by George Mikes
In a Norwegian village inn the local mayor, a well-known collaborator, was confronted by a patriot who asked him: ‘What are you going to do when the Germans lose the war then?’
‘Lose the war? Impossible!’ snapped back the mayor. ‘But if by any chance it should happen, then I’ll just put my hat on and …’
‘Put your hat on what?’ inquired the patriot.*
Both these jokes still raise a smile or a laugh when told today in a pub or a drawing room in London or Oslo. Yet the difference between the two is enormous. A political joke in England, or in any other democracy, is simply a joke the subject of which happens to be politics. No one is in the slightest danger when telling it and the idea of danger just doesn’t come into one’s mind. Even Tories would laugh at the first one although, as likely as not, they would turn it into an anti-Socialist joke when retelling it. But in Nazi-occupied Norway the telling of the second joke might have resulted in being beaten to death or otherwise executed – as has, indeed, often happened to people who told jokes under Nazism, Fascism, Communism, and other forms of dictatorship, both right wing and left wing.
East German jokes on the subject make the situation clear: ‘Is it true that Ulbricht collects political jokes?’
‘No, he doesn’t. He collects the people who tell them.’
Take a few more examples of jokes in various democracies, chosen from different periods. Here is one of the once-fashionable de Gaulle jokes.
The de Gaulles are waiting for the result of a plebiscite. The General is shaving and the first results are handed over by a messenger to his wife. Madame de Gaulle looks at the report, rushes into the bathroom and says to her husband: ‘Mon Dieu, mon Dieu, we’re winning!’
‘I have already told you, Yvonne,’ the General tells her coolly, ‘that when no one else is present, you may call me Charles.’
Before the 1968 elections in America, there was only very limited enthusiasm for either candidate. People were fond of telling one another: ‘Cheer up! Only one of them can be elected.’
When the Ayatollah Khomeini was establishing his new Islamic Republic with its horrible, retrograde laws, thieves’ hands chopped off, adulterous women stoned to death, drinkers of alcohol flogged publicly, the story was told that the Shah sent a telegram to the Ayatollah: ‘I hear you have established a peaceful regime in Iran. I wish to shake your hand. Please send it registered post.’
Many English politicians have heard jokes about themselves and had good laughs at them. I doubt that anyone dared tell a typical de Gaulle joke to de Gaulle but no one was afraid of the political consequence of telling such a joke. In America ten times more offensive jokes than the one quoted above are being told daily in clubs, bars and on television. The point is that in a democracy a political joke is just like any other joke.
Under tyrannies the political joke has an utterly different significance. Under oppressive regimes jokes replace the press, public debates, parliament and even private discussion but they are better than any of these. They are better because serious debate admits two sides, two views; a serious debate puts arguments which might be considered, turned round, rejected. As the tyrant does not allow his opponent the luxury of debate, it is only fair that he, too, should be deprived of the right of reply in some cases. The joke is a flash of lightning, a thrust with a rapier. It does not put forward the ‘argument’ that the tyrant may be mistaken; it makes a fool of him, pricks his pomposity, brings him down to a human level and proves that he is vulnerable and will one day come crashing down. Every joke told weakens the tyrant, every laugh at his expense is a nail in his coffin. That is why tyrants and their henchmen cannot possibly have a sense of humour. Rákosi – the bloodthirsty dictator of Hungary of the late forties and early fifties – tolerated no jokes against himself and many people paid with their lives for the jokes they had told; Kádár, perhaps not a paragon of Western-type democracy, but a milder, wiser and more humane man and no tyrant, insists that all anti-Kádár jokes should be brought to him.
No one living in the free atmosphere of Western democracy can imagine the liberating and invigorating effect these jokes have in a land of terror and intimidation as they are spread from mouth to mouth.
