English Humour for Beginners

by George Mikes

  I quote the next two from memory:

  An Argentine gaucho called Bruno

  Said: ‘I know everything you know.

  A girl is fine,

  A boy is divine,

  But a llama is Numero Uno.’

  Or one which is not really dirty, just naughty:

  There was a young girl from Cape Cod,

  Who thought babies were coming from God.

  But it wasn’t Almighty

  Who lifted her nighty:

  It was Roger, the lodger, the sod.

  The great fashion for limericks was initiated by Edward Lear. His Book of Nonsense contains many but I feel they are not among his best creations. The main trouble is that Lear’s fifth line is usually a repetition (occasionally with slight variation) of the first and rarely adds anything to the joke. More often it is a point which does not come off. Lear’s nonsense poetry is often meaningful and even profound, his limericks are more often than not just plain silly, no more than a grotesque literary grimace. There is nothing wrong, of course, with silliness or with literary grimaces but they belong to a different category from, say, the Owl and the Pussycat.

  There was an old person of Annerly

  Whose conduct was strange and unmannerly.

  He rushed down the strand

  With a pig in each hand

  But returned in the evening to Annerly.

  The last line here varies more than usual. So the example is not really an example. Or rather it is a typical example of examples: it does not prove the point. A more typical one:

  There was an Old Man with a nose,

  Who said, ‘If you choose to suppose,

  That my nose is too long,

  You are certainly wrong!’

  That remarkable Man with a nose.

  There was an Old Man with a beard,

  Who said, ‘It is just as I feared! –

  Two Owls and a Hen,

  Four Larks and a Wren,

  Have all built their nests in my beard!’

  The Encyclopaedia Britannica remarks: ‘Limericks have been composed upon every conceivable topic not excluding philosophy and religion.’ And gives this example:

  There was a young man who said ‘Damn!

  It is borne upon me that I am

  An engine which moves

  In predestined grooves,

  I’m not even a bus; I’m a tram.’

  The third and last great age and flourishing of the limerick (although it survives and is quite popular even today) was at the beginning of the century when there was a craze for limerick competitions, with newspapers offering huge prizes for clever ones and particularly for brilliant last lines (perhaps a reaction to Lear’s dull and repetitive last lines). The crop produced very few memorable pieces. E. V. K. remarks in the Britannica article: ‘The judges in these competitions must have had poor ears, for scarcely any of the winning lines contained the correct number of feet.’

  The clerihew is a modest cousin of the limerick but its origin is known perfectly well. It was invented and cultivated by E. Clerihew Bentley who was not only a well-known novelist but also the father of Nicolas Bentley, my recently dead and much lamented friend and the illustrator of many of my books. He also illustrated some of his father’s clerihews – but not the ones published here.

  The people of Spain think Cervantes

  Equal to half-a-dozen Dantes:

  An opinion resented most bitterly

  By the people of Italy.

  Sir Humphry Davy

  Detested gravy.

  He lived in the odium

  Of having discovered Sodium.

  Karl Marx

  Was completely wrapped up in his sharks.

  The poor creatures seriously missed him

  While he was attacking the capitalist system.

  And the most famous of all:

  The Art of Biography

  Is different from Geography.

  Geography is about Maps,

  But Biography is about Chaps.

  The Wittiest Englishman?

  ‘A second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience’, said a young girl I knew, soon after my arrival in England. I was struck by the wit and the perfect, concise wording of the remark and said so.

  ‘Oh, that’s not by me,’ she replied with a modest smile, ‘it’s by Dr Johnson.’

