English Humour for Beginners

by George Mikes

  Then comes the ‘release from constraint’. Boys dismissed from school will enjoy their freedom. With the last point, ‘mechanical rigidity’, we have already dealt when discussing Bergson. Nicolson’s four theories have at least the merit of all-inclusiveness. He takes four well-known and oft-repeated theories and instead of choosing one as the right and only true creed, he throws them together. But even this formidable package tells us very little. Even if his four categories are funny (and they are not) we laugh at many things not included in them.

  While we may have learnt a great deal about humour from these eminent thinkers, and have enriched ourselves with most profound ideas, we have still failed to reach a definition. The first Lord Birkenhead, then still F. E. Smith, was once told by a dull and pompous judge: ‘Even after your speech, Mr Smith, I am none the wiser.’ Smith replied: ‘Not wiser, my Lord, but better informed.’ This is our position, too. We are much better informed; but not any wiser.

  Ferenc Molnár, the great Hungarian playwright and equally great connoisseur of good coffee, once said, after drinking a cup of the suspicious-looking black liquid called coffee which was available in Budapest after the First World War: ‘It contains one good thing, one bad thing and a mystery. The good thing is that it contains no chicory; the bad thing is that it contains no coffee. And the mystery is: what makes it black?’

  The same with humour. The good thing is that it’s amusing; the bad thing is that it’s aggressive; the mystery is: what the hell are we really laughing about?

  What Humour Really is Not

  Perhaps you will sneer at my statement that – after reading many books on the subject and giving it a great deal of thought – I still have no idea what humour is; and sneer even more when I try to convince any readers that no one else knows what it is, either. You will conclude that I am too slow; too dim. I fail to understand what many others have managed to grasp.

  Possibly. I recall an old story which is also about explaining something very difficult to understand. A blind man asks a young girl what milk is.

  ‘Milk?’ asks the girl, astonished.

  ‘Yes, milk. You see, I’m blind and I just cannot imagine what milk is like.’

  ‘Well, milk is white.’

  ‘My dear girl,’ says the old man, ‘I am old and I have been blind all my life. I just don’t know what white means.’

  ‘Oh, but it’s easy to explain,’ says the girl helpfully. ‘A swan is white.’

  ‘It’s easy to say that a swan is white. But I have never seen a swan.’

  ‘It has a curved neck.’

  ‘Curved?’ sighs the old man. ‘It’s easy for you to say “curved”. But I have no idea what curved is.’

  The girl lifts her arm, bends her wrist forward like a swan’s neck.

  ‘Feel it,’ she says. ‘That’s curved.’

  The old man feels the girl’s arm, touches the curved wrist several times and exclaims joyfully: ‘Thank God! Now at last I know what milk is.’

  That’s it exactly. The same with humour. We know (from Bergson) that it is ‘something mechanical encrusted upon the living’, that there is an element of inelasticity in it; that it is always corrective and means to humiliate. We also know (from Freud) that sometimes it is and does, sometimes it isn’t and doesn’t. We know (from Koestler) that the idea L underlies all funny stories in two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference M1 and M2.

  Having read, and absorbed, all this and a lot more, the more intelligent and perceptive among us touch the curved wrists of Bergson, Freud, Koestler, Nicolson, etc, several times and then utter the Eureka-cry: ‘Thank God! Now, at last, I know what humour is.’

  Cruel or Kind?

  Now that I have succeeded in muddling my readers with the preliminaries and premises, we can proceed from the general to the particular. Not having understood what humour is, we shall find it much easier to understand what English Humour is not. The English are more easygoing about definitions and first principles than the Continentals, and the English are right. They hold with John Stuart Mill that: ‘It is no part of the design of this treatise to aim at metaphysical nicety of definition where the ideas suggested by a term are already as determinate as practical purposes require.’ Humour is humour, they (and I) say – and go on examining its English subdivision.

  Harold Nicolson in his already-mentioned book writes: ‘I shall consider whether the sense of humour is in fact an English monopoly and if so whether it is transitory or permanent.’

