English Humour for Beginners

by George Mikes

  Yet there is a further essential relationship with the clown: we love him. He is Father; we want to see him humbled, ridiculed, brought down to our lowly level, but we still love him. To hate Father would generate guilt in us and we could not enjoy his humiliation; we cannot laugh at the clown with an entirely clear conscience.

  So when the humorist starts clowning he doesn’t just simply make fun of himself; he uses a device to gain our hearts.

  The first person singular also increases the dramatic effect of the story. ‘A funny thing happened to me on the way to the Forum …’ is an age-old trick. Why is it, people often ask, that funny things keep happening to humorists and nothing funny ever happens to them? The truth is that funny things do keep happening to them. The majority of the funny things described by humorists in the first person singular happened to their friends, bank managers, business connections, who never noticed them. Indeed, the only essential difference between the ordinary person and the humorist is that the latter notices the humour in situations where the others miss it.

  It was G. K. Chesterton who gave the perfect – and to my mind, final – answer to the question when he remarked, speaking of humanity at large: ‘You make the jokes: I see them.’

  Leaving literary conventions and devices apart, the English have the gift – a very precious one – of being able to laugh at themselves and their own weaknesses. The first step any foreign students of English humour, trying to acquire it, must take is to accept the idea that they are not perfect; that in some cases they may be wrong; that they are not, at one and the same time, beautiful, omniscient, accomplished sportsmen and generous souls. They must reconcile themselves to the idea that their profile is not Roman and their handwriting is a mess. The English, at least, suspect as much.

  Not very long ago one of the great wits and most popular after-dinner speakers of London was a judge, Lord Birkett. He was giving one of his after-dinner speeches, when he suddenly interrupted himself, looked at a man across the table and said: ‘I don’t mind someone looking at his watch when I speak; but I object when somebody puts his watch to his ear, because he can hardly believe that it is going.’

  In the early years when the British car industry was in the doldrums, I went to see the Motor Car Exhibition. The Rolls-Royce stand was derelict, the man in charge – in striped trousers, black jacket, grey tie and small, saucy, military moustache – seemed lonely and forlorn. A ragged man, a prowler, in shabby overcoat and with a two-day beard came up to him and asked: ‘Where’s the gentlemen’s toilet, Guv’nor?’

  The Rolls-Royce salesman jumped off his stand: ‘Permit me to guide you there, sir,’ he replied and conducted the man to the loo. When he returned, the salesman from the next stand, representing a much more modest make, asked him: ‘Are you mad? Why did you do that?’

  ‘First genuine enquiry I’ve had for three days.’

  The Rolls-Royce chap explained: ‘That was the first genuine enquiry I’ve had for three days.’

  The same kind of self-deprecation and self-mockery on a national level is exemplified in a joke popular at a time of economic crisis, when – on top of everything else – Britain and the world were threatened with yet another oil-price rise.

  His secretary rushes in to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and tells him, breathless with excitement: ‘Chancellor … something terrible has happened … The Pope and Sheikh Yamani … you know, the Oil Minister of Saudi Arabia – have arrived together. They both want to see you without delay. Whom should I let in first?’

  The Chancellor thinks a bit, then replies: ‘Send in the Pope. With the Pope I have to kiss only his ring.’

  A subdivision of this attitude, this state of mind is the ‘sorry, my fault’ business. It has become a major industry in Britain (now in decline, like all major industries). It is a product of the public-school code: acknowledge your shortcomings and mistakes, face your responsibilities. So far so good; but it has been degraded over the years, it has become a facile phrase, the easy way out. If any aspiring foreigner wants to get on here, this is the first phrase he must learn. Never mind whose mistake it is, when you come out with the magic ‘Sorry, my fault,’ the English are disarmed. What can they say to such a decent chap who accepts responsibility? The phrase used to mean: ‘Forgive me, I have made a mistake.’ Nowadays it means: ‘Who cares what’s really happened. Let’s shut up, forget about it and concentrate on something less boring.’

  The big question about self-mockery is this: are the British really laughing at their faults or are they laughing only at those of their faults which they regard as gentlemanly and endearing? The one other people who laugh at themselves as readily as the English, are the Jews. They do laugh at their real shortcomings readily, perhaps too readily. (More of Jewish humour later.) About the English Harold Nicolson remarked: ‘The Englishman will often relish jokes directed against those of his failings (such as absent-mindedness, greediness, unpunctuality, untidiness, extravagance) which do not diminish his essential dignity, he will never laugh at jokes directed against failings of which he is inwardly ashamed.’

  I go further. A great deal of inverted snobbery is attached to these acceptable, likeable, elegant faults. I think it would be quite appropriate to recall an evening I described in the fifties:

  I was invited to a rather dull party. Conversation sagged and there was general boredom in the air. One of the guests – I had never seen him before – told me that he owned large shops.

  ‘Good for you,’ I replied.

  ‘Not one shop,’ he added, ‘but several.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve got the point,’ I nodded. As he went on telling me about his various shops, I asked him where his headquarters were.