George Orwell wrote: ‘Every joke is a tiny revolution. If you had to define humour in single phrase, you might define it as dignity sitting on a tin-tack. Whatever destroys dignity, and brings down the mighty from their seats, preferably with a bump, is funny. And the bigger the fall, the bigger the joke. It would be better to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at a curate. The truth is that you cannot be memorably funny without at some point raising topics which the rich, the powerful and the complacent would prefer to see left alone.’
George Orwell was a great writer and a clever man. But in spite of all his insight and all his hatred for Soviet tyranny and his joining the armies of Republican Spain, he remained an Englishman and even an old Etonian. He looked in the right direction and sensed the truth. But the ‘destruction of dignity’ and the raising of topics ‘the rich, the powerful and the complacent’ would prefer to see left alone is a far cry from the grim reality of Pastor Mueller sentenced to death by the Nazis for telling anti-Hitler jokes to an electrician who came to his house to repair a fuse.
The tyrant kicks back with desperation; the tellers of political jokes are persecuted, tortured and killed. The jokers often die; the jokes never. There was a story told in Stalin’s Russia: a German, a Frenchman and a Russian meet and argue which nation is the bravest. The German and Frenchman make their respective claims and then the Russian says: ‘No, the Russians are the bravest. They are sent to an arctic labour camp for telling jokes against Stalin, yet the jokes go on even in the camps.’
Three Soviet labour-camp inmates sat chatting one evening (says the Big Red Joke Book):
‘What are you in for?’ asked the first.
‘Me? I spoke badly of Comrade Popov in 1939.’
‘And you?’
‘I spoke well of Comrade Popov in 1940. And what about you?’ he asked turning to the third man.
‘I am Comrade Popov.’
This joke, mutatis mutandis, was told in Louis Napoleon’s France, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, the Colonels’ Greece, Pinochet’s Chile, Idi Amin’s Uganda and, no doubt, will be told in many other countries for a long time. Jokes know no frontiers, they are always being renovated, rejuvenated, adapted to changing circumstances, and miraculously survive. ‘Jokes about the German invasion of France in 1940,’ say the authors, ‘crop up again in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Jokes about anti-Semitism in Central and Eastern Europe at the turn of the century migrate across the Irish Sea to Ulster to cross the Atlantic to the United States, where they are used against white racism or Protestant ascendancy.’
Good jokes never die. (But some of them grow very, very old and feeble.)
The political joke is a short sharp shock against a given target. In Russia the mendacious press is often its victim.
Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Napoleon are watching the October Parade in Moscow’s Red Square.
Alexander looks at the tanks and says: ‘If I had chariots like these, I’d have conquered the whole of Asia.’
Caesar looks at the giant rockets: ‘If I’d had such catapults, I’d have conquered the whole world.’
Napoleon looks up from a copy of Pravda: ‘If I’d had a newspaper like this, nobody would ever have heard of Waterloo.’
In Russia, again, people are driven to despair by the constant promises of a rosy future and the dark and stark reality when that future becomes the present.
Two ex-members of the middle class meet in Moscow. One asks the other: ‘Do you think we’ve already reached one hundred per cent of Communism or will it get worse?’
‘If I’d had a newspaper like this, nobody would ever have heard of Waterloo.’
Still in Russia, the terrible gap between glorious technology – SAM missiles and rockets sent up to Venus – and the miserably low
standard of living is often emphasized.
‘If things go on like this,’ says a Soviet citizen, ‘I’ll soon have a helicopter.’
‘A helicopter?’ asks his friend. ‘What do you need a helicopter for?’
‘Of course I need it. Suppose we hear that you can buy shoe-laces in Smolensk. I fly to Smolensk and buy shoe-laces.’
In Eastern and Central Europe the Russians themselves have been the main targets of political jokes. The Russians were in many ways obviously inferior to the peoples they had subjugated, yet the latter had to sing Russia’s praise and were ordered to try and emulate the great Russian achievements.
‘What was the nationality of Adam and Eve?’ people asked.
The answer: ‘They were Russians. They went around naked, when they were hungry they had to steal apples, yet they were convinced that they were living in Paradise.’
