Jokes and their Relations to Society [Reprint 2012 ed.] 9783110806144, 9783110161045

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Jokes and their Relation to Society

W DE G

Humor Research 4

Editors

Victor Raskin Willibald Ruch

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

Jokes and their Relation to Society

by

Christie Davies

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

1998

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin.

© Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

Library of Congress - Cataloging-in-Publication

Data

Davies, Christie. Jokes and their relation to society / by Christie Davies. p. cm. - (Humor research : 4) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 3-11-016104-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Wit and humor - Social aspects. I. Title. II. Series. PN6149.S62D37 1998 306.4'81-dc21 98-27688 CIP

Die Deutsche Bibliothek - Cataloging-in-Publication

Data

Davies, Christie: Jokes and their relation to society / by Christie Davies. - Berlin ; New York : Mouton de Gruyter, 1998 (Humor research ; 4) ISBN 3-11-016104-4

© Copyright 1998 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co., D-10785 Berlin All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover Design: Christopher Schneider, Berlin. Printing: Druckerei Hildebrand, Berlin. - Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer, Berlin. Printed in Germany.

For Gwenda, Janetta and in memory of my father, Christy Davies.

Acknowledgements

Jokes and their Relation to Society is a comparative and historical study of jokes and other forms of humour that has required the advice and assistance of scholars from many countries. I am particularly strongly conscious of the help I have received in the translation and interpretation of jokes from very many languages. In particular, I wish to thank Goh Abe, Stanislav Andreski, Jason Annets, Mahadev Apte, Zyg Baranski, Arthur Asa Berger, Wladyslaw Chlopicki, Peter Cook, William Coupe, Pete Crofts, Philip Davies, Emil Draitser, Alan Dundes, Malcolm Fisher, Vera Gaspariková, André and Liliane Ghilain, Charles Gruner, Robin Gwyndaf, J. R. Hawthorn, Melvin Helitzer, Borek Hnizdo, John Hobgood, Bengt Holbek, Colin Holmes, Irving Louis Horowitz, Randolph Ivy, Christoph Jaffke, Maijatta Jauhianen, Mark, Janet and Samual Jenkinson, Peter K. Jones, Fardos Khan, Ronald Knowles, Ernest Krausz, Giselinde Kuipers, Lauri Lehtimaja, Russell Lewis, Richard Lynn, Des MacHale, David Martin, Irena Matlin, Gerard Matte, Geoffrey Matthews, Jessica Milner Davis, Lawrence Mintz, Peter Narváez, Mark Neal, Don and Aileen Nilsen, Clara Ong, Elliott Oring, Martyn Page, Charles Preston, PirkkoLissa Rausmaa, Walter Redfern, Selwyn Roderick, W. M. S. Russell, Ludek Rychetnik, Richard Scase, Barry Schechter, Charles Schutz, Alexander Shtromas, Elene Skondra, Paul Smith, Henry D. Spalding, Gerald Thomas, Eugene Trivizas, Margarita Vassileva, Magne Velure, Tony Walter, Alan Wardman, Vivian White, Larry Wilde, David and Ruth Williams, Roy Wolfe, Anat Zajdman and Avner Ziv, for providing me with data, advice, help with translation, and other valuable assistance. None of them is responsible for the use I have made of material they provided, and the opinions expressed in this book are of course entirely my own. A great deal of the research for this book has been done in archives and libraries and I would like to express my thanks for their help to the staff of the libraries and folklore archives of the University of California Berkeley, University College Dublin, the House of Humour and Satire in Gabrovo, Indiana University, the Université Laval, the Memorial University of Newfoundland and the Université de Moncton and to the staff of the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the library of the London School of Economics, the National Library of Wales, the Polish-American Museum in Chicago, the Schmulowitz Collection in San Francisco Public Library, the State Library of

