Watching the English

by Kate Fox

  Our lack of excitement (normative or otherwise) does not mean that we are ardent anti-monarchists either. We just don’t tend to get very ardent or fervent about anything. In fact, the majority of us support the monarchy, in a lukewarm sort of way. When asked, ‘Would you favour Britain becoming a republic or remaining a monarchy?’ most of us favour monarchy. Over the past twenty years or so, support for the monarchy – in this rather limited sense of not actively wanting to abolish it – has hovered around 75 per cent. About 17.5 per cent, on average, favour a republic, and about nine per cent ‘don’t know’.

  Just one little caveat. When we are not being chronically underwhelmed, tepid or indifferent, we often engage in active criticism and moaning about the monarchy and the royals. But if you are not English, you would be wise to resist the temptation to join in. Remember: the English will happily moan about anything and everything, including things we are actually rather proud and fond of. We whinge endlessly about our weather, for example, but foreigners are not allowed to belittle it – just as one may criticise members of one’s family but one is indignant if anyone else dares to do so. The same ‘family’ principle applies to our ‘Auntie Beeb’: there is a kind of tradition of grumpy affection and respect for the BBC, even among those who use the term ‘BBC’ as a metaphor for ‘snooty middle class’, and grumble about having to pay the annual licence fee. Our attitude towards the monarchy is essentially the same typically English contradictory cluster – much cynicism and moaning, but some grudging affection and pride, and twitchy indignation if outsiders dare to criticise.

  In surveys, the BBC consistently gets roughly the same amount of support as the monarchy – around 75 per cent of us ‘favour’ the monarchy, and around 70 per cent feel largely ‘positive’ about the BBC. Respondents may be expressing a traditional, almost ‘default’ sense of affection and respect for the BBC and the monarchy, or revealing a need for the comfort of old, familiar institutions – or perhaps even expressing the patriotic pride that around 80 per cent of them acknowledged in my own survey.

  Our humour, moderation and Eeyorishness may limit our public displays of affection for our country and its institutions, but in our jokey, moderate and grumpy way, we do manage to express this affection – if only when ticking boxes on anonymous surveys.

  I generally favour participant observation and other qualitative research methods, and treat survey data with a degree of sceptical caution, but the ethnographic purists who disapprove of all quantitative methodologies should take note: there are embarrassing, private things that some people will only say in the safety of an anonymous survey. For the English, these things include ‘Yes, all right, I’ll admit that I feel proud to be English.’

  The ‘Oh, Come Off It!’ Rule

  I mentioned our derision at the sentimental pomposity of foreign politicians and public figures, but the English ban on earnestness, and specifically on taking oneself too seriously, means that our own politicians and other public figures have a particularly tough time. The sharp-eyed English public is even less tolerant of any breaches of these rules on home ground, and even the smallest lapse – the tiniest sign that a speaker may be overdoing the intensity and crossing the fine line from sincerity to earnestness – will be spotted and picked up on immediately, with scornful, sneering cries of ‘Oh, come off it!’, or some equivalent remark, accompanied by a contemptuous snort.

  And we are just as hard on each other, in ordinary everyday conversation, as we are on those in the public eye. In fact, if a country or culture could be said to have a catchphrase, I would propose ‘Oh, come off it!’ as a strong candidate for England’s (although not as strong as ‘Typical!’, which I’ll come to later). Jeremy Paxman’s candidate is ‘I know my rights’ – well, he doesn’t actually use the term ‘catchphrase’, but he refers to this one frequently, and it is the only such phrase that he includes in his personal list of defining characteristics of Englishness. I take his point, and ‘I know my rights’ does encapsulate a certain stubborn individualism and a strong sense of justice, but both the phrase and the attitude are equally common in the USA, so I am not sure it can be regarded as distinctively English. I would maintain that the armchair cynicism of ‘Oh, come off it!’ is more truly representative of the English psyche than the belligerent activism suggested by ‘I know my rights’. This may be why, as someone once said, the English have satire instead of revolutions. It is worth noting, though, that this much-quoted line is deceptive. It makes us sound rather too nice – a cheeky but innocuous culture that prefers jokes to violent uprisings, that would rather sit around making up silly spoofs than take to the streets with guns and bombs. If you are familiar with the acid viciousness of English satire, you will know that the phrase means nothing of the sort: for the English, mockery is not a substitute for weapons but a lethal weapon in itself, and far more effective at bringing down unpopular political leaders than any amount of violent protest.

