Humour and Comedy

Everyday British humour and British comedy are frequently conflated and confused, therefore the comic novel, play, film, poem, sketch, cartoon or stand-up routine should be analysed separately. British comedy is influenced and informed by the nature of everyday English humour and by some of the other ‘rules of Englishness’ such as the embarrassment rule (most British comedy is essentially about embarrassment). British comedy obeys the rules of English humour, and also plays an important social role in transmitting and reinforcing them. Almost all of the best British comedy seems to involve laughing at itself.

The fact that the British have no concept of a separate ‘ time and place’ for humour, that humour suffers the British consciousness, does mean that British comic writers, artists and performers have to work quite hard to make the British laugh. They have to produce something above and beyond the humour that permeates every aspect of the British ordinary social interactions. Just because the British have ‘a good sense of humour’ does not mean that the British are easily amused - quite the opposite: their keen, finely tuned sense of humour, and their irony-saturated culture probably make them harder to amuse than most other nations. Whether or not this results in better comedy is another matter, but it certainly seems to result in a lot of comedy; if the British are not amused, it is clearly not for want of effort on the part of British prolific humorists.

The British have an appetite for the comic and amusing, they involve humour in every cultural aspect. And it is impossible to make a research without paying attention to literature, art, and contemporary entertainment genres such as the incredible number of English humorous films, publications (including such magazines as Punch and Private Eye and scores of comic novels, from Charles Dickens to Helen Fielding), and radio comedy shows.

Therefore we would like to give some examples of that.

Contemporary genres

A number of British radio comedies achieved considerable renown in the second half of the twentieth century. One notable and influential series was The Goon Show, which was broadcast through the 1950. Another was Round the Horne.

Currently, most British comedy is broadcast via TV with sketch shows, stand-up comedy, impressionists and sitcoms being the four most popular formats.

One notable show is Monty Python's Flying Circus, a comedy from the seventies that introduced us to such luminaries as John Cleese, Eric Idle, and Terry Gilliam and went on to shape the future of comedy in the UK. The insistence on logic within a mad environment supplies much of the really effective humour of the Monty Python troupe. Similar Python sketches create a world in which structured and (viewed from a certain perspective) sensible lunacy prevails. Other sketch shows include French and Saunders, Little Britain and The Fast Show.

The situation comedy (sitcom) is another genre of peculiarly British humour. Popular British sitcoms have included Only Fools and Horses, Blackadder, The Vicar of Dibley, Fawlty Towers, and Dad's Army.

Literature

Humour and comedy were firmly established in English literature during the fourteenth century. Since that time humour became inseparably linked with literature. World-famous English writers and poets are worthy of mentioning, because they made a great contribution into development of British culture and British humour. Most their works were intended to be used as social satire or as a teaching aid of moral values.

The most significant ones are undoubtedly Shakespeare and Dickens, who made the world know British culture and British humour.

Shakespeare

England and Shakespeare are inextricably intertwined; strands of his weaving run through the fabric of their national thought, literature, life. And there are two out of the many gigantic legacies he left the world that the British are peculiarly fitted to enjoy. The first is his poetry, the actual dance and glitter of verse. The second is his humour, which is their concern.

His humour is everywhere, even the grimmest and the wildest tragedies can not keep it out. Through his creative use of humor, Shakespeare allows readers to see things as they really are.

In his comedies, Shakespeare is a poetic humorist rather than a creator of comedy proper. Malvolio is perhaps the best example of a character that Shakespeare handles in the traditional manner of the creator of Comedy. Malvolio is not a fool treated with indulgence, given leave to exhibit his folly at length, but is a serious character hunted down with contemptuous laughter. He represents a type that Shakespeare disliked, a cold and conceited fellow, sick with self-love and rotten with envy, and had the play that contains him been of a tragic cast. We might have seen Malvolio playing a very different part, one nearer that of Iago. As it is a comedy, he is laughed at, but the laugher is not the usual affectionate outburst but is keen and cutting. Sir Andrew is really a more contemptible figure than the capable steward, yet he is simply enjoyed and not derided. Shakespeare only asks us to enjoy him and not to criticize him. But when he comes to Malvolio, Shakespeare for once makes himself the guardian of society and good sense, and gives the man a flick or two of the lash. But Malvolio – a typical figure of Comedy proper – has always been regarded as an odd and puzzling character, standing quite apart from the majority of Shakespeare’s comic figures.

What a world of wit and high spirits and happy laughter is in Shakespeare’s writings! Of the width and splendor of imagination to be found in this whole world of humour that Shakespeare created, it is not necessary to speak; we could not copy if we tried; we can only wonder and give praise. In this world there is an air of large tolerance, kindness and they are necessary for humour, of which the British have never had any lack.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 is a parody of a form of poetry which was popular in Elizabethan England. The Petrarchan love sonnet, in which a poet compared his lover to natural beauties, was named after the fourteenth-century Italian poet who wrote a series of love sonnets for his beloved Laura. This form of poetry was first imitated in England by Sir Thomas Wyatt at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Shakespeare himself often wrote this form of love sonnet. However, in Sonnet 130 ho chooses to make fun of it.

