A bit of a giggle

Twentieth Century, July 1961²⁷

Some years ago I woke in the middle of the night and found to my astonishment that I was shaking with laughter. I had had no dream to account for this immoderate mirth and as I lay there in the darkness giggling foolishly I experienced a curious sense of guilt. For in broad daylight, in the usual run of things, laughter comes attached to circumstances, soldered to a situation. It is, as it were, a rare commodity, pure and strange, issued by quota to sweeten the rigours of reality. In this way, lying in my bed at night, laughing for no reason, I had raided the psychic larder and was illicitly enjoying the primal honeycomb itself.

Humour, even when legitimate, fastened to a joke, has something of the naughty to it. Like fire, elusive and spirituous, it seems quite foreign to the ordinary world and must have been stolen, like fire, by Prometheus from the gods.

If it was, then cataplexy is surely the punishment. This is a strange disease in which the patients, fortunately a rare few, suddenly become paralyzed when confronted by a humorous situation. As they are about to laugh, they are seized by a total paralysis and they slither helpless to the floor. They remain quite conscious throughout but are unable to move a limb until the sense of mirth evaporates. Everyone is familiar with the feeling of being weak with actual laughter. Cataplexy is not to be confused with this. In this condition the paralysis precedes the laughter. It is provoked by the mental act of seeing the joke, by the first tremor of silent mirth which rocks the mind before it shakes the body.

The Victoria Palace, tattily decorated in fading Sickert tones, twice-nightly houses a revealing paradox of English theatrical humour. Enclosed in a triangle whose points are Victoria Station, Buckingham Palace and St George’s Hospital, the ritual to be seen here each night somehow conveniently exemplifies the spirit of these utterly British institutions. The palace housing imperial tradition, the hospital professional respectability and student bumptiousness, and then the station, escape-hatch to a supposedly sexy continent. The Crazy Gang are licensed jesters of this rickety Establishment, performing an act which neatly symbolizes all the arrogance and evasiveness of the Englishman at his worst.28

This is not to say that I dislike the act. I love it; but every time I see this smutty rollick, I have an uneasy feeling that under the camouflage of outrageous irreverence these ageing gentlemen are bolstering up some of the more unpleasant aspects of our national character. Thinly disguised and often blatantly apparent, the performance deals with sex. I say ‘deals’ advisedly, since the method involved does exactly this: it deals with sex; disposes of it; and renders it apparently harmless. Though bawdy in the extreme, sex as such is actually eliminated as effectively as if it had in fact been bowdlerized from the text.

The routine consists of a series of sparsely constructed sketches which allows free reign to elaborate jokes in which bottoms, breasts and urinals receive obsessional attention. Also high on the list of topics are trousers, pants, trusses and hernias. Bed-pots, farts and contraceptives are not ignored. Few opportunities are lost for these knobbly old gaffers to get themselves up in ‘drag,’ which leads us neatly back into the bottoms, breasts and knickers routine. The audience, needless to say, shrieks its delight, indicating by its enthusiasm the power of the psychic tension which these performers seem so kindly to release. I believe that in fact the sense of release is entirely false and that this performance simply discharges neurotic transformations of much deeper tensions which are themselves studiously left untapped. It is a psychological decoy which gives a false impression of relief so that the more dangerous issues can fester undisturbed. For when it comes down to it the items mentioned above – the urinals, the breasts, the brassieres and bed-pots – are no more than the second XI of sexuality. The first XI, the central sexual issues, are never allowed to get out to the wicket.

The effect, I am sure, is unintentional. I cannot believe that the cast set out deliberately to lay a false scent. Nevertheless it falls in quite happily with the intentions of the Lord Chamberlain, who will blithely license this routine at the same time that he bars an honest treatment of the crucial themes. In this way the Chamberlain is exploiting the immaturity of English humour in order to preserve that very immaturity.29 The very fact that jokes about farts and bed-pans can give a sense of release is a sign of this naivety. It is a sign of an infantile confusion; one which Freud points out to be a natural phase in normal development – the confusion between excretion and eroticism, the blurred elision between dung and love. It is significant that so much English humour rests on this confusion; witness “The Miller’s Tale”.³⁰ The Crazy Gang routine only serves to emphasize and confirm this confusion in the public mind. And as long as the confusion exists it will always be possible for Lord Chamberlains to exploit it to obscure the explosive issue of adult sexuality.

Many people have said that the Goons are the English Marx Brothers. How can anyone be so insensitive? For a start The Goon Show is probably the least American of any. It is crucially and quintessentially English; a delicious compound of Carrollian fantasy and imperial nostalgia. The whole series reeks of G. A. Henty and Rider Haggard, and the most successful episodes are centred on the outposts of a far-flung romantic Victorian Empire. Rickety forts in the Khyber Pass are endlessly besieged by frontier tribes. Ned Seagoon sets out on futile safaris into the heart of Africa. Major Bloodnok erupts with fearful dysentery in some tatty Sudanese latrine. The pleasure of this wonderful show is contained in the garbled memories of childhood reading which it excites, sauced with a sly scepticism of all the values of these nursery tales. Bloodnok’s cowardice reaches heroic proportions. Grytpype-Thynne is utterly commendable in his suave and devious malevolence. And then, on the other hand, there is the purely Alice whimsy. The snotty, pubescent Bluebottle; Henry Crun, inarticulate with senility, White-Knightish and benign. The narrative abounds in lovable eccentrics: March Hares, Dormice and the like. American, indeed!

