English Humour for Beginners

by George Mikes

  The rule is that the victim of this sort of adolescent sadism has to accept the joke good-humouredly, otherwise he is regarded as a bore, with no sense of humour. If he loses his temper, he becomes even more ridiculous. The only accepted way of retaliation or revenge is by means of another, even crueller, practical joke.

  Now consider a few examples of verbal wit. W. S. Gilbert, many years after Wagner’s death, was asked at a party by a lady with high-brow pretensions: ‘Tell me, Mr Gilbert, is dear old Richard Wagner still composing?’ ‘No, Madam,’ replied Gilbert, ‘actually he is decomposing.’

  Then there is the famous quip: ‘Psychoanalysis is the disease it pretends to cure,’ or Wilde’s celebrated remarks about a famous novelist: ‘Ah, Meredith! Who can define him? His style is chaos illuminated by flashes of lightning. As a writer he has mastered everything, except language; as a novelist he can do everything, except tell a story.’ Or Wilde again, having been informed that Osgood, the go-ahead publisher who advertised the fact that all his books were published simultaneously in London and New York, had died. ‘He is a great loss to us. I suppose they will bury him simultaneously in London and New York.’

  Each of these witticisms fills us with the desire: ‘I wish I’d said it.’ (Even Wilde felt this irresistible desire and once, when applauding one of Whistler’s witticisms, he, too, exclaimed: ‘I wish I had said that.’ Whistler replied: ‘You will, Oscar, you will.’) But whatever their charm, all of them are offensive, aimed against a victim and designed to establish the wit’s superiority over him.

  Wit comes easily, even compulsively – to many people. It can become a way of life in some circles, in literary groups, in Central European cafés. It is bellum omnium contra omnes, very much with the survival of the fittest. The wit’s aim is murder. Everyone is fair game. The witticism is a thinly disguised insult, you can either retaliate on the same level or you have to grin as if you enjoyed it. But when this ruthless blood-sport is confined within a particular set of people it is not altogether unfair. Members of the circle know what to expect and, in any case, the jokes soon become repetitive, follow a pattern and become boring – although the players cannot desist; it is their way of life. The whole thing becomes altogether cruel (and usually more amusing in its horror) when the hunter happens on an outsider, an innocent and completely unprepared victim, who becomes embarrassed, has no idea how to take it and is inclined to break down in tears.

  ‘The wit … is hostile, often with a skilful, artful, highly developed, sophisticated meanness and viciousness,’ says Dr Grotjahn, and he compares him to a man who plays with sparks but never lights a warming fire. He thinks that the wit’s irresistible tendency to make witty remarks ‘is his way of releasing his hostility. Without it, he probably would blow his top or get a migraine attack.’

  The cynic is a special type of wit: he is not just a ‘distressing fault-finder’ as one dictionary defines him. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary is much better: The cynic ‘is one disposed to decry and sneer at the sincerity or goodness of human motives or actions’. This refusal to believe in human goodness is an essential factor in the cynic – whose name, by the way, comes from an ancient school of philosophy which took it, in turn, from the Greek word for ‘dog’ (kuon) because of their manners. The cynic either pulls down something lofty and noble to an everyday level, or sees the mean motive behind the noble act.

  A favourite slogan of German propaganda in two World Wars: ‘The British will fight to the last gasp of the last Frenchman.’ Or Wilde: ‘If a man is too unimaginative to produce evidence in support of a lie, he might as well speak the truth at once.’ An oft-heard comment on the United States: ‘What a great country God could make the United States – if only he had the money.’ Or Wilde again, on the infinite goodness of the Almighty: ‘Don’t you realize that missionaries are the divinely provided food of cannibals? Whenever they are on the brink of starvation, heaven, in its infinite mercy, sends them a nice, plump missionary.’ The cynic makes fun of death; or he jokes about the downright horrible. Cynicism keeps tears away, which is why soldiers joke about impending battles, or ambulance men – otherwise not given to cynicism – about road casualties. Medical students joke during anatomy lessons, surrounded by corpses and dismembered limbs.