  ‘In Cricklewood,’ he said.

  Up to that moment he had been just as bored with our conversation as I was myself. But suddenly a light appeared in his eye.

  ‘I don’t know that district at all,’ he said. ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes, I know it very well,’ I replied.

  ‘I don’t,’ he insisted. ‘I’ve been there for thirty years but I still don’t know that district at all.’

  He was becoming agitated and I saw from the expression in his eyes that I was not supposed to think: ‘How stupid!’ but to look at him with admiration and wonder.

  ‘There are two streets in my immediate neighbourhood,’ he continued, ‘one is called Exeter Road, the other Exeter Parade.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘there are.’

  ‘Do you know them?’ he asked me.

  ‘I know them both very well,’ I replied.

  ‘Well, I don’t,’ he said triumphantly. ‘I have been there for thirty years and I still don’t know which is Exeter Road and which is Exeter Parade.’

  He looked around, pleased with himself beyond measure. It was no minor achievement. He seemed to imply: ‘Only an exceptionally able, shrewd and brilliant man can be quite as stupid as that.’

  ‘Actually,’ he went on, ‘it’s thirty-two years, not thirty – and I still don’t know one from the other.’

  So I explained it to him. I explained with great care which was Exeter Road and which was Exeter Parade. He looked at me with bewilderment. So did all the others. What a bore I was; what a spoil-sport. Did I want to take away this man’s only claim to fame? Quite frankly, I did.

  But it was too late. The others paid no attention to me. The man’s remarks had enlivened the conversation and the party came to life; everybody was eager to have his turn. Everyone told us how utterly silly he was. One story was capped by another. One man knew the names of the streets in his district all right, but had such a bad sense of direction that he kept losing his way even in the immediate neighbourhood of his house. Whenever he wanted to make a short cut he was sure to land miles away. Another man said that he was unable to remember names. A couple of others said they knew what he meant, they could never remember names either, whereupon he insisted, rather ferociously, that no one could possibly be quite so bad on names
as he was. He looked round defiantly and no one dared challenge him. A fourth person boasted that he could not remember faces and a fifth that he was incapable of mending fuses. We lingered over the topic of mechanical imbecility but this contest was easily won by a lady who alleged that she was unable even to wind up her watch. Then the man who owned so many shops butted in to say again that although he had been working in Cricklewood for thirty years – thirty-two, to be precise – he still could not tell Exeter Road from Exeter Parade.

  So they went on confessing to faults and failings which – needless to say – they did not regard as faults and failings at all. All this self-deprecation meant only: how wonderful we must be if we can afford to admit so much against ourselves. Or else: if we have to be stupid, then – by God – we’re going to be the stupidest people in the world. We want to excel somehow.

  Understatement

  Understatement is not a trick, not a literary device: it is a way of life. It is a weltanschauung, i.e. a way of looking at the world. You have to breathe the air of England, live with these understanding, tolerant – some say sheepish – people for a while before you get it into your blood. Unless you learn what understatement is you have not made even the first step towards understanding English humour. Life is one degree under in England and so is every manifestation of life.

  A lawyer is working in his study on a hard case when a workman – who has to do some repairs in the house – crosses the room. The lawyer exclaims: ‘How can I be expected to do any work when armies of workmen keep marching up and down in front of my nose?’ This lawyer is not an English lawyer – neither a barrister, nor a solicitor. A man sneezes in a pub and another tells him: ‘If you’ve got the cholera why don’t you stay at home?’ This is not an Englishman and not an English pub.

  These are both wild overstatements. Many people try to achieve, and often succeed in achieving, humorous effects this way. But it is not the English way. Take the English passion for queueing. As some people need occasional outbursts of temper – an Italian will feel much relieved after smashing a few plates or after having a flaming row with somebody on any subject – so an Englishman needs an occasional outburst of discipline and self-control. This need probably stems from the old virtues of tolerance, courtesy, self-assurance; they are changing perhaps, and fading away slowly, but they have not disappeared yet – far from it.

  Understatement is also underreaction. P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster speaks to his valet:

  ‘Have you seen Mr Fink-Nottle, Jeeves?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘I am going to murder him.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  When gales are raging, trees are torn up and houses are blown away like cardboard, an Englishman will remark: ‘Rather windy, isn’t it?’ When it rains cats and dogs, or there is hail and sleet plus freezing fog, an Englishman, meeting his neighbour on his way to the local railway-station, will comment: ‘Not a very nice day, is it?’ If someone expresses his views with vehemence, passion and dogmatic fervour, an Englishman may tell him: ‘You really think so?’ In a more temperamental Continental country this would be worded slightly differently: ‘You are talking utter rot and it is beneath my dignity to go on talking with such a fool as you.’ But the meaning of the two statements is exactly the same.

  The whole rhythm of life in England is understatement; their suppression of emotion is understatement; their underreaction to everything, the polite word instead of the expletive (when the latter would help so much more to clear the air), the stiff upper lip, the very climate with its absence of extremes, all these are understatement.