There have been innumerable jokes explaining the differences between Capitalism and Communism. This one comes from Poland: ‘Under capitalism there is rigid discipline in production and chaos in consumption. Under communism you get rigid discipline in consumption and chaos in production.’
Or again: ‘What is the difference between Capitalism and Communism?’
‘Capitalism is the exploitation of man by man. Communism is the other way round.’
Other jokes dealt with the horrible oppression of the Stalin years. It became known in Budapest that a mysterious three-fold coffin had been found at the bottom of the Danube. It had long been thought that Attila the Hun – a revered hero in Hungary – had been buried there and it had always been hoped that one day his coffin might be found.
‘The man in the coffin,’ a member of the Secret Police reported, ‘is definitely Attila.’
‘How do you know?’
‘He confessed.’
Another line of jokes dealt with the so-called Russian generosity. All the satellite countries had incessantly to utter noises of deep gratitude while the Russians were ruthlessly exploiting them.
‘Russian agriculture is so developed,’ says a Russian, ‘that they now have four harvests a year.’
‘Aren’t you exaggerating a bit?’
‘No. One in the Soviet Union, one in Hungary, one in Poland, one in East Germany.’
On the same theme: there was a so-called Danubian Conference in Budapest, to decide navigation rights between Hungary and Russia. It was, of course, a foregone conclusion that Russia would give the orders and the Hungarians would obey, with gratitude. On the very first day of the Conference people in Budapest told one another: ‘Agreement has already been reached. The Russians have the right to navigate the Danube length-wise and we across.’
Finally, East Germany was – and to some extent still is – a special case. Ulbricht was detested even more than other leaders were detested in neighbouring countries, particularly for his absolute subservience to the Soviet Union. Many East German jokes dealt with this subject. Two examples:
An old Russian comrade visits Ulbricht, goes to his study and sees a telephone on his desk with an earphone but no mouthpiece.
‘What on earth is this?’ he asks.
‘This is my hot line to Moscow.’
Or another Ulbricht story: Khrushchev and Ulbricht are going around in Moscow. Khrushchev stops a small boy in the street and asks him: ‘Who is your father?’
‘Comrade Khrushchev.’
‘Your mother?’
‘The Soviet Union.’
‘What would you like to be?’
‘An astronaut.’
A few weeks later they meet again in East Berlin. This time it is Ulbricht who stops a small boy in the street.
‘Who’s your father?’
‘Comrade Ulbricht.’
‘Your mother?’
‘The German Democratic Republic.’
‘What would you like to be?’
‘An orphan.’
Dirty Jokes
‘Continental people have sex life; the English have hot-water bottles.’ This was the whole of the chapter on sex I wrote, soon after the war, in my book How to be an Alien and I shall never live it down. In subsequent years things seemed to have changed considerably and London was proclaimed (by Londoners) the sex capital of the world. I was unconvinced. When asked by a television interviewer (with a superior smile on his lips) whether I still believed that the English had nothing but hot-water bottles or did I think that they had progressed somewhat, I admitted that yes, they had progressed. Nowadays they had electric blankets.
People keep pointing out to me that the English multiply somehow and survive as a nation. That’s true. Surprising but true.
The sex-life of the British, I have said in another book,* is in strange contradiction with their placid temperament. In everything else (e.g. queueing, driving) they are reserved, tolerant and disciplined; in their sex-life – if they live any sex-life at all – they tend to be violent and crude. A surprisingly large number of Englishmen like to be flogged by ladies wearing black stockings and nothing else; they believe that those ubiquitous places where women strip and show themselves naked to an audience for a modest fee, are evidence of virility; they think that the high circulation of porn magazines is a sign of high sexuality and not of high neurosis. They fail to see why sweating, topless waitresses should put you off food and sex at one and the same time.
