Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  25. There are some increasingly significant exceptions to these privacy rules – see ‘The Print Exception’ and ‘The Internet Exception’ (pages 62 and 64), for example.

  26. I’ll be coming back to the intriguing dissociation between cyberspace and ‘realspace’ and attempting some explanations, later on – see ‘Cyberspace Rules’ in Rules of Play (page 335).

  27. Including Professor Robin Dunbar’s team, and my own SIRC project studying gossip on mobile phones.

  28. Perhaps not surprisingly, some children rebel against this: teenagers in particular may go through a phase of refusing to participate in this ritual and, often, provoking their elders by going to the opposite extreme, where leave-takings consist of shouting, ‘See ya,’ and slamming the door. There does not seem to be a happy medium.

  HUMOUR RULES

  This heading can be read both in the straightforward sense of ‘rules about humour’ and in the (now rather dated) graffiti sense of ‘Humour rules, OK!’ The latter is in fact more appropriate, as the most noticeable and important ‘rule’ about humour in English conversation is its dominance and pervasiveness. Humour rules. Humour governs. Humour is omnipresent and omnipotent. I wasn’t even going to do a separate chapter on humour because I knew that, like class, it permeates every aspect of English life and culture, and would therefore just naturally crop up in different contexts throughout the book. It did, but the trouble with English humour is that it is so pervasive that to convey its role in our lives I would have to mention it in every other paragraph, which would eventually become tedious – so it got its own chapter after all.

  There is an awful lot of guff talked about the English Sense of Humour, including many patriotic attempts to prove that our sense of humour is somehow unique and superior to everyone else’s. Many English people seem to believe that we have some sort of global monopoly, if not on humour itself, then at least on certain ‘brands’ of humour – the high-class ones such as wit and especially irony. My findings indicate that while there may indeed be something distinctive about English humour, the real ‘defining characteristic’ is the value we put on humour, the central importance of humour in English culture and social interactions.

  In other cultures, there is ‘a time and a place’ for humour; it is a special, separate kind of talk. In English conversation, there is always an undercurrent of humour. We can barely manage to say ‘hello’ or comment on the weather without somehow contriving to make a bit of a joke of it, and most English conversations will involve at least some degree of banter, teasing, irony, understatement, humorous self-deprecation, mockery or just silliness. Humour is our ‘default mode’, if you like: we do not have to switch it on deliberately, and we cannot switch it off. For the English, the rules of humour are the cultural equivalent of natural laws – we obey them automatically, rather in the way that we obey the law of gravity.

  THE IMPORTANCE OF NOT BEING EARNEST RULE

  At the most basic level, an underlying rule in all English conversation is the proscription of ‘earnestness’. Although we may not have a monopoly on humour, or even on irony, the English are probably more acutely sensitive than any other nation to the distinction between ‘serious’ and ‘solemn’, between ‘sincerity’ and ‘earnestness’.

  This distinction is crucial to any kind of understanding of Englishness. I cannot emphasise this strongly enough: if you are not able to grasp these subtle but vital differences, you will never understand the English – and even if you speak the language fluently, you will never feel or appear entirely at home in conversation with the English. Your English may be impeccable, but your behavioural ‘grammar’ will be full of glaring errors.

  Once you have become sufficiently sensitised to these distinctions, the Importance of Not Being Earnest rule is really quite simple. Seriousness is acceptable; solemnity is prohibited. Sincerity is allowed; earnestness is strictly forbidden. Pomposity and self-importance are outlawed. Serious matters can be spoken of seriously, but one must never take oneself too seriously. The ability to laugh at ourselves, although it may be rooted in a form of arrogance, or at least complacency, is one of the more endearing characteristics of the English. (At least, I hope I am right about this: if I have overestimated our ability to laugh at ourselves, this book will be rather unpopular.29)

  To take a deliberately extreme example, the kind of hand-on-heart, gushing earnestness and pompous, Bible-thumping solemnity favoured by almost all American politicians30 would never win a single vote in this country. We watch these speeches on our news programmes with a kind of smugly detached amusement, wondering how the cheering crowds can possibly be so credulous as to fall for this sort of nonsense. When we are not feeling smugly amused, we are cringing with vicarious embarrassment: how can these politicians bring themselves to utter such shamefully earnest platitudes, in such ludicrously solemn tones? We expect politicians to speak largely in platitudes, of course – ours are no different in this respect; it is the earnestness that makes us wince.

