English Humour for Beginners

by George Mikes

  The Irish are not lazier and not stupider than most people. Some of the greatest writers in the English language – Swift, Wilde, Shaw, James Joyce, Yeats, just to mention the first five of the dozens of names that come to one’s mind – were Irish. So surely we ought to cry ‘racism!’, ‘unfair!’, ‘disgusting!’ and swear never again to tell or even listen to an Irish joke?

  Until a few years ago I should have approved this proposition. Then I was invited to a party in a large country house. The guests were dispersed in many rooms. In one of these rooms, with its door open, I found myself with a group of six or seven people and told them a joke about homosexuals. The laughter was silenced by a man who suddenly appeared from the corridor outside and roared with flashing eyes: ‘Who told that homosexual joke?’

  I said it was me.

  ‘I am a homosexual!’ he shouted. He sounded very proud of it as if it were a major achievement.

  ‘So what?’ said I.

  He seemed to be stupefied, I think he was convinced that I had failed to hear what he had said, so he repeated it even more loudly: ‘You’ve just told a joke against homosexuals and I am a homosexual.’

  This was obviously a gimmick of his, he must have said it many times before.

  ‘No,’ I told him, ‘I didn’t tell a joke against homosexuals. But people constantly tell jokes about Jews, about the English, about the Germans, about the Irish, about the Scots, about prostitutes, about the new-rich, about doctors, about the Queen and – perhaps in more questionable taste – about stutterers. Why should homosexuals be the one and only exception? What is so specially sacrosanct about them?’

  I failed to convince that man whose main contention seemed to be that he was no German, no new-rich, no Queen, no stutterer: he was a homosexual ergo it was wicked to tell jokes about homosexuals. But I think I was right. I do not say that all these jokes are innocent; some of them are truly vicious. But when they are told innocently, we must accept them simply as the expression of some stereotyped opinion the aim of which is to raise a laugh. Occasionally they may do harm and inculcate hostility against one group or another. But, on the whole, while racists may be fond of racist jokes, jokes will not turn people racist. I think we ought to be tolerant, and try not to be what the Germans call tierisch ernst, brutishly serious, not to be self-righteous and outraged when we hear a joke against a group we happen to like and then proceed to tell jokes against groups we happen to dislike. After all, while jokes should be taken seriously, they should not be taken that seriously.

  And there is another aspect of this. In Australia I once heard a particularly loud-mouthed and ill-educated group of Aussies amuse themselves by telling a string of anti-Italian jokes. Slowly I grew as irritated as that homosexual chap had been at the party. The Italians I had met in Australia were decent, hard-working people, most of them much more intelligent than these particular Australians. Then it suddenly occurred to me that it was not hatred of the Italians that made them tell these jokes, but love of themselves. They wanted to feel superior and clever, and anti-Italian (in fact, anti-anybody) jokes achieve such a purpose. Poor bastards, I thought then, if you need these jokes as therapy to bolster up your ego, you must have them.

  A motorist has taken the wrong turning and is completely lost in the depths of County Cork, Eire. At last, he discovers a local man and asks him how to get to Limerick.

  The man scratches his head and replies: ‘Well, if I wanted to go to Limerick I wouldn’t start from here.’

  What is Humour?

  What is humour?

  I do not know.

  Mr Spike Milligan, the comedian, wrote: ‘Comedy is a way of making money. The trouble is that everyone nowadays tries to make it into a philosophical system.’ He was quite wrong. Humour is philosophy, the trouble is that everyone nowadays tries to make money out of it. This, however relevant, is beside the main point. The point is that great minds, from Aristotle through Bergson and Freud to Mr Milligan, make desperate, and often brilliant, efforts to define humour and they always fail.

  The definition of humour is a problem of philosophy. Therein lies the first difficulty. Having heard the word ‘humour’ people expect a good laugh. This expectation is unjustified. The philosophical definition of humour should not be any funnier or more entertaining than the philosophical definition of the purpose of life.

