate deeper habits of speech and thought. Food, pubs, and small ceremonial errors become avenues for larger commentary about authenticity and appearance.
Language itself is often under the microscope: misused idioms, pomposity in public speech, and the tiny hypocrisies that vocabulary can conceal. The result is a portrait of a society fluent in formality but sometimes bankrupt in meaning, punctuated by scenes of human kindness that undercut any strident satire.

Notable Pieces and Highlights
Standout items are those that take a simple premise , a dinner party, a round of golf, a family quarrel , and escalate it through linguistic precision and escalating incongruity. The best sketches turn brief incidents into lasting comic images: an argument fought over a menu item becomes a morality play, or a day on the golf course reveals the ritualized bravado that masks fragility.
Coren's ability to shift register , from the mock-solemn to the delightfully absurd , keeps the collection varied and unpredictable. Even the shortest paragraphs can carry a memorable gag, while longer pieces reward readers with accumulated ironies and a final line that reorients the whole scene.

Legacy and Reception
Golfing for Cats showcases the qualities that made Coren a much-loved figure in British humor: a deft ear for speech, a compassionate comic eye, and an impatience for pretension. The collection reflects the golden age of Punch-style satirical miscellany, where the observational essay and the light sketch were prized forms.
Readers who encounter these pieces today will find much that still rings true about social posture and the petty rituals of modern life. The book serves both as a time capsule of mid-1970s British manners and as a portable lesson in how comedy can be both kind and incisive, delivered with a narrator who prefers wry bewilderment to moral triumph.