  There have certainly been brave individuals who have campaigned and risked their lives for the rights and freedoms we now enjoy, but most ordinary English people now take these for granted, and prefer sniping, pin-pricking, grumbling and mocking from the sidelines to any sort of active involvement in defending or maintaining them. Many cannot even be bothered to vote in national elections, although the pollsters and pundits cannot seem to agree on whether our shamefully low turnout is due to cynicism or apathy – or, the most likely answer, a bit of both. Most of those who do vote do so in much the same highly sceptical spirit, choosing the ‘best of a bad lot’ or the ‘lesser of two evils’, rather than with any shining-eyed, fervent conviction that this or that political party is really going to make the world a better place. Such a suggestion would be greeted with the customary ‘Oh, come off it!’

  Among the young and others susceptible to linguistic fads and fashions, the current response might be the ironic ‘Yeah, right’, or other expressions of scornful scepticism such as ‘Get over yourself’, rather than ‘Oh, come off it!’ – but the principle is the same. Similarly, those who break the Importance of Not Being Earnest rule are described in current slang as being ‘up themselves’, rather than the more traditional ‘full of themselves’. By the time you read this, these may in turn have been superseded by new expressions, but the underlying rules and values are deep-rooted, and will remain unchanged.

  IRONY RULES

  The English are not usually given to patriotic boasting – indeed, both patriotism and boasting are regarded as unseemly, so the combination of these two sins is doubly distasteful. But there is one significant exception to this rule, and that is the patriotic pride we take in our sense of humour,35 particularly in our expert use of irony. The popular belief is that we have a better, more subtle, more highly developed sense of humour than any other nation, and specifically that other nations are all tediously literal in their thinking and incapable of understanding or appreciating irony. Almost all of the English people I interviewed subscribed to this belief, and many foreigners, rather surprisingly, humbly concurred.

  Although we seem to have persuaded ourselves and a great many others of our superior sense of irony, I remain, as I have already indicated, not entirely convinced. Humour is universal. Irony is a universally important ingredient of humour: no single culture can possibly claim a monopoly on it. My research suggests that, yet again, the irony issue is a question of degree – a matter of quantity rather than quality. What is unique about English humour is the pervasiveness of irony and the importance we attach to it. Irony is the dominant ingredient in English humour, not just a piquant flavouring. Irony rules. The English, according to an acute observer of the minutiae of Englishness,36 are ‘conceived in irony. We float in it from the womb. It’s the amniotic fluid . . . Joking but not joking. Caring but not caring. Serious but not serious.’

  It must be said that many of my foreign informants found this aspect of Englishness frustrating, rather than amusing: ‘The problem with the English,’ complained one Ame
rican visitor, ‘is that you never know when they are joking – you never know whether they are being serious or not.’ This was a businessman, travelling with a female colleague from Holland. She considered the issue frowningly for a moment, then concluded, somewhat tentatively, ‘I think they are mostly joking, yes?’