  Now who was Dr Johnson? I had no idea. I was certainly no scholar of English literature but neither was I quite ignorant. I felt, from the way she mentioned him, that I ought to have known who Dr Johnson was. But I did not. My case was typical. Dr Johnson’s name is often unknown to well-read Continentals who know all about the Brontës, Jane Austen, James Joyce, let alone Shakespeare and Shaw. The probable explanation is the fact that Dr Johnson was a greater talker than writer. His Dictionary of the English Language was a great achievement of lasting value; the Lives of the Poets and his Journey to the Western Islands are excellent, even if often pompous and ponderous, works; but he lives through his conversations. His luck – if to become immortal is luck and to be forgotten is not to be preferred – was to meet James Boswell, a man with an insatiable intellectual and, so to say, social appetite and gifted with a fabulous, tape-recording memory for conversations, which he put down in several volumes. He recorded the conversations of others, too; and other people sometimes recorded Johnson. The company he kept included many of the age’s cleverest and most interesting men, and to listen to them was a great privilege. Dr Johnson had firm views on every subject under the sun, whether he knew something about it or not. But it did not really matter; even when he was talking rot it was brilliant rot. His views were always original; he expressed them with a few well-chosen words; his vocabulary – as befits a lexicographer – was rich and varied. His style of shooting was so impressive that it hardly mattered whether he hit the target or missed it.

  Even if his name is not too well known on the Continent, at least one of his remarks is universally quoted: ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel’. In a rather similar vein are the following reflections on the realities of warfare:

  The life of a modern soldier is ill represented by heroick fiction. War has means of destruction more formidable than the cannon and the sword. Of the thousands and ten thousands, that perished in our late contests with France and Spain, a very small part ever felt the stroke of an enemy; the rest languished in tents and ships, amidst damps and putrefaction; pale, torpid, spiritless, and helpless; gasping and groaning, unpitied among men, made obdurate by long continuance of hopeless misery, and whelmed in pits, or heaved into the ocean, without notice and without remembrance. By incommodious encampments and unwholesome stations, where courage is useless, and enterprise unpracticable, fleets are silently dispeopled, and armies sluggishly melted away.

  He enjoyed making fun of the Scots whom he disliked and even despised. A Scotsman once remonstrated with him and observed that ‘Scotland had a great many noble prospects.’

  Johnson replied: ‘Sir, you have a great many. Norway, too, has noble wild prospects; and Lapland is remarkable for prodigious noble wild prospects. But, Sir, let me tell you, the noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England.’

  ‘The noblest prospect which a Scotchman ever sees is the high road that leads him to England.’

  The flavour of his conversation may be best enjoyed if one reads a bit of continuous dialogue, with arguments and repartees.

  He talked disparagingly of the work of Churchill, a celebrated poet of his times:

  JOHNSON: It has a temporary currency only from its audacity of abuse, and being filled with living names, and it will sink into oblivion.

  BOSWELL: You are hardly a fair judge, Sir; for Churchill has attacked you violently.

  JOHNSON: Nay, Sir, I am a very fair judge. He did not attack me violently till he found I did not like his poetry; and his attack on me shall not prevent me from continuing to say what I think of him, from an apprehensio
n that it may be ascribed to resentment. No, Sir; I called the fellow a blockhead at first, and I will call him a blockhead still. However, I will acknowledge that I have a better opinion of him now than I once had; for he has shown more fertility than I expected. To be sure, he is a tree that cannot produce good fruit; he only bears crabs. But, Sir, a tree that produces a great many crabs is better than a tree which produces only a few.

  Or take this not too convincing but very original defence of Christian truth. He, a firm believer, was talking of people who denied the truth of Christianity.

  It is always easy to be on the negative side. If a man were now to deny that there is salt upon the table, you could not reduce him to an absurdity. Come, let us try this a little farther. I deny that Canada is taken, and I can support my denial by pretty good arguments. The French are a much more numerous people than we; and it is not likely that they would allow us to take it. ‘But the ministry have assured us, in all the formality of the Gazette, that it is taken.’ – Very true. But the ministry have put us to an enormous expense by war in America, and it is in their interest to persuade us that we have got something for our money. ‘But the fact is confirmed by thousands of men who were at the taking of it.’ – Ay, but these men have still more interest in deceiving us. They don’t want that you should think the French have beat them, but that they have beat the French. Now, suppose you should go over and find that it really is taken, that would only satisfy yourself: for when you come home we will not believe you. We will say, you have been bribed. – Yet, Sir, notwithstanding all these plausible objections, we have no doubt that Canada is really ours. Such is the weight of common testimony. How much stronger are the evidences of the Christian religion?