  The same goes for the gushy, tearful acceptance speeches of American actors at the Oscars and other awards ceremonies, to which English television viewers across the country respond with the same finger-down-throat ‘I’m going to be sick’ gesture. You will rarely see English Oscar-winners indulging in these heart-on-sleeve displays – their speeches tend to be either short and dignified or self-deprecatingly humorous, and even so they nearly always manage to look uncomfortable and embarrassed. Any English thespian who dares to break these unwritten rules, as Kate Winslet has done, is mercilessly ridiculed and condemned in our newspapers and other media. Winslet’s emotional speech at the Golden Globes was described by one British newspaper as enough to ‘make a corpse wince with embarrassment’, for example, and others were even more scornful.

  In fact, most expression of emotion constitutes a breach of the Importance of Not Being Earnest rule. We (SIRC) did a study on the ‘emotional state of the nation’, in which we found a curious mismatch between English attitudes and actual behaviour in this context. While the majority of us (72 per cent) will say that expressing emotion is ‘healthy’, only a minority – less than 20 per cent – had actually expressed any emotion in the previous 24 hours, and 19 per cent could not even remember the last time they had expressed any emotion. (Compare this with our survey on weather-talk, where 56 per cent had talked about the weather within the previous six hours, 38 per cent within the previous hour.) We English have become much better, in recent years, at talking about emotions – everyone has now mastered therapy-jargon, and can talk about ‘emotional intelligence’, the ‘inner child’ and the need to be ‘in touch’ with one’s feelings. But most of us still don’t actually express these feelings very much.

  Americans, although among the easiest to scoff at, are by no means the only targets of our cynical censure. The sentimental patriotism of leaders and the portentous earnestness of writers, artists, actors, musicians, pundits and other public figures of all nations are treated with equal derision and disdain by the English, who can spot the slightest hint of self-importance at twenty paces, even on a grainy television picture and in a language we don’t understand.

  The 7/7 terrorist bombings in London in 2005 – our own mini-9/11, a series of suicide-bomb attacks during the morning rush-hour on the London Underground and on a bus, which killed 56 people and injured 700 – provided some striking illustrations of the Importance of Not Being Earnest rule. On the day of the bombings, some well-meaning Americans started a forum entitled ‘London Hurts’ on the international LiveJournal website, with a banner declaring ‘Today I am A Londoner and Today I Hurt’, and tearful sympathetic messages, poems and prayers began to pour in from around the world. But the swift response from actual Londoners was not quite what the effusive sympathisers expected: it consisted almost entirely of spoof and satire. The English poked fun at the sentimental banner with posts such as ‘Today I am a Londoner and Today I Got a Day Off’ and ‘If you’re all Londoners today, that’s ei
ght quid each for the congestion charge.31 Come on, pony up!’ The syrupy ‘uplifting’ poems sent in by foreigners prompted spoofs such as:

  Through blitz and bombs we did prevail

  We carried on by road and rail

  We soldiered on and in we mucked

  (Though if it snows, we’re truly f**ked).

  The title ‘London Hurts’ inspired more gleeful lampooning: ‘London Hurts . . . All the news concerns Norf London, but has anybody ever asked how Waterloo’s feeling? Or checked to see if the Royal Festival Hall is OK? Some people are so self-centred.’ To which another Londoner replied, ‘I spoke to the Hayward Gallery earlier today – it is feeling slightly unsettled by events, but otherwise is in good health.’ And later on another: ‘Southwark Cathedral was a bit shaken, and went down the pub with the Imperial War Museum last night.’32

  Most of the English responses were purely satirical, but some posters expressed the Importance of Not Being Earnest rule more explicitly: ‘Please stop this drivel. We don’t want it, it’s not needed and it really is an embarrassment to everyone’; ‘Calm down Americans . . . get a grip. London is over it – when’s the chippy open?’; ‘These sickly banners are actually sapping my morale more than any number of exploding buses. Please, for the love of God, stop.’