  She had a point. And I felt rather sorry for both of them. I found in my interviews with foreign visitors that the English predilection for irony posed more of a problem for those here on business than for tourists and other pleasure-seekers. J. B. Priestley observed that ‘The atmosphere in which we English live is favourable to humour. It is so often hazy, and very rarely is everything clear-cut.’ And he puts ‘a feeling for irony’ at the top of his list of ingredients of English humour. Our humour-friendly atmosphere is all very well if you are here on holiday, but when you are negotiating deals worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, like my hapless informants quoted above, this hazy, irony-soaked cultural climate can clearly be something of a hindrance.37

  For those attempting to acclimatise to this atmosphere, the most important ‘rule’ to remember is that irony is endemic: like humour in general, irony is a constant, a given, a normal element of ordinary, everyday conversation. The English may not always be joking, but they are always in a state of readiness for humour. We do not always say the opposite of what we mean, but we are always alert to the possibility of irony. When we ask someone a straightforward question (e.g. ‘How are the children?’), we are equally prepared for either a straightforward response (‘Fine, thanks’) or an ironic one (‘Oh, they’re delightful – charming, helpful, tidy, studious . . .’ To which the reply is ‘Oh dear. Been one of those days, has it?’).

  The Understatement Rule

  I’m putting this as a sub-heading under irony, because understatement is a form of irony, rather than a distinct and separate type of humour. It is also a very English kind of irony – the understatement rule is a close cousin of the Importance of Not Being Earnest rule, the ‘Oh, come off it’ rule and the various reserve and modesty rules that govern our everyday social interactions. Understatement is by no means an exclusively English form of humour, of course: again, we are talking about quantity rather than quality. George Mikes said that the understatement ‘is not just a speciality of the English sense of humour; it is a way of life’. The English are rightly renowned for our use of understatement, not because we invented it or because we do it better than anyone else but because we do it so much. (Well, maybe we do do it a little bit better – if only because we get more practice at it.)

  The reasons for our prolific understating are not hard to discover: our strict prohibitions on earnestness, gushing, emoting and boasting require almost constant use of understatement. Rather than risk exhibiting any hint of forbidden solemnity, unseemly emotion or excessive zeal, we go to the opposite extreme and feign dry, deadpan indifference. The understatement rule means that a debilitating and painful chronic illness must be described as ‘a bit of a nuisance’; a truly horrific experience is ‘well, not exactly what I would have chosen’; a sight of breathtaking beauty is ‘quite pretty’; an outstanding performance or achievement is ‘not bad’; an act of abominable cruelty is ‘not very friendly’, and an unforgivably stupid misjudgement is ‘not very clever’; the Antarctic is ‘rather chilly’ and the Sahara ‘a bit too warm for my taste’; and any exceptionally delightful object, person or event, which in other cultures would warrant streams of superlatives, is pretty much covered by ‘nice’, or, if we wish to express more ardent approval, ‘very nice’.

  Needless to say, the English understatement is another trait that many foreign visitors find utterly bewildering and infuriating (or, as we English would put it, ‘a bit confusing’). ‘I don’t get it,’ said one exasperated informant. ‘Is it supposed to be funny? If it’s supposed to be funny, why don’t they laugh – or at least smile? Or something. How the hell are you supposed to know when “not bad” means “absolutely brilliant” and when it just means “OK”? Is there some secret sign or something that they use? Why can’t they just say what they mean?’

  This is the problem with English humour. Much of it, including and perhaps especially the understatement, isn’t actually very funny – or at least not obviously funny, not laugh-out-loud funny, and definitely not cross-culturally funny. Even the English, who understand it, are not exactly riotously amused by the understatement. At best, a well-timed, well-turned understatement only raises a slight smirk. But, then, that is surely the whole point of the understatement: it is amusing, but only in an understated way. It is humour, but it is a restrained, refined, subtle form of humour.

  Even those foreigners who appreciate the English understatement, and find it amusing, still experience considerable difficulties when it comes to using it themselves. My father tells me about some desperately Anglophile Italian friends of his, who were determined to be as English as possible – they spoke perfect English, wore English clothes, even developed a taste for English food. But they complained that they couldn’t quite ‘do’ the English understatement, and pressed him for instructions. On one occasion, one of them was describing, heatedly and at some length, a ghastly meal he had had at a local restaurant – the food was inedible, the place was disgustingly filthy, the service rude beyond belief, etc., etc. ‘Oh,’ said my father, at the end of the tirade. ‘So, you wouldn’t recommend it, then?’