  It is generally assumed (wrongly) that a sense of humour is a purely and exclusively human quality. Only humans have a sense of humour; and all humans have some sort of a sense of humour. So make no mistake: the question that Nicolson asks here is whether the English are the only members of the human race on earth and if so why are aliens so inhuman?

  The result of his exploration, not surprisingly, is that yes, only the English are human, although he does not quite say it in so many words. What he says is this: ‘Englishmen regard their sense of humour as cosy, comfortable, contemplative, lazy and good-humoured.’ How a sense of humour can be good-humoured and lazy are questions on which we need not dwell. But to me the English sense of humour also looks cruel, not particularly witty, childish and often vicious. Such things have been said before and they puzzled Nicolson. How is it – he asks – that to foreigners the English sense of humour seems to be atrabilious and dour?

  Taine (quoted by Nicolson) remarked more than a century ago: ‘The man who jests in England is seldom kindly and never happy.’ Indeed, Englishmen have always been fond – and proud – of saying that they take their pleasures sadly. Taine added: ‘For people of another race [English humour] is disagreeable; our nerves find it too sharp and bitter.’

  This hardly fits in with Nicolson’s view of the English character. The English national characteristics are, according to him: good humour, tolerance, ready sympathy, compassion; an affection for nature, animals, children; a fund of common sense; a wide and generous gift for fancy; a respect for individual character rather than for individual intelligence; a dislike of extremes, of overemphasis and boastfulness; a love of games; diffidence; shyness; laziness; optimism.

  This self-portrait of the English does not reflect a dislike of boastfulness – but the English know how to boast modestly. A lot of what Nicolson says is true, of course, but what about a few other traits of English character? Cruelty? Conceit? Snobbery? An incurable feeling of superiority? Dislike of everything foreign and strange? A stick-in-the-mud traditionalism and abhorrence of everything new?

  Humour – like beauty – is in the beholder’s eye. But the beholder’s eye is determined by the beholder’s character, so we might as well have a quick look at some relevant aspects of the English character.

  Changing or Permanent?

  When I first came to England I was struck by the English: their outlook on life, their humour, their phlegm, their affected and real superiority, their insularity and their aloofness from the rest of the human race. Their impact on me was overwhelming. I have lived through exciting times, like everybody else of my generation, but the most important, most formative and most significant event in my life was my emigration: to be transplanted from the coffee-houses of Budapest to the cricket grounds of England is a shocking experience for a man who knows how to drink coffee but has no idea how to play cricket.

  I described my impression of the English in an early book called How to be an Alien, which most people regarded as humorous although it was in fact a desperate cri de cœur, a forlorn cry for help. Because my first impression was so overwhelming, the picture in my mind does not change easily. Yet I have to ask myself: is England still the same country which I set foot on (and which set foot on me) in 1938? Has the English character changed out of recognition (as many people say) or is it permanent and unchangeable (as others maintain)? If it has changed, in what way?

  National character does not change with the rapidity of the weather. You cann
ot say that the British national character was sunny in the second half of September, 1938, and cloudy and turbulent in the first week of April, 1980. But you can observe tendencies, note changes and recognize trends.

  National character, like individual character, is partly inherited, partly formed by the environment. Whether one or the other plays a greater part in character formation, and what the exact ratio is, need not concern us here. As the circumstances – the environment – of the British have changed since the war, the national character has also changed. The three cardinal events of the last forty years in the history of Britain were: the winning of the war, the loss of the Empire and the shift in the power structure in British society.

  What has been the effect of these events? Was it beneficial or detrimental? The answer to the second question is: both. Under stress, good people become better, bad people become worse.

  The winning of the war left the least impression on the British character. They were used to winning wars. They knew it had been touch and go – as on many occasions before – but muddling through was very much in the British line and they were also used to being lucky. At the end of the war they realized – it was not difficult – that the United States and the Soviet Union were much greater powers but Britain was still a leading world power enjoying good-will and influence, a permanent member of the Security Council, the centre of a great Empire and enjoying tremendous prestige.