  But he did not approve all the aspects of devotion and piety. The talk was on religious orders.

  It is as unreasonable for a man to go into a Carthusian convent for fear of being immoral, as for a man to cut off his hands for fear he should steal. There is, indeed, great resolution in the immediate act of dismembering himself: but when that is once done, he has no longer any merit; for though it is out of his power to steal, yet he may all his life be a thief in his heart. All severity that does not tend to increase good, or prevent evil, is absurd. I said to the Lady Abbess of a convent, ‘Madam, you are here, not for the love of virtue, but the fear of vice.’ She said, ‘I shall remember this as long as I live.’

  He could be very wise, even if somewhat unconventional, on love and marriage.

  Talking of Mrs Careless, Johnson said: ‘If I had married her, it might have been as happy for me.’ – BOSWELL: ‘Pray, Sir, do you not suppose that there are fifty women in the world, with any one of whom a man may be as happy as with any one woman in particular?’ – JOHNSON: ‘Ay, Sir, fifty thousand.’ – BOSWELL: ‘Then, Sir, you are not of opinion with some who imagine that certain men and certain women are made for each other; and that they cannot be happy if they miss their counterparts.’ – JOHNSON: ‘To be sure not. Sir, I believe marriages would in general be as happy, and often more so, if they were all made by the Lord Chancellor, upon a due consideration of the characters and circumstances, without the parties having any choice in the matter.’

  Today he would speak of a computer instead of the Lord Chancellor. And today he would be called a male chauvinist pig. Or perhaps not. Even the greatest men are products of their age and environment and today, probably, he would hold different views from his views of two hundred years ago. One day in 1763 Boswell told Johnson that he had been at a Quaker meeting and had heard a woman preach.

  Johnson’s comment was: ‘Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.’

  Many people think Dr Johnson was the wittiest Englishman who ever lived. Others vote for Oscar Wilde – except, of course, that he was Irish, like that other great wit Bernard Shaw. Many of Wilde’s aphorisms reflect an obvious desire to shine and were uttered pour épater le bourgeois. The formula is terribly out of date today. But fashions do change, and the paradox – never dead – will come back into vogue.

  What’s wrong with his assessment: ‘The justification of a character in a novel is not that other persons are what they are, but that the author is what he is. Otherwise the novel is not a work of art.’

  Or: ‘Most of our modern portrait painters are doomed to absolute oblivion. They never paint what they see. They paint what the public sees, and the public never sees anything.’

  On religious belief: ‘The growth of common sense in the English Church is a thing very much to be regretted. It is really a degrading concession to a low form of realism. It is silly, too. It springs from an entire ignorance of psychology. Man can believe the impossible but man can never believe the improbable.’

  And a last remark by Wilde: ‘Formerly we used to canonize our heroes. The modern method is to vulgarize them. Cheap editions of great books may be delightful, but cheap editions of great men are absolutely detestable … Every great man nowadays has his disciples but it is always Judas who writes the biography.’

  I could add many other witticisms by many other writers: Shaw, Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, Stephen Potter, Somerset Maugham – the list is very long and I like to keep my books rather short, so I shall resist temptation … except for two little poems by Chesterton, a letter of Belloc’s which throws an interesting light on his Cautionary Tales, and (pure self-indulgence, this) one of T. S. Eliot’s delightful poems from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats; all of which come at the end of this chapter.

  To conclude these thoughts on the wittiest Englishman, I must declare a bias for my one and only hero who is more often thought of in his other roles: Winston Churchill. A. P. Herbert said of him as a humorist: ‘If he had done nothing else, he could and would have made himself famous in this way alone,’ and I agree. And I do not think that my hero-worship makes me lose my critical faculty vis-à-vis Churchill: he deserves our admiration.