  But – and therein lies the second difficulty – efforts to give a definitive answer to the question, what is humour, are just as vain as efforts to give a definitive answer to the question, ‘what is the purpose of life’. On this latter question thousands of tomes have been written by some of the best brains of humanity. The answers given were often brilliant, exciting, thought-provoking and profound, but never do they seem convincingly to be true. (Perhaps the truth is just too dull and uninspiring to hold the attention: life has no purpose? But one can’t even swear to that.) The achievement of philosophy is asking the right questions and giving the wrong answers. The achievement of philosophy is to skate with breath-taking skill around problems and to find no solutions. We are no nearer to finding a convincing and generally accepted answer to the question ‘what is the purpose of life’ than we were half a dozen millennia ago. The same goes for the problem of humour.

  I am not going to fill this gap here and now. I am not going to find the solution missed by so many, from Aristotle to Milligan. Neither am I going to sum up the innumerable theories (except for touching on a few, when it is inevitable). I cannot completely ignore the subject of defining humour but it is not my main subject. My main subject is: how to try to be funny in England. So I am going to sum up and paraphrase what I have said in some earlier books* on the subject. My meditation will raise me into the august company of Aristotle, Bergson and Freud. They could not solve the problem; neither can I.

  What is humour, then? Well, what is rain? It is something different for the meteorologist and the farmer. For the bank clerk it may be the phenomenon which makes his weekend miserable; for the cinema-owner it may be the phenomenon which makes his weekend profitable. And are a drizzle and a downpour, a shower, a cloud-burst and a drop here and there all rain? Is the difference between a drizzle and a deluge a difference in degree or does it amount to a difference in kind? One can maintain the difference is only one of degree – although one can hardly expect the wrongdoers of antiquity who perished in the Deluge to agree. One can also say that whatever different angles different individuals may have, rain is still rain, and scientific definition will lead to precise results.

  But this is not true. There is nothing magic about science and in particular nothing magic about methods which claim to be scientific. Different sciences may reach different results even when dealing with the very same case. Legal insanity, for instance, is very different from medical insanity. Physicians may diagnose a man as sick; judges may treat him as a criminal. Medically he may be an invalid; legally he may go to prison for life or, in some countries, he will be hanged.

  Similarly, one of the several difficulties about humour is that people approached it from several angles. Aristotle looked at it from an aesthetic point of view, Bergson as a philosopher and Freud as a psychologist. It is the story of rain, all over again.

  You may know many things about humour; you may use it with deadly or uproarious effect; you may enjoy it or earn your bread with it; you may classify it into comedy, wit, joke, satire, irony, mimicry and so on almost indefinitely and you may discover penetrating truths about it. But you still do not know what it is. Similarly, physicists can produce electricity; they know all about it; with its help they can travel in the air, on land or on the water; they can dig tunnels, remove mountains, transmit messages over thousands of miles; they may reach the moon and build miraculous computers; they can lighten our darkness and cure the sick with it; but they do not know what electricity is.

  Let us, then, try another approach and seek an answer by way of elimination: what humour is not?

  The more famous treatises on the
subject we read, the nearer we come to our aim. Indeed, the most reliable general definition of humour would be: humour is not what the great minds of humanity have said it was.

  Bergson’s book on Laughter is excellent reading – much better than its summaries. It is full of diversions and the diversions are the best part of it: funny, witty, often brilliant. What he has to say on the main subject, however, is occasionally downright silly.

  Bergson’s main ideas are elasticity, adaptability and the élan vital. The opposite of these, inelasticity and rigidity, are laughable, indeed one definition of the laughable is ‘something mechanical encrusted upon the living’. That means, as Arthur Koestler pointed out, that the funniest things in the world according to Bergson are the automaton, and the puppet on a string, the Jack-in-a-box, etc. Koestler said, in effect, that if Bergson was right, Egyptian statues, Byzantine mosaics, epileptic fits, even other people’s heartbeats would turn our lives into perpetual merriment.