  Jokes about death and horror all tend to show that the cynic is tough; that he can take it; that he is not afraid of things that worry the rest of us. But, of course, he is even more afraid; he is permanently preoccupied with the fear that he is joking about. Cynicism always has an element of cowardice in it. It is rarely the convinced atheist who tells cynical jokes about God or calls him by insulting names, but the agnostic who is afraid that God may, after all, exist and punish him. It is always the man who is afraid of, or preoccupied with, death who jokes about it. The cynical joke is an attempt to tame a powerful opponent. The cynic tries to get on familiar terms with Death, or God, or Cancer, tries to make Death his chum, just a chap standing around the bar enjoying half a bitter in his company, an amiable fellow, Death; surely, he will not harm me? This is one way of taming death, of making it look less frightful.

  Cynical remarks, naturally enough, often hurt people. Religious people (particularly if deep down in their hearts they have doubts) resent dirty jokes about God; devoted monarchists (especially when they feel some lingering uneasiness lest the Queen be, after all, just an ordinary human being) resent jokes about the Sovereign, etc. Everybody has a borderline beyond which he will cease to see the joke and will protest and walk out in disgust. No one likes to do this, as the cynic is accepted as a sophisticated person and he will always try to show up the critic who resents his jokes as an unsophisticated boor. Yet there is a limit to everybody’s tolerance.

  Satire, too, is aggressive, a way of humiliating others and establishing the satirist’s superiority. Even if the satirist does not state that he could do better, sitting in judgement on others always implies superiority. But here another element must also be taken into consideration: who and what are the targets of satire?

  The satirist is often a journalist or pamphleteer whose only weapon is his pen with which he fights kings, tyrants and obnoxious political regimes. Whether we agree with him or not, he deserves our admiration because of his courage. But what about the Stuermer, a German satirical weekly? The Stuermer’s butt was the Jews, who were then being sent to the gas ovens. And in Russia newspaper satirists used to do a lot of jeering at the Kulaks who were being executed in their millions (a kulak in those days was any person disliked by the regime). I once heard (indirectly) some jokes a hangman had told about men he had hanged.

  When we talk about sneering, sarcasm and jeering, we do not really mean that the joke, as a joke, is bad but only that it outrages our moral instinct so much that we refuse to examine its power to amuse. A sneer or a jeer is a satirical joke we disagree with; satire or irony is the type of jeering and sneer we approve of.

  Satire, in addition to its aggressive content, has a strong moral content, and no decent and civilized man can laugh at jokes aimed at people who cannot hit back. The satirist who hits at the mighty and powerful is a hero; the satirist who hits at the man who is down, is a cad.

  Humour is aggressive and always aggressive. There is no such thing as non-aggressive humour. Nonsense! you may reply. What about sex jokes, for example? Obscene jokes are a form of sexual aggression. Sometimes the most aggressively worded jokes contain more understanding, even affection, than the seemingly milder ones, yet they remain aggressive. (A woman was dug out of the ruins of her house during the blitz of London, having spent hours in the debris. Someone asked her: ‘Where’s your husband?’ She replied: ‘Fighting in Libya – the bloody coward.’) Perhaps it is nonsense jokes which seem to come nearest to being non-aggressive. Two chaps meet. One says to the other: ‘Didn’t we meet in Newcastle, years ago?’ The other shakes his head: ‘Never been to Newcastle in my life.’ ‘Neither have I,’ says the first chap and then adds reflectively: ‘Must have been two other fel
lows.’ Who is the butt of this joke? – one may ask. The first chap? The second? Well, who? Nonsense humour is more purely aggressive than that: it is an act of rebellion against reason, against the established order. Thus nonsense humour, with its modest and charming smile, is more aggressive, indeed destructive, than any other kind of humour.

  We might as well add to all this that the kidder, the teaser, the wit, the cynic, the satirist and even to some extent the practitioner of the sneer and the jeer, are all trying to find a permissible outlet for their aggression.