  Herbert also said that a mere procession of witticisms in print may give a sense of inhumanity, like ‘a lot of men marching past in “comic opera” uniforms’, and this is true. No great man should be represented as a machine churning out witty remarks, and this would be particularly unjust to Churchill who was very human, cruel and compassionate, vindictive and generously forgiving, petty and magnanimous. After the war – he had just been ousted from the premiership – he met a Labour Member, Richard Stokes, in the smoking room of the House of Commons. Stokes had attacked him on many occasions during the war, asking penetrating, awkward and aggressive questions. Churchill put his hand on Stokes’ shoulder: ‘Of course I’ve forgiven you. Such hatred as I have – and it isn’t much – I would rather reserve for the future than the past.’ He moved on but turned back and spoke again the inimitable Churchillian words with the famous chuckle: ‘A judicious and thrifty disposal of bile.’

  He was not always so charitable. He could pretty well massacre a person with a remark. Of the meek-mannered and supposedly soft Attlee, who replaced him in 1945, he remarked: ‘A sheep in sheep’s clothing.’

  His encounters with Lady Astor, in the thirties, are also famous. After some bitter exchanges in the House, Churchill – then a backbencher, in the wilderness – was standing in the lobby with a few cronies of his when Lady Astor was passing. Churchill stepped forward and told her: ‘You are ugly.’

  She was somewhat taken aback by this ungentlemanly remark and retorted: ‘And you are drunk.’

  Churchill nodded: ‘True. But by tomorrow morning I shall be sober.’

  After another acrimonious exchange, Lady Astor jumped to her feet in the Chamber and shouted: ‘If the Rt Hon Gentleman were my husband I’d put poison in his tea.’

  To which Churchill replied: ‘If the Hon Lady were my wife, I would drink it.’

  All this was – it had to be – spontaneous. Most of us can think of effective, occasionally even brilliant, repartees on the staircase as we leave some enc
ounter, or an hour, a day, a week, a month later. When I was still a law student in Budapest someone offended and humiliated me deeply. His insult rankled and tormented me for years and years. Hardly a week passed without my recalling that scene with a great feeling of shame and a sense of defeat, and I thought this bitter, tormenting feeling would accompany me throughout my life. But twenty-two years later, in London, quite suddenly, I thought of a devastating reply. I laughed aloud with joy, although I was alone in the street. I repeated it several times, with great gusto. That will teach the bastard a lesson. The matter was settled; I was cured. The point is that to think of a devastating reply even twenty-two years later has its therapeutic and soothing effect; but to be able to jump to your feet in the House and give an instantaneous reply, in the hearing of the House, the country – indeed, thanks to Hansard, to proclaim it into eternity – must be the most satisfying feeling in the world.

  Churchill’s genius permitted him to make jokes on the most solemn and grandiose occasions. Addressing the Canadian Parliament at a dark hour of the war, he was referring to Hitler’s threat of wringing Britain’s neck like a chicken’s. He paused. Everyone expected a defiant ‘sweat-and-blood’ reply, or a quotation from Byron or Housman. What he said, in a slightly changed tone, was: ‘Some chicken; some neck.’ This is not a witty joke. It is, in fact, a cheap music-hall joke. But uttered on that occasion, preceded and followed by solemn and world-shaking statements, it created a happy, liberating effect on a tense audience. It was masterly. The words in themselves are nothing; but those words, on that occasion spoken by that man, have become immortal.

  A. P. Herbert describes another, equally solemn and, for Churchill, potentially even more dangerous occasion.* It happened during the no-confidence debate in 1942, after a series of shattering British defeats when a small but important ‘Churchill must go!’ movement became vociferous. The motion was: ‘The House has no confidence in the central direction of the war.’ Churchill was making his final speech on which his fate depended. Half-way through Hore-Belisha interrupted him: ‘What about the Churchill tank?’