Sonnet 130:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:

And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare.

Petrachan Sonnet:

She used to let her golden hair fly free.

For the wind to toy and tangle and molest;

Her eyes were brighter than the radiant west.

(Seldom they shine so now.) I used to see

Pity look out of those deep eyes on me.

("It was false pity," you would now protest.)

I had love's tinder heaped within my breast;

What wonder that the flame burnt furiously?

She did not walk in any mortal way,

But with angelic progress; when she spoke,

Unearthly voices sang in unison.

She seemed divine among the dreary folk

Of earth. You say she is not so today?

Well, though the bow's unbent, the wound bleeds on.

Sonnet 130 is a contradiction to the Renaissance's concept of the ideal woman: ‘her breasts are dun’, ‘black wires grow on her head’, and some perfumes smell better than she reeks. Shakespeare in satirical tone rejects Petrarch’s form and content. Again, the different intention that Shakespeare has while using the same devices that are usually found in Petrarchian sonnets make it appear to be more of a parody above anything else. It was popular to think that physical beauty or attraction was necessary for love to exist. Instead of exaggerating the beloved’s physical features by comparing them to the sun, coral, snow, roses, perfumes, goddesses, the speaker in the Shakespeare sonnet 130 declares that he can proclaim his love for her while maintaining her humanness.

Dickens

Fashions come and fashions go, but the supremacy of Dickens as a humorist remains unchallenged. We have only one name to put beside his, as a creator of humorous character, and that, of course, is Shakespeare. There is no comic figure in Dickens as great as Falstaff, who has in himself the very genius of humour. On the other hand, Shakespeare has not the same comic fecundity. Dickens is the creator of a whole population of drolls. There are nearly a hundred characters in Pickwick alone and nearly all of them are comic. He must have made more people laugh than the sum total of authors in several literatures.

The humour of Dickens is essentially a humour of character. It is his comic figures we remember first: Mr. Peter Magnus, Mr. Sapsea, Mr. Guppy, Mr. Jack Hopkins, Mrs. Todgers, Mr. Toots, Mrs. Gamp, Mr. Pumblechook, Miss Nipper. These are so numerous, so astonishing, so altogether delightful. These characters are gross caricatures. What distinguishes Dickens is that there is a genuine creative force, a fountain of high spirits, a gushing spring of absurdity.

The great Dickens drolls are not funny in the idea but in the actual expression of themselves. If they were merely described and not presented dramatically there would be little or nothing in them.

Let us look an example.

There is Mr. Pecksniff. Now Mr. Pecksniff as a solid character, wedged into the plot, is of no importance at all, at least not now. He is not a solid character at all. Nor is the mere idea of him, that of a rascally ignorant architect who pretends to be unusually virtuous, a pattern of a moral order, either very credible or very amusing.. He is a rubbishy figure, mere hypocrisy with a tuft of hair. But no, he is nothing of the kind, because his actual talk on occasion is gloriously absurd. We could think of better characters than Pecksniff, but when it came to making them talk like this we should have no confess ourselves beaten and “with a blush retire”. We have only to remember how Pecksniff improved the occasion in the coach to understand where the genius of Dickens makes its appearance:

“What we are?” said Mr. Pecksniff, “but coaches? Some of us are slow coaches­­­-----“

“Goodness, Pa!” cried Charity.

“Some of us, I say,” resumed her parent with increased emphasis, “are slow coaches; Our passions are the horses; and rampant animals, too!”

“Really, Pa!” cried both daughters at once. “How very unpleasant.”

“And rampant animals, too!” repeated Mr. Pecksniff, with so much determination, that he may be said to have exhibited, at the moment, a sort of moral rampancy himself: “and Virtue is the drag. We start from The Mother’s Arms, and we run to The Dust Shovel.”

When he has said this, Mr. Pecksniff, being exhausted, took some further refreshment. When he had done that, he corked the bottle tight, with the air of a man, who had effectually corked the subject also; and went to sleep for three stages.

What is important, then, about Mr. Pecksniff is not that he is a hypocritical architect who occasionally gets drunk, but that he can talk in this strain of sublime idiocy. If this is not like life, then, we say, so much the worse for life.

The humour of Dickens has two sides, a satirical and a sympathetic. There were certain kinds of people he never tried to understand, stiff, cold, official sort of people, and these he turned into the victims of his satirical humour. His novels are full of such comic marionettes, masquerading as officials, lawyers, and fashionable people. His handling of them is frequently very funny – for Dickens was always determined to enjoy his characters, and even his most sinister villains are a great lark, but they do not give us his best comic characters, which were the creations of his sympathetic humour. These, the Micawbers, the Wellers, Pickwick, Toots, and the rest, are always lovable simpletons, who ask for and receive the laughter of affection.