viii Acknowledgements New South Wales and the libraries of Bombay, Cambridge, Glasgow, Leeds, Punjab, and Reading Universities and to the libraries of the University of Wales at Saint David's Lampeter, and Swansea. I am grateful to the British Council, the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Indian University Grants Council, the Institute for Humane Studies, the Japanese Society for Humour and the research board of the University of Reading for helping to fund the expenses involved in visiting the various libraries and archives. Parts of this work have previously been published as journal articles or as chapters in edited books and I would like to thank the publishers for their permission to reproduce them here, namely Macmillan for permission to use my chapter from Chris Powell and George E. C. Paton (eds.), Humour in Society, Resistance and Control, Basingstoke 1988, Paragon for permission to use my chapter from Alexander Shtromas and Morton Kaplan (eds.), The Soviet Union and the Challenge of the Future, volume 3, Ideology, Culture and Nationalism, New York 1989, Susquehenna University Press for permission to use my chapter from Patrick Parrinder and Christopher Rolfe (eds.), H. G. Wells under Revision, Toronto 1990, Sheffield Academic Press for permission to use my chapters from Gillian Bennett and Paul Smith (eds.), A Nest of Vipers, Sheffield 1990 and from Gillian Bennett (ed.), Spoken in Jest, Sheffield 1991 and the British Journal of Sociology for permission to reprint my article "The Protestant ethic and the comic spirit of capitalism" from Volume 43, Issue 3, 1992.1 would also like to thank all the relevant editors for encouraging and enabling me to write these articles in the first place. The same thanks must be extended to my present editors Victor Raskin and Willibald Ruch who invited me to write this book for the Mouton series in Humor Research and who also read and commented on the manuscript. I am very conscious of how much I owe these two leaders in humour scholarship for their unstinted help to me over many years. I must also thank Dr. Anke Beck and Heide Addicks for steering it through the press in Berlin and Mrs. Enid Richardson for her skilful word processing. The dedication once again expresses my gratitude to the members of my family who have sustained me during the time when I was writing this book and to the memory of my father who encouraged me to take a scholarly interest in humour just as he had earlier taught me to enjoy it.

Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction

1

Chapter 2 Traditional and modern Fooltowns: Local, regional and ethnic jokes about stupidity

11

Chapter From the3Milesians to the Milesians: The Irish-Pontian joke, its history and its absence in China and Japan

27

Chapter 4 The Protestant ethic and the comic spirit of capitalism

43

Chapter 5 Stupidity and rationality: Jokes from the iron cage

63

Chapter 6 Humour for the future and a future for humour

85

Chapter 7 Ethnic jokes about alcohol: A study of the humour of ambivalence

101

Chapter 8 "Nasty" legends, "sick" humour and ethnic jokes about stupidity

137

Chapter fun 9 of work: Making Humour as sociology in the humorous writings of H. G. Wells

151

Chapter 10: Conclusion

165

Notes

193

References

205

Index

229

χ Contents List of tables

Table 1. Stupid and canny jokes by country (Chapter 1) pp. 2-3 Table 2. Ethnic jokes about stupidity and alcohol (Chapter 7) p. 108 Table 3. Opposed sets of ethnic jokes (Chapter 10) p. 188 Table 4. Irish and Polish jokes about drinking (Notes to chapter 7) p. 201 Table 5. Irish and Polish jokes about stupidity (Notes to chapter 7) p. 201