  The loss of the Empire was a different matter and a great shock. Britain ceased to be a world power, one of the top nations, the supreme arbiter. The rest of the world was not there just to keep her in luxury. There were two basic reactions to this event. One group was ready to face realities and indeed even unrealities, since enjoying disasters and gloom is a good old British habit. Britain, according to them, was now about as important as Portugal – another former Imperial power. This group kept making jokes about losing India but keeping Gibraltar. They were altogether much too self-effacing and self-belittling. The other group acted as if nothing had happened. After all, it was not the Empire that made Britain; Britain made the Empire. For them Britain has remained all-powerful, the top nation, just because the British are the British – magnificent, inimitable, quaint. Palmerston is still Foreign Secretary, recalcitrant European tribal chiefs ought to be birched. The poorer the country became, the deeper it sank into the economic morass, the louder these people have beaten their chests, the more xenophobic, racist, conceited, class-conscious, snobbish and insular they have become.

  The third great change, the shift in the power structure, affects the national character in two ways. If I may quote myself, I have said somewhere else: Britain is the society where the ruling class does not rule, the working class does not work and the middle class is not in the middle. Social classes are on the move and classes on the move are always bloody awful: desperate, bitter and paranoid if they move downwards, power-hungry, gloating, revengeful and self-conscious if they move upwards. A lot can be said against a hereditary aristocracy in a stable society but at least they are secure, self-confident and believe in themselves, however unjustified such a belief may be.

  The second trouble is that the British working class is probably the least well-educated in Western Europe. I was struck by this fact when I first came here and still cannot get over it. Trade union experts told me then that education was a long-term affair; but forty years is a long term and a lot could have been achieved between then and now. Then they were engaged in gaining the next ‘substantial rise’ in wages; they are engaged in the same battle today. The British working class has, of course, a great deal of natural intelligence but the best brains opt out and forget their working-class origins (except in their memoirs where it makes good reading) and the second eleven become trade union leaders and lead their battalions from behind, according to rules and principles learnt during the thirties. The state of education is probably worse today than it was forty years ago and when you see the general level of working-class people in, say, Sweden or Germany and think of our own, you want to weep at the ignorance and backwardness of ours. The result is that there are a million and a half unemployed in Britain yet, at one and the same time, a tremendous shortage of highly skilled engineers, designers etc. Masses of British workers are just too uneducated and ignorant to take these jobs. I am not mixing up frills with education: they are too uneducated to acquire the necessary skills. This is not their failure; it is the failure of successive governments and above all the failure of the trade unions.

  ‘Classes on the move are always bloody awful.’

  The public-school manner which was prevalent in British society for so long is being slowly eroded. It is no longer fashionable to have the manners of an ageing adolescent, to suppress all emotions, to admire ‘character’ and despise intellect; and the vague idea that ‘fairness’ is the supreme law of society is in decline. But the stiff upper lip still rules. At the time of writing there are regular twice-weekly railway strikes in England, a lorry-drivers’ strike, a municipal workers’ strike, a civil-servants’ strike and a miners’ strike are threatening, there are shortages of food and other articles in the shops, the number of unemployed is growing every hour and on top of it all the country is snowed under, many roads are impassable and the airports are closed. In many other countries there would be revolution or civil war. Here the Home Secretary keeps telling the House that there is no crisis, the House nods – with the exception of a few Opposition members who smile ironically. The general public does not bother much about these little local difficulties. They shrug their shoulders and get on with their jobs – not too enthusiastically, but no less diligently than on other occasions.

  In the past the supreme moral code of the British was fairness. Shoplifting and murder could be forgiven; queue-jumping not. You could call the British stupid (indeed, they were offended if you called them clever) but you could not call them unfair. British bank-robbers and safe-breakers pleaded guilty and went to prison; but once there they would stab a fellow-prisoner in the back with a long, sharp knife if he had called them unfair. Those days are over. Fairness is now regarded by an increasing number of people as silly sentimentality. Who wants to be fair?