  I can personally vouch for the fact that these responses were not just the reactions of armchair cynics unaffected by the bomb attacks. I was in London on the day of the bombings, on the Underground, waiting to catch the tube to Paddington – one of the many people who narrowly missed being on the wrong train at the wrong time. While quickly texting family and friends in London to make sure that they, too, were alive, I went into fieldwork mode and began observing, eavesdropping and talking with fellow passengers – breaking the English taboo on talking to strangers, but exceptions are allowed in such circumstances. The very first thing I overheard was a joke: ‘I didn’t realise the French were such sore losers!’ (The day before the bombings, London had been chosen to host the 2012 Olympic Games, although Paris had been widely expected to win, and the French were clearly surprised and disappointed at the result – although not, as the joke implies, to the point of bombing London out of pique.) I am reliably informed, by friends who were on the spot, that similar jokes about the French were circulating even among actual survivors of the bombs as they emerged, filthy and coughing, from the Underground stations where the attacks had taken place. And for some the humour-reflex apparently kicked in even earlier: one of the survivors, who had been trapped in one of the bombed trains, reported that after the explosion, as the train filled with thick smoke, ‘Silence descended on the carriage apart from people choking and coughing. Then someone near me quipped, “Well, at least we got the Olympics!”’

  If, as someone once said, ‘Comedy is tragedy plus time’, it would seem that the time required for the English to turn tragedy into humour is about a nanosecond. Specifically, the Importance of Not Being Earnest rule applies before the dust has even settled, as the earnest would-be empathisers on ‘London Hurts’ were clearly shocked to learn. Monitoring the forum, I couldn’t help feeling a bit sorry for them: their emotional outpourings were kindly meant, and would no doubt have been greatly appreciated by any other nation.

  Seven years later, the opening ceremony for the London Olympics in 2012 seemed to me another particularly good example of English humour, self-mockery and aversion to earnestness. Although the spectacular parts of the ceremony were suitably grand and impressive, there was very little of the overblown self-important pomposity that normally characterises such ceremonies. Instead, almost every element included at least one ironic little twist, at least one humorous reminder that we don’t take ourselves too seriously. A performance of the famously stirring and emotive Chariots of Fire music by the London Symphony Orchestra, for example, was subverted throughout by the antics of comedian Rowan Atkinson, acting the part of a bored and distracted musician. We couldn’t even be serious about the arrival of our Queen to open the Games: this was done as a spoof of a James Bond film, with Her Majesty sportingly playing herself. If ever there were an excuse for patriotic pomp and grandeur, it must surely be hosting the Olympic Games – and yet we took this opportunity to poke fun at ourselves and our most cherished institutions.

  Again, though, I suspect that English self-mockery is rooted in a rather smug complacency, if not outright arrogance. And this was evident in other aspects of the opening ceremony: there were some globally recognised, positive images of England and the English, but the chaotic display also featured dark, even deliberately ugly, unflattering moments, and was full of obscure parochial references and whimsical in-jokes that were incomprehensible to a global audience. Indeed, even the most delighted, admiring commentators from other nations found much of it ‘baffling’, ‘odd’, ‘bizarre’, ‘impenetrable’, ‘weird’, ‘bewildering’, ‘insane’ and ‘What the f***?’ Others were less polite. The majority of English people loved it, and didn’t much care whether the rest of the world understood it or not. In fact, many were probably secretly pleased that they didn’t. The degree of self-mockery, self-denigration, obscure self-reference and self-indulgent eccentricity exhibited in that ceremony required a breathtaking disregard for the opinion of others – in this case billions of others – which can only stem from a deep sense of superiority.

  The Closet Patriot Rule

  It is often said that the English suffer from a lack of patriotic feeling. And there is some evidence to support this claim: English people, on average, rate their degree of patriotism at just 5.8 out of 10, according to a European survey, far below the self-rated patriotism of the Scots, Welsh and Irish, and the lowest of all the European nations. Our ‘national day’, St George’s Day, is on 23 April, but surveys regularly show that at least two-thirds of us are completely unaware of this. Can you imagine so many Americans not knowing 4 July, or Irish people unaware of St Patrick’s Day?