Chapter 1 Introduction

The central theme that runs through each of the essays that constitute the chapters that follow is that the most common scripts (Raskin 1985) on which ethnic and many other kinds of jokes and humour are based make the butts of the jokes appear either stupid or canny, the Scots word canny being a convenient way of suggesting that (for the purpose of the jokes) a group is crafty and stingy (Davies 1990a). The reasons for this seem to lie in the nature of work in modem societies, which threatens everyone with two opposed kinds of failure. First, there is always present the threat that one will fail to master some aspect of the world of work and be regarded as stupid in consequence, particularly at a time of rapid technical and commercial change. The second mode of failure and the one that awaits the canny is that one will be so absorbed with working, calculating and making money, as to lose out on the pleasures of life and to forfeit the trust and esteem of others by being too clever and too calculating. In general, the stupidity jokes are pinned on a familiar group, one similar to the joke-tellers but who live at the periphery of the joke-teller's country or culture. The people at the centre are thus laughing at what appears to them to be a slightly strange version of themselves; almost as if they were to see themselves in a distorting mirror at a fair ground. The butts of stupidity jokes are not a distant or alien group. This centre-periphery relationship may take a geographical, economic, linguistic or even religious form (Davies 1990a: 4083). Sometimes the two groups may be hostile or in a state of conflict, sometimes they live as amicable neighbours and sometimes they are indifferent to one another, as may be deduced from a perusal of the cases listed in Table 1. The jokes are essentially the same in all three cases and cannot be related easily to the presence or absence of conflict or hostility. It has been shown in the earlier studies (Davies 1990a: 84-101) and is shown again here that it is futile to search for an explanation of stupidity jokes in terms of inter-group conflict or tensions. The key explanation of these jokes is always the centreedge relationships of the jokers and the butts of their jokes.

2

Introduction

Table 1. Stupid and canny jokes by country Country where stupid and canny jokes are told

Identity of stupid groups in the jokes

Identity of the canny group in the joke

United States

Poles (and others locally e.g. Italians Portuguese)

Scots, Jews, New England Yankees.

Canada (Central and Maritime Canada incl. Ontario and Quebec)

Newfoundlanders ("Newfies")

Scots, Jews, Nova Scotians

Canada (West)

Ukrainians, Icelanders

Scots, Jews

Mexico

Yucatecos (from Yucatan)

Regiomontanos (citizens of Monterrey)

Columbia

Pastusos (from Pasto in Nariño)

England

Irish

Wales

Irish

Scotland

Irish

Aberdonians (from Aberdeen), Jews

Ireland

Kerrymen

Scots, Jews

France

Belgians, French Swiss (Ouin-Ouin)

Auvergnats (from the Auvergne) Scots, Jews

Netherlands

Belgians, Limburgers

Scots, Jews

Germany

Ostfrieslanders

Swabians, Scots, Jews

Southern Italians

Milanese, Genovese, Florentines, Scots, Jews, Levantinis.

Fribourgers from Fribourg/Freiburg

Genevois, Balois (from Geneva and Bâle/Basel), Jews

People from Lepe in Andalucía

Aragonese, Catalans

Scots, Jews

Italy

Switzerland

Spain

Paisas (from Antioquia)

Cardis (from Cardiganshire/Ceredigion), Scots, Jews

Introduction

Country where stupid and canny jokes are told

Identity of stupid groups in the jokes

Identity of the canny group in the joke

Finland

Karelians

Laihians (from Laihia), Scots

Bulgaria

Sopi (peasants from the hinterland of Sofia)

Gabrovonians (from Gabrovo), Armenians

Greece

Pontians (Black Sea Greeks)

3

Armenians

Russia

Ukrainians, Chukchees

India

Sikhs (Sardarjis)

Pakistan

Sikhs (Sardarjis)

Hindus, especially Gujaratis

Iran

Rashtis (Azéris from Rasht)

Armenians, people from Isfahan or Tabriz

Nigeria

Hausas

Ibos

South Africa

Afrikaners (van der Merwe)

Scots, Jews

Australia

Irish, Tasmanians

Scots, Jews

New Zealand

Irish, Maoris (North Island), West Coasters (South Island)

