Michael Wood at Literary Hub:
Among the many dolls mentioned in Greta Gerwig’s film Barbie there is one associated with time and memory and literally named after Marcel Proust. It didn’t sell well. Perhaps Mattel got the wrong writer. They could have gone for the same Marcel, but as a comedian, a French, philosophical, disguised partner of Dickens. Critics have been finding Proust funny since 1928—he died in 1922. Christopher Prendergast’s Mirages and Mad Beliefs (2013) has a chapter on Proust’s jokes, and in 2015 Elizabeth Ladenson published a marvelous essay called “Proust and the Marx Brothers.”
And yet. This claim for comedy in Proust always comes as a surprise and is instantly forgotten. Why is this? I don’t know the answer to the question, but a guess or two about its grounds may help us to understand it a little better.
More here.