British Humour

Shared humour is a valuable aspect of any relationship. Humour is usually gentle and it can take any tension better than any pill. A wise man on a course once opined that humour, humility and humanity, three words starting with HU, are the keys aspects of a positive character. I use this mantra a lot, though I struggle with at least two of its components.

However, humour does not often travel well. Humour is a defining aspect of every culture, and people from one culture usually prefer humour that is familiar to something from outside. It is one of many reasons that humanity still tends to feel comfortable with its own type, one that is understandable yet sad.

In particular, most humour involves language, and one challenge for humour travelling is that of translation. Even the most basic jokes, for example puns, can be meaningless when translated. More subtle language-based wit can only really be appreciated in a native language. Even if something can translate perfectly, different cultures find different things funny.

I lived in countries where English is not the native language for sixteen years between 1996-2012 before moving to New York. While the American culture differs from the British, it was only when I arrived here that I realised how valuable it is to share a native language with the people you are interacting with each day. Humour is a part of that, but it applies to anything cultural, especially things like theatre. This realisation changed my thinking about where in Europe I’d like to live once I return there – London moved many steps up the pecking order.

At least I was lucky in living in a series of countries where English was spoken very well indeed. That was one reason why I did not learn their languages too well – it was always possible, and usually easier, to converse in English. That made me ridiculously privileged, but is also a source of some regret, for language is a gateway to any culture, and all my gates are rather closed.

I was always struck by how British humour is appreciated everywhere I have been. I can even extend this to a personal observation, that people anywhere they can speak a bit of English seem to like my jokes. I don’t think I’m especially witty, but I seem to always raise a laugh. I exploit it a bit, knowing that often people don’t know if I am joking or not, and I let leave them to wonder sometimes. Part of the lucky propensity seems to be a love of the British accent, which is especially strong here in the US – nowhere else have I witnessed so many young women swooning over me, and just for ordering a grande non fat latte.

But it may go further than the accent; it might be that something in a British upbringing lends itself to humour that can work. It seems to be true for the Irish as well, and they are still more loved than the British, partly for their underdog attitude and partly for their extraordinary wit. I have rarely met an Irish person, no matter how educated or not educated, who can’t find a spontaneous apt turn of phrase.

My favourite example of how British humour is loved is a sketch from 1963 called Dinner for One – you can find it, and several of the other examples I quote later, on Youtube. I had never seen this sketch until I left the UK. But I learned that it is loved so strongly across Northern Europe that it has reached ritual status, with everyone knowing the catchphrases. I was at a New Year’s eve party in Stockholm, and everyone was drinking and was spread around the house and outside (yes, it was below freezing but Swedes are like that), until someone shouted that this sketch was coming on TV and everyone converged around the set. Seemingly it is shown at the same time every New Year’s Eve and almost the whole country watches it, year in and year out. It was funny, but really? 

While I love many things about New Yorkers, I struggle to appreciate American humour, from almost any ethnic or regional group. To my taste, the advertisements here are almost universally terrible, especially when they try to be funny. The late night TV sketches can be funny, but they tend to be cruel and too similar to each other. The mainstream comedy programmes are usually awful. The exception is anything Jewish, from Seinfeld to Woody Allen and anything in between.

So I spent a bit of time trying to work this out logically. I started with some nostalgia, looking on Youtube for sketches that had made me laugh out loud as a child and still remembered. I found “The Bricklayer’s Lament” by Gerard Hoffhung, “Take a Pew” by Alan Bennett, in “In the Pub” by Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, all of which made me laugh again but didn’t seem quite as funny as I remembered.

Then I tried to fill this out with other seminal comedies. I eliminated many that travelled the best, because they were either slapstick, like Mr Bean, or what I termed catchphrase comedies, of which Dad’s Army may the most famous. A catchphrase comedy is where a set of characters is put into a situation and respond in utterly predictable ways, essentially with their catchphrases – “we’re all doomed”, for example.

What remained started with Beyond the Fringe and Tony Hancock and moved through Monty Python and The fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, with The Office coming later. In parallel were TV and Radio wit shows like Have I Got News for You and Whose Line is it Anyway.

Then I thought of more recent shows, though I am not sure how recent some of them actually are, since I watch them on PBS here and sometimes they buy and repeat stuff from before the millennium. I love the wit in “Upstart Crow”. But other shows are more notable for silence. Look out for “The Café” which my wife and I rechristened Nothing Ever Happens. Not much happens in “Mum” either. This entire muse on comedy was initiated by a show we saw for the first time last weekend, “The Detectorists”. This show featured two lovable losers who ran away from facing the issues in their lives by standing aimlessly in fields with metal detectors. To my taste, it was really funny. And could never dream of being commissioned in the US.

Using all this, I tried to come up with some comedy genres. Wikipedia did not help, it listed twenty, most of which seemed to overlap. A sitcom using dark observational wit seemed to cover at least four. I narrowed my list down to: catchphrase and slapstick humour; cruel, shocking or exaggerated humour; witty word-based humour; and wry, vulnerable, loser humour.

Catchphrase and slapstick humour travels and I suspect many cultures have an abundance of it. The US seems to have a lot of the cruel and exaggerated type, perhaps influenced by Hollywood and the desire to appeal to an immature male demographic. I fear James Corden and Ricky Gervais have become rather infected by this style. The witty sort depends on language, and the Irish are probably the best, but the British can thank Beyond the Fringe and Footlights for a strong legacy.

It is the wry, vulnerable, loser humour that I see no evidence of in the US, but it is all over many successful British shows, and seems to be the sort that leaves the strongest mark on me. It requires a slow pace, always a problem in the US. Silence doesn’t get much of a look in here, where loud talking often seems to drown out listening. And it also needs an acceptance of vulnerability. In Britain, perhaps it is a happy legacy of coming to accept faded glory – something it will take at least two more generations of Americans to embrace. If so, that might help to explain how the Jewish excel at the same sort of humour – in that culture, preparing for the next humiliation is a dominant mindset.

So I am not sure if all this musing achieved a lot. I suppose there were a few lessons and a few laughs. Nothing seems as good as it did years ago. Listening is a great starting point for humour. PBS is a treasure. Faded glory offers some compensations. And thank you, Peter Cook and friends, your laughter outlives you.