The fact remains that England may be a copulating country but it is not an erotic country. Whenever I try to personify sex in England, Lord Longford and Mrs Whitehouse – these staunch guardians of our virtues – spring to mind. Girls are being taken to bed, to be sure, but they are not courted; they are being made love to but they are not pursued. Women are quite willing to go to bed but they rarely flirt with men. Ladies between the ages of eight and eighty (let’s say eighty-five) come back from Italy outraged and complaining bitterly about the crude wolf-whistles. Crude they may be, but they do make middle-aged ladies feel twenty-five years younger, wanted and desired, and these complaints are just disguised boasts. When bishops, retired brigadiers or at least young executives start wolf-whistling in this town of ours, then I may believe that London has become – well, not the sex capital of the world but a budding sex-village.
So what is the position of sex jokes in English humour? Dirty jokes are common all over the world and most of the jokes told – eighty-five per cent of them, according to expert estimates – are sex jokes.
I personally detest jokes in general and dirty jokes in particular. I can enjoy a really good joke well told, particularly when it has an à propos and brings out a point or illuminates an argument. But when people blurt out one joke after the other for a whole evening, hour after hour, that makes me cry. ‘Did you hear the latest?’ they ask and then proceed to tell you jokes which had long white beards even under Victoria, Napoleon III, Francis Joseph or Abraham Lincoln (these jokes travel fast round the world). But my complaint is not really against the age of these jokes. Even the most brilliant of them becomes a trifle tedious when it is the 125th in a series. That is why I described my hobby in Who’s Who as: not listening to funny stories. (The result is that people come up to me, saying: ‘I know you don’t like listening to jokes but just listen to this one’ … and then they proceed to tell me one which used to be extremely popular in Wallenstein’s army during the Thirty Years War. I sigh. I have recognized by now that this is a professional hazard. Most people define a humorist as the man to whom they must tell funny stories. While in this same parenthesis, I should like to make it clear that well-told personal anecdotes – things which actually happened to you or a friend of yours and which apply to a specific situation or tend to illustrate a point – belong to an utterly different category. Indeed, they are the spice of life. A few years ago, I spent an evening in Athens with a Greek writer and his charming and much younger wife. I had my equally charming and also much younger girl-friend with me. When he started telling a story, his wife exclaimed: ‘For goodness’ sake, Antony, not that one again!�
�� When my turn came, my girl-friend interrupted: ‘Please … please … I’ve heard that a hundred times!’ So it went on, until Antony, very politely and calmly, turned to his wife and said: ‘My dear, when a man’s wife is bored with a man’s stories, there is one thing he can do: change his wife. He cannot possibly change his stories.’ Wise words. Personal anecdotes are the accumulated wealth of a life-time. A man cannot change his stories any more easily than he can change his nose or his left foot.)
Jokes on the not too temperamental sex-life of the English, in line with my own hot-water bottle jibe, are numerous.
A German businessman invites an Englishman for a round of golf.
‘I don’t play golf,’ replies the Englishman. ‘I tried it once and found it an excruciating bore so I gave it up.’
A little later the Englishman is offered a drink.
‘I don’t drink. I tried some whisky once and found the taste abominable. Never again, thank you.’
Then a young man comes into the room. The Englishman introduces him to his German friend: ‘My son.’
The German looks at the boy and says: ‘Your only child, I presume.’
Another joke in the same vein:
An English commercial traveller arrives at a village with no hotel, so he is put up in the house of the publican. The publican’s wife has just made an apple pie which she leaves on the kitchen table when they all go to bed. As the house has only one bed, the publican sleeps between his wife and his guest. Fire breaks out during the night and the publican rushes down to deal with it. His wife whispers to the guest: ‘This is your chance.’
Upon which the man jumps up, runs down to the kitchen and eats the apple pie.
And the last example.
A man goes out to an official dinner and rings up his wife some time later.
‘I thought this was a business-function pure and proper. But there are a lot of girls here, some topless, the others quite naked, serving people and even sitting on our laps. What shall I do?’
His wife: ‘If you think you can do anything, come home quickly.’