  I had a hunch, however, based on my participant-observation research, that our apparent lack of patriotism might have more to do with the ban on earnestness, and perhaps some other closely related aspects of Englishness, than an absence of national pride. So I did my own national survey, asking rather more detailed questions, which confirmed my impression that we are in fact a nation of ‘closet patriots’. My survey findings showed that the vast majority (83 per cent) of English people do feel at least some sense of patriotic pride: 22 per cent ‘always’ feel proud to be English, 23 per cent ‘often’ and 38 per cent at least ‘sometimes’. My survey and many others invariably show that the English quality we feel most proud of is our sense of humour.

  Three-quarters of us think that more should be done to celebrate our national day, and of these, 63 per cent would like us to ‘embrace’ St George’s Day as the Irish do St Patrick’s Day. Nearly half would like to see more people flying the English flag on St George’s Day. Only 11 per cent, however, would go so far as to fly the flag themselves, and 72 per cent said they would not be celebrating in any way or had no plans to celebrate, even though St George’s Day was on a Saturday that year.

  But why? If we are proud to be English, and feel that more should be done to celebrate our national day and national flag, why do we not celebrate or fly the flag ourselves?

  If you look closely at the stats, the answers to this question are almost all clear.

  First, there is a clue in the English quality of which we are most proud: our sense of humour. And a key element of this is the Importance of Not Being Earnest, the prohibition of excessive zeal. The boastful, sentimental, flag-waving patriotism of other nations is frowned upon and makes us cringe. We may feel proud to be English, but we are mostly too squeamish and too cynical – too conscious of the unwritten ban on earnestness – to make a big, gushy, patriotic fuss about it. Ironically, the English quality in which we take most pride, our sense of humour, prevents most of us from actually displaying this pride.

  Second, you may well have noticed that the high
percentage of English people who think that more should be done to celebrate St George’s Day (75 per cent) is almost exactly the same as the high percentage who have no intention of celebrating our national day themselves (72 per cent). This pattern also strikes me as typically English, and related to two possible ‘defining characteristics’ already encountered: moderation and Eeyorishness. Our sense of moderation, as well as our horror of earnestness, means that we tend to be rather apathetic: we avoid extremes, excess and intensity. And we have an Eeyorish tendency to indulge in a lot of therapeutic moaning about a problem rather than actually addressing it. We whinge and complain that ‘more should be done’ to celebrate our national day, but we don’t organise a celebration or even so much as fly a flag.33

  A few of us do emerge from our patriotic closet for big royal occasions, such as the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 2012 and the Royal Wedding in 2011. You may have seen many images of flag-waving crowds in London and people holding street parties in their home towns to celebrate these events, but those images are unrepresentative: only a tiny minority of the population (six per cent at most) actually participate in such public celebrations.34 Even this minority are not necessarily ardent monarchists. Royal events are brief episodes of what anthropologists call ‘cultural remission’ or ‘festive inversion’ – like carnivals or tribal festivals, where some of the usual social norms and unwritten rules are temporarily suspended and the English do things we would never normally do: waving national flags, cheering and dancing in the streets, and even talking to strangers. We welcome any opportunity to have a day off work, break the rules and indulge in disinhibited behaviour of this kind, and a royal wedding or jubilee is as good an excuse as any for a bit of ‘legitimised deviance’.

  Even with this powerful incentive, most of us cannot summon up much enthusiasm for royal events. Surveys showed, for example, that Americans were significantly more excited about the 2011 Royal Wedding than the English, the majority of whom remained underwhelmed, despite all the media hype. At least two-thirds of us either ‘couldn’t care less’ or felt ‘largely indifferent’ about the wedding, and only about 10 per cent would admit to being ‘very excited’. I say ‘would admit’ because I know that even with anonymous surveys we have to be aware of the Social Desirability Bias – defined as a standard error on self-report measures due to respondents attempting to present themselves in a socially desirable/acceptable light (otherwise known as ‘lying’). But ‘socially desirable responding’ of this kind can itself be revealing: the fact that so many claimed to be unexcited, even if some simply could not bring themselves to admit to any excitement, tells us that the social norms prohibiting excitement about such things must be quite influential.