  Aggressiveness in humour is a general phenomenon; cruelty in humour is more specifically English. What’s the difference between aggressiveness and cruelty? The aggressive man wants to hurt, often for good or at least subjectively valid reasons; the cruel man is indifferent to the suffering of others – or else takes special delight in it.

  Peasant humour or childish humour is cruel everywhere. I once told a story to my son, when he was very young, which I made up as I went on. We – he and I – were caught by Red Indians who threatened to eat us up. The cauldrons were already prepared and the water boiling when, quite unexpectedly and in the nick of time, we were rescued. When I finished, my son said: ‘Now tell me that story again, but in the end they should save only me and the Red Indians should eat you up.’ At a certain level of culture and sophistication – or growing up – cruelty fades out in most of us. But not in England. English humour may be, and often is, witty and erudite, yet it revels in cruelty.

  The first nursery rhyme British children learn is about Humpty-Dumpty who sat on a wall, had a great fall and the result is that all the king’s horses and all the king’s men will not put Humpty-Dumpty together again. I do not suggest that Humpty-Dumpty and similar nursery rhymes turn children into bloodthirsty monsters; all I say is that English children start to learn laughing at great falls and disasters at an early age.

  One of the most often quoted examples of English literary cruelty is Swift’s Modest Proposal. But Swift was not English – in fact, according to Stephen Potter he was extremely un-English – and the piece is not cruel at all. There are too many beggar boys in Ireland, says Swift, and it would be desirable to find a fair, cheap and easy method of making these children sound and useful members of the commonwealth. And why stick to children of beggars when there are too many poor children in the kingdom, everywhere? Swift’s solution is a simple one: ‘I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London that a young, healthy Child well Nursed is at a year Old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome Food, whether Stewed, Roasted, Baked or Boyled and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a Fricasce, or a Ragoust.’

  He goes on in this vein. ‘… the remaining hundred thousand [children] may at a year Old be offered in sale to persons of Quality, and Fortune, through the Kingdom, always advising the Mother to let them Suck plentifully in the last Month, so as to render them Plump and Fat for a good Table. A Child will make two Dishes at an Entertainment for Friends, and when the Family dines alone, the fore or the hind Quarter will make a reasonable Dish, and seasoned with a little Pepper or Salt will be very good Boiled on the fourth Day, especially in Winter.’

  This is not cruelty but very good satire. His red-hot anger and ice-cold contempt for a society which condemns children to death through poverty comes clearly through.

  ‘I Profess in the sincerity of my Heart that I have not the least personal interest in endeavouring to promote this necessary work having no other Motive than the publick Good of my Country, by advancing our Trade, providing for Infants, relieving the Poor, and giving some Pleasure to the Rich. I have no Children, by which I can propose to get a single Penny; the youngest being nine Years old, and my wife past Childbearing.’

  Edward Lear is one of my great favourites. Harold Nicolson writes about him: ‘The mortality among Lear’s characters, although fortunately the majority of them were of foreign origin, is high. A girl of Smyrna is burnt to death (or almost burnt to death) by her own grandmother; a Norwegian girl is crushed in a door; a Czechoslovak citizen* contracts the plague; a Peruvian is thrust into a stove by his wife and a similar fate overcomes a Prussian; an inhabitant of Cromer falls off a cliff and a citizen of Calcutta is choked to death; an unnamed oriental dies of remorse observing the gluttony of his children; a maiden at Janina has her head blown off; an old lady at Stroud commits mass murder; and two citizens, respectively of Ems and Cadiz meet their death by drowning.’

  W. S. Gilbert is another writer I love and admire. Often, in many operettas, he laughs at old age and feebleness; torture, executions, beating and boiling people in oil are sources of constant merriment. Just a few examples: The Mikado is full of these jocular references to death, execution and torture. The hero is the Lord High Executioner, the Mikado himself sings his justly famous and witty song about his determination ‘to let the punishment fit the crime’. All this is harmless enough but even that song contains lines like this:

  It is my very humane endeavour

  To make to some extent,

  Each evil liver

  A running river

  Of harmless merriment.