  ‘YOU SEE?’ cried his Italian friend. ‘That’s it! How do you do that? How do you know to do that? How do you know when to do it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said my father, apologetically. ‘I can’t explain. We just do it. It just comes naturally.’

  This is the other problem with the English understatement: it is a rule, but a rule in the fourth Oxford English Dictionary sense of ‘the normal or usual state of things’ – we are not conscious of obeying it; it is somehow wired into our brains. We are not taught the use of the understatement: we learn it by osmosis. The understatement ‘comes naturally’ because it is deeply ingrained in our culture, part of the English psyche.

  The understatement is also difficult for foreigners to ‘get’ because it is, in effect, an in-joke about our own unwritten rules of humour. When we describe, say, a horrendous, traumatic and painful experience as ‘not very pleasant’, we are acknowledging the taboo on earnestness and the rules of irony, but at the same making fun of our ludicrously rigid obedience to these codes. We are exercising restraint, but in such an exaggerated manner that we are also (quietly) laughing at ourselves for doing so. We are parodying ourselves. Every understatement is a little private joke about Englishness.

  The Self-deprecation Rule

  Like the English understatement, English self-deprecation can be seen as a form of irony. It usually involves not genuine modesty but saying the opposite of what we really mean – or, at least, the opposite of what we intend people to understand.

  The issue of English modesty will come up again and again in this book, so I should clear up any misunderstandings about it straight away. When I speak of ‘modesty rules’, I mean exactly that – not that the English are somehow naturally more modest and self-effacing than other nations but that we have strict rules about the appearance of modesty. These include both ‘negative’ rules, such as prohibitions on boasting and any form of self-importance, and ‘positive’ rules, actively prescribing self-deprecation and self-mockery. The very abundance of these unwritten rules suggests that the English are not naturally or instinctively modest: the best that can be said is that we place a high value on modesty, that we aspire to modesty. The modesty that we actually display is generally false – or, to put it more charitably, ironic.

  And therein lies the humour. Again, we are not talking about obvious, thigh-slapping funniness: the humour of English self-deprecation, like that of the English understatement, is understated, often to the point of being almost imperceptible – and bordering on incomprehensible to those unfamiliar with English modesty rules.

 
To show how it works, however, I will take a relatively blatant example. My husband is a brain surgeon. When we first met, I asked what had led him to choose this profession. ‘Well, um,’ he replied, ‘I read PPE [Philosophy, Politics and Economics] at Oxford, but I found it all rather beyond me, so, er, I thought I’d better do something a bit less difficult.’ I laughed, but then, as he must have expected, protested that surely brain surgery could not really be described as an easy option. This gave him a further opportunity for self-deprecation. ‘Oh, no, it’s nowhere near as clever as it’s cracked up to be. To be honest, it’s actually a bit hit-or-miss.’ It later emerged, as he must have known it would, that far from finding the intellectual demands of Oxford ‘beyond him’, he had entered with a scholarship and graduated with a First. ‘I was a dreadful little swot,’ he explained.

  So was he being truly modest? No, but neither could his humorously self-deprecating responses really be described as deliberate, calculated ‘false’ modesty. He was simply playing by the rules, dealing with the embarrassment of success and prestige by making a self-denigrating joke of it all, as is our custom. And this is the point: there was nothing extraordinary or remarkable about his apparently humble self-mockery. He was just being English. We all do this, automatically, all the time. Even those of us with much less impressive achievements or credentials to disguise. I’m lucky – many people don’t know what an anthropologist is, and those who do generally regard us as the lowest form of scientific life, so there is very little danger of being thought boastful when I am asked about my work. But just in case I might be suspected of being (or claiming to be) something vaguely brainy, I always quickly explain to those unfamiliar with the term that it is ‘just a fancy word for nosy-parker’, and to academics that what I do is in any case ‘only pop-anthropology’, and not even the proper, intrepid, mud-hut variety.