  Bergson goes on to analyse all varieties of humour, and to find that there is an element of inelasticity in everything that is funny. This is an intellectual exercise and people of my generation, used to watching Marxist ideologists performing on the flying – or lying – trapeze, explaining that poverty is riches, compulsory silence is freedom of speech and oppression is liberty find nothing extraordinary in it. Many of us have learnt the trick. Give us an attractive-sounding, apparently clever idea and we will apply it to anything. It is an easy exercise and Bergson does it brilliantly. In the course of his reasoning we find statements such as: all clothes are intrinsically ridiculous. Happy is the man who looks at his socks in the morning and is cheered up for the rest of the day. He also finds physical deformity funny, if it can be successfully imitated. A hunchback resembles a man who holds himself badly, so he is funny. A black man is also funny because he looks as if he has covered his face with soot. Bergson asks us: why do we laugh at a head of hair which has changed from dark to blonde? But do we? Personally I don’t. What, he demands, is comic about a rubicund nose? Nothing, if he asks me. Why do we laugh at a public speaker who sneezes at a crucial point of his speech? Where lies the comic element in a quotation from a funeral oration: ‘He was virtuous and plump’? It lies, Bergson explains, in the fact that our attention is suddenly called from the soul to the body. Any incident, we are told, is comic, if it calls attention to a person’s physical qualities, when it is the moral side that really concerns us.

  This is utter balderdash and offensive balderdash into the bargain. Physical deformity is not funny under any circumstances, however easily it can be imitated. It is no good trying to fathom why a black man looks funny. He does not look funnier than a white man or a Chinese and I know several people who went to Amin’s Uganda, which is full of black people, and failed to roar with laughter even once, from dawn to dusk.

  He also says: an individual is comic who goes his own way without troubling himself to get into touch with his fellow beings. ‘It is the part of laughter to reprove his absent-mindedness and wake him out of his dream.’ There may be a great deal of truth in the suggestion that some of the great comic characters, like Don Quixote, were not adjusted to reality. But this is not to say that all of them are unadjusted, from the women in Lysistrata to Bertie Wooster. And why bring absent-mindedness into it? Surely, absent-mindedness is not an indispensable element of humour, except in those overworked professor jokes. Don Quixote may have been maladjusted; he was not absent-minded.

  Bergson’s worst failure begins with his doctrine that laughter is always corrective, intended to humiliate. So far so good; the aggressive, often cruel, nature of laughter is not in doubt. But the deduction he makes from this assumption is that as a result of this it is impossible to laugh at oneself. Whereas it is indeed not only possible, but – for the very survival of the human race – it is necessary. A sense of humour – and I shall return to this theme – begins with one’s ability to laugh at oneself.

  It might be said in Bergson’s defence that his idea that deformity and Negroes are hilarious is out of date. But he was a twentieth century author – he died during World War II – and he has little excuse for being considerably more out of date than Aristotle.

  Freud in his discussion of humour declares that an important element is economy: a thesis which I view with doubt. He gives us various jokes in his book: ‘The girl reminds me of Dreyfus. The army doesn’t believe in her innocence.’ This may be the funniest way of calling a woman a whore but not, surely, the most economical? He tells us about two American businessmen of doubtful honesty who had their portraits painted. When a famous critic saw the two of them hanging side by side, all he said was: ‘Where is the Saviour?’ It was a witty way of calling the two gentlemen thieves, but was it an economical one?

  Freud says that not all wit is aggressive and he distinguishes between harmless and tendentious wit. Harmless wit gives simple pleasure, tendentious wit a further pleasure, that of aggression and humiliation. In tendentious Freud has made a mistake here; all wit is aggressive, even the so-called harmless wit, when closely examined.