A Dickens novel is like the day and the night of some tremendous existed child, now darkly miserable, now violently happy. It is as if the little outcast he once was came at last to set down on paper the daydreams he had in the blacking factory, so that the cruel adults are all severely punished, the cold sneering people are turned into figures of fun dangling on the end of wires and are mocked and buffeted, and all the lovably comic souls are brought in and entertained at a gigantic birthday party. That is why the absurdities in Dickens can reach a poetical height, soar into the blue: they are not a record of actuality but part of a dream of life: they do not belong to things as they are but to things as they ought to be.

Art

Humour has existed in British art for many centuries, but it became widespread in the 18^th century thanks to William Hogarth, who gave us a complete picture of the ages. Hogarth illustrates a literary satire or moral tale. The force of his satire, the variety and the truth of his representation influenced on such outstanding writers as William Hazlitt, Charles Lamb. According to the words of William Hazlitt, one of the great critics of The English language and British culture, Hogarth paints nothing but comedy and tragic-comedy. He does not represent folly or vice in its incipient, or dormant, or grub state; but full-grown, with wings, pampered into all sorts of affection, airy, ostentatious, and extravagant. Hogarth never looks at any object but to find out a moral or a ludicrous effect. In looking at Hogarth, you are ready to burst your sides with laughing at the unaccountable jumble of odd things which are brought together.

The comic art of the latter half of the eighteenth century is largely that of caricature. Gillray, Rowlandson, Sandby, Collet, Sayer, Bunbury, Woodward are the representatives of this tendency. This was the era of John Bull, whose broad fist we seem to see in all the drawings of the period. The British do not appear to have had any nerves but only immense appetites and corresponding immensities of vitality and strength; a caricature has not a point but a felling blow from a cudgel; all foreigners are depicted as they were apes; the humour is like the charge of a bull.

But Gillray must be set apart from the other comic draughtsmen of his time. He has a grim humour of his own, but what distinguishes him, apart from his magnificent technique, is a malice at once so shrewd and passionate that it has a touch of sublimity about it. It was a bad day’s work for George III when he made a lasting enemy of Gillray, when he refused to look at the sketches Gillray had made for Loutherbourg’s picture of the Siege of Valenciennes. Never was any man, king or commoner handled with more devastating malice. Gillray turns his Farmer George into a figure of farce. In the print, Royal Affability, we see the king, stupid and complacent, with a little tubby wife hanging on his arm, addressing a startled peasant who has just come from the pigs:’ Well, friend, where are you going, hay? What’s your name, hay?’

In another one the famous apple dumplings are introduced. We see a grinning old woman busy with her dumplings while the king peers through the window and cries in astonishment: “ Hay? Hay? Apple dumplings? How get the apples in-how? Are they made without seams?” Equally bitter are Gillray’s French Revolution and Napoleonic caricatures.

Conclusion

Stephen Fry considers humour to come high on the list of the features characterizing the British. Banter, self-mockery and laughter at ill-luck surely do constitute one of the British’s strongest and most defining qualities. Its downside is a tendency to laugh at what the British don’t understand, shrilly to mock the unfamiliar, the alien and the new.

The following features make English humour unique:

· The value the British put on humour, the central importance of humour in British 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.

· British humour is not obviously funny. It is amusing, but only in an understated way. It is humour, but it is a restrained, refined, subtle form of humour.

· British humour in not cross-culturally funny, since it is tightly connected with the British culture and word play

Having made the research, analysed the British culture, we are now ready to answer the most significant question: What social functions does humour serve for the English?

Laughing with others serves to relieve tension, which is perhaps why the British do so much of it; they have little tolerance for hostility in relationships, and humour can help to ease these feelings and produce the kind of comfortable state of things in which they thrive emotionally. A similar sense of humour is one of the most important things that the British can have in common with someone else, so making a humorous remark is also a way of gauging one’s compatibility with another person. Laughing at a shared problem gives a sense of companionship in difficulty that is very reassuring (we can remain the humorous material produced during World War II.) Humour is frequently used to draw the sting or fear out of any situation. It is also a way of deflecting embarrassment or ridicule in social situations: their famed ability to laugh at themselves, both individually and as a group, pays dividends in disarming the scorn of others, by showing that they are not egotistical enough to care that they have just made a fool of ourselves. Because many British people are essentially fairly sensitive and vulnerable, this use of humour acts as a powerful buffer against criticism and loss of self-esteem. At the same time, however, the British are given to “taking the mickey” – particularly out of others’ regional accents and idiosyncrasies— and an ability to accept this is seen as a sign of one’s overall likeability and lack of pomposity. This sort of teasing helps to build closeness between friends and family members, partly because it dampens down destructive egotism and partly because, as already noted, we identify strongly with those they find amusing.

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