There is one curious thing about the Goons: some of the accents have been taken over and used by a very distinct group of the British population. These are the sub-technocrats. No other description really fits them. They usually work in television as cameramen or electricians. They are often lab technicians and many of them work in firms which make computers. They wear Government-surplus Lovat-green trousers with very wide bottoms. They have Fair Isle jumpers and sports coats with four different colours of ball-pen tucked in the top pocket. They are relentlessly up in hi-fi and belong to scooter clubs which go on weekend rallies to Burnham Beeches. There is no other way to describe these people. They belong to no distinctive social class but they are horribly at home with machines of all sorts. They are almost a genetic group and the spontaneous adoption of Goon accents seems to support this. They share a vague resentment of the Establishment and they exploit the cheeky accents of the show as a cabalistic language of protest. They are, to borrow a Goon term, the crutty Herberts of this world.

English humour leans heavily on accent. I can think of few successful shows which do not depend for their success on a parade of vocal grotesques. ITMA was an uninterrupted stream of such figures.31 The English seem, in some strange way, unable to be funny in their own voices. It is almost Shakespearian, this device. The humorous is co-extensive with the ludicrous and the ludicrous synonymous with the bucolic. Speak in your own voice here and you automatically speak seriously; the personal voice is sober and exalted. Dickens’s comic figures are all contorted in one way or another. I personally flee into the sanctuary of an accent whenever I can – anything to escape the flaccid ineffectiveness of normal English with its toneless pallor and extended syntax.

For years I have envied the compact directness of American and when I first heard Mort Sahl my dissatisfaction with normal English reached its climax. Here at last was a man who could speak for himself without the protection of an accent and still be funny. In fact, as a purely verbal comedian I am sure that there is no one to touch him. He relies on no special effects but simply fires off a breathless sequence of laconic comments on the world as he finds it. His technique is associative, leading him from topic to topic in an eruptive pattern of breaks and improvisations which lead him back, sometimes only after 20 minutes or so, to the original theme. He is heavily indebted to the cannibalism of American speech. Nowhere else does a language build up from so many sources so that the final product is a rich agglomerate allowing the raconteur the widest range of allusion and suggestion. All sorts of dialects and group vocabularies are kidnapped for general use. Yiddish, German, professional jazz talk, psycho-analytic and sociological terms all combine and allow Sahl’s often mumbled and unfinished sentences to set up vibrations of Empsonian complexity. It is quite impossible to reproduce these nuances in print.

Sahl himself stands head and shoulders above all the others of the American Nouvelle Vague. He deals with force and effect with issues that matter: from desegregation in the South to the wilder excesses of John Foster Dulles.³² None of the others have this headlong relevance. Shelley Berman, a more conventional American nightclub entertainer, depends on fantasy. (A woman hanging from a flagpole of a department store becomes the subject of a frantic phone call from a man who lives in the opposite office block: ‘…There is a woman hanging from the flag pole of your third floor window… Yeah… Look! She has been there a very long time; her knuckles are very white.’) Lenny Bruce, sometimes and unreliably, is excruciatingly funny but depends for much of his act on impossible sick jokes (cancer as a status symbol).33 All betray the same disenchanted cynicism. Mort Sahl is alone in the intelligent curiosity which he brings to this yawning, adult Weltschmerz.³⁴ But, my God! What a relief to hear Weltschmerz voiced, clearly and succinctly: a humour that reflects a sophisticated pessimism, now entirely proof against shock or disappointment.

I think that I admire pessimism in humour above everything else. It really is the gold standard of laughter and that is why American-Jewish humour has such an attractive lustre. Groucho is the Archduke of this estate – dilapidated, disgruntled and irascible; an arsenal of withering wisecracks which puncture the romantic delusions of the American dream. He is surrounded by an entourage of deluded optimists: sweet young couples drugged with a sentimental narcissism, set to music in sugary duets which Groucho interrupts with caustic, leering innuendos. Margaret Dumont, flatulent figurehead of propertied American womanhood, is systematically insulted (‘I’m Rufus T. Firefly. I cover a lot of ground.’ ‘Say, you cover a lot of ground. When are they going to tear you down and put up office buildings where you stand?’)

Sexual schemes are set at nought. Groucho is caught necking with Margaret Dumont; Harpo is breaking in downstairs with thunderous sound effect. ‘What’s that?’ flutes Miss Dumont. ‘Sounds like mice,’ cracks Groucho and abandons the already ludicrous love-making. Groucho embarks on all his projects equipped with a paranoid conviction that the whole thing will go awry, so that the enterprise is conducted as a joking relationship where the rancid humour protects him from inevitable disappointment.

This, at root, is a Jewish mechanism. Conditioned to expect that everything will turn out for the worst and that there’s a bad time coming be it never so far away, the Jew feels sceptical hesitancy to every enterprise, sexual or financial. In the final reduction one’s own opinions suffer the same introspective decay. My favourite Jewish joke – indeed my favourite joke – is the primal Ur-jest of this philosophy. Two men are talking:

‘What is it hangs on a wall, is green and whistles?’

‘I don’t know. So, what is it?’

‘A herring!’

‘But a herring doesn’t hang on a wall.’

‘So? You can hang it on a wall, can’t you?’

‘Sure! But a herring isn’t green.’

‘Well you can paint it green, can’t you?’

‘Sure! But see here! A herring doesn’t whistle.’

‘Okay. Okay. So it doesn’t whistle.’

Many English people mistake the point of the Marx Brothers and enthuse over the zany antics: the cabin scene in A Night at the Opera (1935), the mirror scene in Duck Soup (1933). These are brilliant, to be sure, but they are standard vaudeville routines: any good team of clowns could have done them. No, the crucial Marxist thesis is the mocking doubt, the weary scepticism and the cheerful conviction that everything under the sun – sexual, financial and political – will, nay must turn out about as badly as anything could.