English Humour for Beginners: by George Mikes.

 

 

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English Humour for Beginners: by George Mikes. 

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Quoted from blurb:-

"George Mikes was born in 1912 in Siklós, Hungary. Having studied law and received his doctorate from Budapest University, he became a journalist and was sent to London as a correspondent to cover the Munich crisis. He came for a fortnight but stayed on and made England his home. During the Second World War he broadcast for the BBC Hungarian Service, where he remained until 1951. He continued working as a freelance critic, broadcaster and writer until his death in 1987. 

"English Humour for Beginners was first published in 1980, when Mikes had already established himself as a humorist as English as they come. His other books include How to be an Alien, How to Unite Nations, How to be Inimitable, How to Scrape Skies, How to Tango, The Land of the Rising Yen, How to Run a Stately Home (with the Duke of Bedford), Switzerland for Beginners, How to be Decadent, How to be Poor, How to be a Guru and How to be God. He also wrote a study of the Hungarian Revolution and A Study of Infamy, an analysis of the Hungarian secret political police system. On his seventieth birthday he published his autobiography, How to be Seventy."

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"English Humour resembles the Loch Ness Monster in that both are famous but there is a strong suspicion that neither of them exists. Here the similarity ends: the Loch Ness Monster seems to be a gentle beast and harms no one; English Humour is cruel. 

"English Humour also resembles witches. There are no witches; yet for centuries humanity acted as though they existed. ... It’s the same with English Humour. It may not exist but this simple fact has failed to prevent thousands of writers from producing book upon book on the subject. And it will not deter me either."

"In other countries, if they find you inadequate or they hate you, they will call you stupid, ill-mannered, a horse-thief or a hyena. In England they will say that you have no sense of humour. This is the final condemnation, the total dismissal."

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"I doubt (as I have already explained) that there is such a thing as an English sense of humour, consequently the – say – Welsh sense of humour would be a sub-species of a non-existent genus. But that would be in the true English nonsense tradition. Until the nineteen seventies there was a coin in circulation in Britain called the half crown. There was no crown, but this disturbed no one. The English were quite happy with a fraction of a non-existent unit. In mathematics half of nothing is nothing. In humour and in British fiscal matters (the two are often identical) half of nothing is quite something."

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" ... 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."

He's completely wrong there. Physicists DO know, and they do NOT perform most of the tasks mentioned; that's work of lesser professionals, who usually profit far more. 

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The chapter titled "What Is Humour" may be better skipped by general fans of this author. In short, it isn't funny. 

One may be dismayed at the thought that this would continue. But the subsection titled "Understatement" in the next chapter begins to brighten up things a bit. 'Cruelty', in the same chapter after that, is horrifying. It proceeds thence to wit and becomes better. 

"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.’ ... "

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Obviously Mikes couldn't care less about colonial subjects of British empire:-

"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."

He never heard of Dyer, to mention just one name; or of Churchill deliberately refusing the ships filled with grain sent by FDR to help India when millions died of starvation, because Churchill thought they were better dead, being subhuman in his opinion! 

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" ... ‘Jokes about the German invasion of France in 1940,’ say the authors, ‘crop up again in Czechoslovakia in 1968. Jokes about anti-Semitism in Central and Eastern Europe at the turn of the century migrate across the Irish Sea to Ulster to cross the Atlantic to the United States, where they are used against white racism or Protestant ascendancy.’"

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"Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Napoleon are watching the October Parade in Moscow’s Red Square. 

"Alexander looks at the tanks and says: ‘If I had chariots like these, I’d have conquered the whole of Asia.’ 

"Caesar looks at the giant rockets: ‘If I’d had such catapults, I’d have conquered the whole world.’ 

"Napoleon looks up from a copy of Pravda: ‘If I’d had a newspaper like this, nobody would ever have heard of Waterloo.’"

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"Khrushchev and Ulbricht are going around in Moscow. Khrushchev stops a small boy in the street and asks him: ‘Who is your father?’ 

"‘Comrade Khrushchev.’ 

"‘Your mother?’ 