  It was pointed out to a trade union official during the lorry-drivers’ strike that he was cutting off food-supplies to ordinary people with whom he has no dispute whatsoever. He replied: ‘If I can’t eat why should they?’ The leader of the ambulancemen declared on the eve of their strike that they would not answer even emergency calls and added: ‘And if it means lives lost, that’s how it must be.’

  This is not the mentality, the tone which people used to associate with England. This is not the old British character; it is the new one. The shining British virtues were the virtues of superiority, self-confidence and well-being; they are being replaced by the vices of inferiority, insecurity and poverty. Kindness and tolerance are on the way out; indifference and meanness are on the way in. The great virtues are not gone completely, far from it, but they do shine much less dazzlingly than they did even in the recent past.

  Three Faces of English Humour

  The English sense of humour has three characteristics which distinguish it from others. Or to be more precise: other peoples have one or another of these characteristics (Jewish humour, for instance, is just as self-mocking as the English), but only the English have the three together and it is not so much the three individual traits as the chemistry of the three together which creates something unique.

  Laughing at Yourself

  If a sense of humour were simply the ability to laugh, everybody would have a sense of humour. Stalin was not one of the great humorous characters of our age but even he was able to laugh until tears flowed down his cheeks. Milovan Djilas describes a blood-chilling scene at one of those notorious dinner-parties which on the one hand amused the participants and, on the other, decided the fate of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. They were discussing the execution of Zinoviev. Beria – another man who i
s not exactly remembered for his uproarious comic turns – began imitating Zinoviev’s agony in the last minutes of his life. The joke lay in Zinoviev’s terror, and Beria imitated his shrieks, cries, moans and frantic appeals to Stalin who – Zinoviev supposed – was ignorant of his being murdered. Zinoviev was a Jew and to add to the merriment Beria put on a Jewish accent. Stalin was roaring with laughter, his face became red, tears were running down his cheeks and he asked Beria to repeat the performance. A solicitous Molotov, however, stopped the repeat performance half-way through, being anxious that too much laughter might harm Stalin’s delicate health.

  I also remember a lovely Irish girl who told me: ‘My girlfriend and I have such a wonderful sense of humour. We just sit down and laugh and laugh for hours for no reason whatsoever.’

  All this, from Stalin to little Deirdre, may pass for a sense of humour. But a sense of humour, I believe, really begins when one is able to laugh at oneself. That’s where a sense of proportion – something useful and positive – comes in. The person who can laugh at himself sees himself (more or less) as others see him. He can smile at his own misfortune, folly and weakness. He may even be able to accept the idea that in a disagreement the other person, too, may have a point.

  Humorists discovered the advantages of such an attitude long ago. The humorous piece in which the writer describes himself as clumsy, foolish, gullible and incompetent is a very old device. The reason behind this is twofold: 1) some humorists – give credit where credit is due – do, after all, possess a genuine sense of humour and are capable of laughing at themselves; 2) they play the clown because they know that the world loves a clown more than it loves a humorist.

  The humorist, as a rule, is a satirist, a purifier, a moralist. Although he wears an apologetic smile, he wants to chastise and purify us. The clown is a very special figure and touches deep chords at the bottom of our hearts.* The clown is a depreciated father-figure, a man of authority deprived of his standing. He looks grand and is often cruel, like Father he tries to make us believe that he knows everything, that he can do everything, but in fact, he is only a fool, no better than us. Like Father, he wants us to think him big and alarming, but he is not: he is feeble, ridiculous, incompetent and just as much lost in this world as the rest of us. We are delighted to discover this, we are relieved and revel in our sudden glory: but the clown is essentially a sad and melancholy figure. Every time he fights a windmill, he suffers defeat; time and again he runs his head against a brick wall only to discover that the wall is hard and his head is soft. And – saddest of all – he realizes that he cannot really protect those whom he is called upon to protect.