  The London Evening Standard reported one day that Concorde had resumed its London–Bahrain service on a twice-weekly basis but had left Heathrow without one single passenger. When a British Airways spokesman was asked about this somewhat curious state of affairs, he replied: ‘We never expected the service to be overcrowded.’

  There is no other country in the world where this reply could have been made. The story comes from ‘This England’, a weekly feature in the New Statesman & Nation. They publish authentic extracts from the British press and recently they collected three years’ crop in a booklet.

  Or – speaking of understatement – take one or two examples of English patience and tolerance. Pauline Jenkins (writes the News of the World) had a ‘hell of a shock’ when she discovered on her wedding night that her husband was a woman. She told a reporter later: ‘I threatened to leave then and there.’ But later she calmed down, went down to the kitchen and ‘had a cup of tea instead’.

  A violent English family scene as reported by The Times: Mrs Diana Evans, mother of three children and married for seventeen years, called to her husband in the garden. ‘I am getting a divorce.’ The news was shattering; utterly unexpected; the husband’s marriage lay in ruins. His answer was: ‘If I do not get these tomato plants in soon they will die.’

  The English equivalent of the crime passionel, quoted from the Lymington Times: a husband, incensed when he found his wife in bed with another man, drew a huge and murderous knife and thrust it into the heart of their daughter’s teddy-bear.

  Or, again, look at the manner in which a true Englishman faces death. The Southend Standard reported that Mr Victor Shaw, a dustman, having emptied the dustbins at a caravan-site at Rochdale, found a mortar bomb in one. The bomb proved to be live and nearly blew the dust-cart with Mr Shaw and his whole gang in it to smithereens. Mr Shaw’s comment was that he wished, when people threw bombs into the dustbin, that they would indicate on a small bit of paper whether the bombs were live or not.

  There are Sunday Trading Laws in force in England. Flowers and food – being perishable goods – may be sold on Sundays but other goods may be sold only in open markets by Jews (or Moslems) who keep their Sabbaths on Saturdays (or Fridays). No one takes much notice of these laws but Croydon Council decided that they were to be enforced with greater strictness. The flower and food dealers shrugged their shoulders, they were not affected. But what about the other eighty-two stallholders? The plan to close their market would have created a riot in some more temperamental Southern countries; four hundred years ago the Inquisition might have stepped in; seven hundred years ago it might have proved the casus belli for a religious war. But in England, Anno Domini 1978, the eighty-two stallholders – good Christians to a man – found another solution. They all declared that they were Jews and went on trading.

  Cruelty

  British humour has a strong streak of cruelty.

  It is amazing that these seemingly gentle people deem certain things funny which horrify others. What is the explanation? That these gentle people are not so gentle, after all? That the rest of the world is too squeamish? Or perhaps something more subtle and complicated?

  The first objection to this statement – that British humour is cruel – is the simple reply that all humour is cruel. The idea that humour is gentle and sweet and that the humorist, or even the man with a good sense of humour, is a nice and likeable chap is nonsense. Humour is always aggressive. On the lowest level we laugh, or at least giggle nervously, at the man who has slipped on one of those famous banana skins. Our ‘sudden glory’ is always connected with someone else’s sudden discomfiture or ignominy.*

  ‘Wit is related to aggression, hostility and sadism. Humour is related to depression, narcissism and masochism’ – to quote Dr Martin Grotjahn’s Beyond Laughter. Dr Grotjahn goes over a number of manifestations of humour. He starts with ‘kidding’. Kidding is an American expression but needs no explanation in Britain either. Kidding means to treat someone like a kid, in other words to assume a superior, pseudo-authoritarian attitude towards him. ‘The inveterate kidder,’ writes Dr Grotjahn, ‘expresses his own conflict with authority (usually his parents) and projects it onto his victim. The kidder imitates his father torturing his “kid” who is in a position of humiliation and passive endurance … He can dish it out but he cannot take it.’ After the kidder comes the practical jok
er. He is the eternal adolescent, his aggression is barely disguised. My brother is a mild and compassionate man but with an occasionally explosive temperament. He used to be fond of mild practical jokes, but even these were cruel, or at least aggressive. For example, if you had a bad cold my brother, in his young days, was liable to wait for you to feel a sneeze coming on – then he would jerk your handkerchief away so that you were caught in mid-sneeze and either sneezed into your own hand or choked. Not a joke to please sensitive and susceptible souls. My brother would also stop someone in the street and ask him if he knew where, say, Bedford Avenue was. The victim would say, sorry, he didn’t know. Then my brother would explain to him, with all decorum, that it was second on the right, then first on the left.

  The second joke is just mildly aggressive, the first has an element of cruelty in it. The well-known joke that follows (not my brother’s) aims at humiliating the victim. A man is invited to a nudist party and arrives full of expectations. The butler – one of the conspirators – receives him with deferential courtesy, takes him to a side-room and tells him to undress. When stark naked, he is ceremoniously announced and enters a room where everyone else is properly dressed in evening gowns and dinner jackets, complete with jewels and decorations.