"‘The Soviet Union.’ 

"‘What would you like to be?’ 

"‘An astronaut.’ 

"A few weeks later they meet again in East Berlin. This time it is Ulbricht who stops a small boy in the street. 

"‘Who’s your father?’ 

"‘Comrade Ulbricht.’ 

"‘Your mother?’ 

"‘The German Democratic Republic.’ 

"‘What would you like to be?’ 

"‘An orphan.’"

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"Most people define a humorist as the man to whom they must tell funny stories."

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"As tellers of dirty jokes are mostly men and their so-called victims in most cases are women, Freudians regard sex jokes as verbal rape or, at least, preparation for physical approach. 

"Many of the jokes are degrading to women. The dirty joke, according to Freud, is a slightly more sophisticated form of other nasty habits: whispering dirty words to women in the street or writing up four-letter words – usually the name of the female genital organ – on walls."

That being the case, it's unclear if the author thereafter has the same agenda added on to the purpose of showing just how disgustingly assaulting these misogynistic 'jokes' are, in recounting some of the worst! 

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About the author of "Alice" masterpieces:- 

"Dodgson’s outward life story may be told in a few words. He was born in 1832 (the year Lear met Lord Stanley), the son of the Reverend Charles Dodgson. He spent four years at Rugby, matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1850, took a first class honours degree in mathematics at Christ Church and was appointed Lecturer in Mathematics there. He stayed in that job until he retired, at the age of forty-nine. In his spare time he became a brilliant photographer – according to some, one of the best in the nineteenth century. Under his own name he wrote such books as The Formulae of Plane Trigonometry and An Elementary Treatise on Determinants. He died at Guildford in 1898, at the age of sixty-six. 

"Some biographers maintain that the great event of his life was meeting Ellen Terry. She was eighteen and breathtakingly beautiful. He – it is believed – fell in love with her; some allege that he wanted to marry her. Well, it is all ‘it is believed’ and ‘some allege’ because he never talked of his feelings, certainly never proposed to Miss Terry and never wrote one single line about his feelings for her in his diary. He never married."

" .... In 1856 he met Alice Liddell when she was not yet four. He told her lots of wonderful stories inventing them when they went for walks together. One day Alice said: ‘Oh, Mr Dodgson, I wish you would write out Alice’s adventures for me.’ 

"He did, under the pseudonym of Lewis Carroll. 180,000 copies of Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking-Glass were sold in his lifetime. The books also gave many phrases to the English language and many immortal characters to English folklore, from the Mad Hatter through Humpty-Dumpty to Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Yet, icily and on innumerable occasions, he persisted in saying: ‘Mr Dodgson neither claims nor acknowledges any connections with the books not published under his name.’ He wanted to be remembered as the author of An Elementary Treatise on Determinants."

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The author quotes some of the work, poetry, of Lewis Carroll, of which YOU ARE OLD, FATHER WILLIAM is really good. So is THE WALRUS AND THE CARPENTER, but it's not merely funny, or rather, it's lacks the feel-good quality of the former. He quotes ETIQUETTE by W. S. Gilbert, a good one about British society. GENTLE ALICE BROWN is, on the other hand, more horror than fun, evoking disgust for any opposite opinion. 

His chapter on limerick is continuation of the dirty joke chapter, and in the next one he discusses English wit by mentioning Dr Johnson, Oscar Wilde and Churchill. 

"Joe Kennedy, the later and late President John Kennedy’s father, was US Ambassador to Britain during the war. At a ceremonial dinner Mrs Kennedy sat next to Churchill. She had innumerable children and grandchildren and believed in a curious theory: that she could never fail to interest anyone she met because at least one of her many offspring must fascinate him. On this occasion the Prime Minister had been talking to his other neighbour for a long time. It was towards the end of dinner that he turned to Mrs Kennedy, who said to him: ‘I don’t think, Mr Churchill, that I have told you anything about my grandchildren.’ 

"To which Churchill replied: ‘For which, Madam, I am infinitely grateful.’"

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January 25, 2021 - May 12,  2021.

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