  Freud also tells us that a joke is the most social of all the mental functions that aim at yielding pleasure. A joke, he says, often calls for three persons and the completion of a joke often requires the participation of someone else. Jokes and dreams – he goes on – have grown up in quite different regions of mental life. A dream still remains a wish; a joke is developed play. Dreams retain their connection with the major interests of life; jokes aim at a small yield of pleasure. Dreams serve predominantly for the avoidance of pain or distress; jokes for the attainment of pleasure. But all our mental activity converges on these two aims.

  When the poor humorist is determined to learn something from a philosopher – to learn how to make a joke – he finds himself in deep waters. He feels like crying and running away.

  Koestler in his Act of Creation draws two diagrams with zig-zagging lines and explains the whole thing in words: ‘The pattern underlying both stories is the perceiving of a situation or idea L, in two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference, M1 and M2. The event L, in which the two intersect, is made to vibrate simultaneously on two different wave-lengths, as it were. While this situation lasts, L is not merely linked to one associative context, but bisociated with two.’

  Am I quoting out of context? Yes. Is this unfair? Certainly. But quoted in context, with absolute fairness, it will not come any nearer helping you to make a rattling good joke.

  Max Eastman, in the Enjoyment of Laughter, draws another terrifying graph which is just as helpful as Koestler’s. Koestler, however, raises humour to a new pedestal. According to him the jester is the brother of the scientist and the artist. Comic comparison – humour – is intended to make us laugh; objective analogy – science – to make us understand; poetic image – art – to make us marvel. Creative activity – he goes on to say – is trivalent: it can enter the service of humour, discovery or art. Or put it differently: one branch of the creative activity is humour. The jester is the brother of the sage, perhaps a sage himself. We must be grateful to Koestler for the accolade.

  One of the most recent English writers to deal with this question was Harold Nicolson.* He does not fare any better with definitions than his predecessors. He distinguishes between grim humour, kindly humour, wry humour, pretty humour, sardonic humour, macabre humour and gay humour (using the word in its old sense). But all this is no definition of humour at all. You would not try to define the notion of hat by telling us that there are caps, top-hats, bowlers, panamas, bonnets, fezes, helmets, shakos and topees. Undoubtedly there are; but even a longer and more complete list would leave us uninformed as to what a hat is.

  But Nicolson tries, in fact, to do a little better than that. He throws together a number of well-known theories on humour, hoping that four theories will tell us more than just one. They do when they complement one another; they tell us less when they contradict one another. He says that there
are four theories of laughter (there are, of course, 144 theories of laughter but let us deal with his four). 1. The Theory of Self Esteem. 2. The Theory of Descending Incongruity. 3. The Theory of Release from Constraint and 4. The Theory of Automation as opposed to Free Activity.

  The theory of self-esteem is based on Hobbes’s famous dictum on ‘sudden glory’. It says: ‘… the passion of laughter is nothing else but sudden glory, arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.’

  One sub-group of this type of laughter is schadenfreude, the sheer enjoyment of the misery of others. Nicolson is very proud of the fact that the word schadenfreude does not exist in English but I cannot decide whether this proves the nobility of the English character or the poverty of the English language.

  La Rochefoucauld agrees with Hobbes, when he remarks that ‘in the misfortunes of our friends there is always something that pleases us.’

  Harold Nicolson’s second category is ‘the descending incongruity’ which is Herbert Spencer’s phrase. You may wonder what descending incongruity means and when you are told it occurs ‘when consciousness is unawares transferred from great things to small’, you may go on wondering. It never works the other way round, we are warned. Spencer and Nicolson throw some light on all this: for example, when people make elaborate preparations for fireworks, guests are protected from danger etc, and then there is no glorious and colourful display in the sky, just a faint and feeble sputter, that causes general laughter. When Spencer says that the theory does not work the other way round, he is probably right. When there is a sudden explosion, without any fussy preparations, which kills twenty-seven people and injures another fifty-two, this does not cause general merriment.