  I know it is ‘all a joke’ but people’s jokes are revealing. Dostoevsky, Kafka, Koestler and Solzhenitsyn have described incomparably greater horrors than the Mikado but the reader never feels that they are on the side of the torturers, that they laugh with the executioners at their victims and that they regard these matters as harmless merriment. One can say, of course, that Gilbert in fact castigates the Mikado’s cruelty; but this is not so: he thinks it is funny. Dickens and Bernard Shaw could be as funny as any other writer but they never laughed at the weak, the downtrodden, the sufferer. The Mikado mentions a torture which is ‘something lingering, with boiling oil in it’; H. M. S. Pinafore contains many jolly references to the cat-o’-nine-tails; and even The Gondoliers – that feather-like, romantic tale – contains quite a few hints to the old nursemaid’s memory being refreshed in the torture-chamber of the Inquisition. Gilbert’s constant references to ageing women who ought to be thrown on the dust-heap are also numerous and well-known.

  Evelyn Waugh also comes to mind. A great writer, a much less attractive human being. It is hard to decide whether one should find his cruelty or his snobbery more appalling – but we are discussing cruelty now. I could quote a number of examples from his novels but the one remark I most vividly recall comes from his Diaries. During the war, at the time of the London blitz he took his rare books down to the safety of his country house but sent his children up to the dangers of London. He thought that some people might think this decision strange, but explained that children were replaceable, rare books were not. (Which is not even true. Rare books are not unique, only rare, so they are replaceable; unique human beings are not.)

  His son Auberon Waugh, while not replaceable, replaces his father to some extent. He is witty and often brilliant but – perhaps not surprisingly from a man whom his father valued less than his rare books – he is far too given to sneering and jeering. He often makes fun of old age, even of middle age, and of people who do not belong to the so-called upper classes – as if he himself were not hopelessly middle-class, and even more hopelessly middle-aged, with a balding head.

  Voltaire was at least as witty as the whole Waugh family put together and yet how much more noble and beautiful are his views on old age:

  On meurt deux fois, je le vois bien,

  Cesser d’aimer et d’être aimable

  C’est une mort insupportable,

  Cesser de vivre, ce n’est rien …*

  I could continue my examples almost indefinitely but I shall stop here. I only meant to give a few examples. The question is this: if English humour has its nasty, cruel and repulsive elements, does that mean the English are nasty, cruel and repulsive people? Not at all.

  First of all, joking about your phobias – death, old age, disease, torture – is usually not a sign of toughness and cruelty but of weakness and cowardice.r />
  It is enough to spend a week or two in Britain to see that the British are not harsh and cruel people. Even if their virtues – as I have argued – are not what they used to be, cruelty is certainly not among their newly acquired vices. They are, as a nation, kind and courteous, helpful and considerate. In their colonial days they could be blindly selfish but they were rarely cruel. In any case the days of colonialism are over.

  If all this is true, the problem becomes even more puzzling. Why do these gentle and kind people express themselves in a crueller type of humour than other, nastier and crueller societies? The explanation is simple. All peoples have to get rid of a certain amount of nastiness, frustration and hatred, just as a combustion engine must spit out its burnt and stinking waste. Some other people commit murderous and horrible acts; the British get rid of their nastiness in the form of jokes about torturers, murderers, cannibalism and burning young ladies of Smyrna to death then they feel relaxed – also a little cleaner and relieved of tensions. They, too, have found their permissible outlet and can settle down to a life of leisure and to the luxury of decency.

  Political Jokes

  Take two jokes. One English.

  A Tory canvasser called on an old farm labourer to ask for his vote.

  ‘I vote Socialist,’ said the old man, ‘like my father and grandfather before me.’

  ‘On that line of argument,’ replied the canvasser derisively, ‘what would you vote if your father was a fool and his father before him was a fool too?’

  ‘In that case, I’d vote Conservative.’

  And the other joke, coming from Nazi-occupied Norway in the days of the Second World War.