Scots, Jews, Dutch

Jews Gujaratis, Sindis

In addition, stupidity jokes are told about Carinthians and Burgenlanders in Austria, about the citizens of Aarhus and about Norwegians in Denmark, about Finns and Norwegians in Sweden, about Bosnians and Albanians in the former Jugoslavia, about Slovaks in the Czech lands, about Uzbeks in Tadzhikistan, about Kurds in Iraq, about Kurdish Jews and Moroccan Jews in Israel, about the L a z ( f r o m Trebizond) in Turkey, about Nubians and Sa'idis (Southerners) in Egypt, about Tunisians in Algeria. Clearly we have here the material for an analysis based on international comparisons. The stupidity jokes are almost universal and j o k e s about canny people are also very widespread, although concentrated in several countries

4 Introduction

on a particular well-known group such as the Scots, rather than each country having its own local version as in the jokes about stupidity. The modern ethnic jokes about stupidity are more numerous than those told in the past and in general better constructed, but they are nonetheless very similar to the older genre of jokes about fooltowns. This similarity is examined in Chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 2 looks at the history of fooltowns renowned in the past for their comic stupidity and compares them with more modern stupidity jokes which may be pinned on a town, such as Lepe in Andalucía in Spain, Aarhus in Denmark or Rasht in Iran, on the people from a region or a county such as the jokes about the Laz in Turkey, the Lancastrians in England, or the Kerrymen in Ireland, on the people of a province such as Newfoundland, on an ethnic minority such as Polish-Americans or on a nation such as the peoples of Belgium or Ireland. In general it may be said that the similarities between the stupidity jokes operating at different levels (i.e. town/region/ethnic group/nation) are more important than the differences between them. This is not surprising since the differences between the categories are often the result of the arbitrary outcomes of yesterday's politics. Until 1922 southern Ireland was part of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland still is. Belgium has only been an independent country since 1830, having previously been part of France and the Netherlands and having also been ruled by the Spanish and the Austrians. It may well in the future split into two units, a Flemish-speaking Flanders and a French-speaking Wallonia. As the research that lead to the writing of this book was being carried out, both Jugoslavia and Bosnia split into fragments. It may well be that the violent conflicts in Bosnia have a shared origin with the Jugoslav ethnic jokes of the 1960s and 1970s about stupid Bosnians. The conflict in Bosnia as compared with the quiet secession from Jugoslavia of Slovenia and Macedonia has been a consequence of the mixed ethnic and religious composition of the province, which contains Orthodox Serbs, Roman Catholic Croatians and Muslims, some of whom may be the descendants of Christian heretics. Each group has tried to carve out a sector for itself by driving out the others in a vicious persecution that has become known as ethnic cleansing. Before the most recent carving up of Jugoslavia the Bosnians would have been made up of an intermingling of all three groups who share a more or less common language, which is why they were the butt of stupidity jokes told by both Serbs and Croatians, since the Bosnians would have appeared to them as a distorted mixed-up version of themselves, rather as the Belgians are the butt of stupidity jokes in both France and the Netherlands. A further and entirely peaceful parallel would be the way in which both French and German-speak-

Introduction 5

ing Swiss tell stupidity jokes about people from the canton of Fribourg/Freiburg (Herdi 1979: 56-57; Ringo-Ringo 1978: 86), a mixed language canton where one third of the population speaks French and the other two thirds SwissGerman (Bonjour, Offler and Potter 1952: 304; Schweizerische Volkszählung 1980). Such peoples constitute a Transitional Wavering People known by the acronymn TWP [the W is pronounced like the 'oo' in took] or even a Transitional Wavering People and Seemingly Inderminate Nation known by the acronym TWPSIN. Their uncertain geographical position in a political order of jostling nation states or ethnic groups seeking to be nations both renders them likely to be the butt of jokes about stupidity (which is a matter of no importance) and also in certain cases a centre of conflict (which is disastrous for the people who live there). Belgium and Bosnia have long been the cockpits of Europe. If politicians of all kinds had studied the ethnic jokes of the region, they might have behaved with more caution where Bosnia was concerned. The Jugoslavian stupidity jokes were not an indication of an existing conflict but provided a warning that Bosnia lay on a political fracture line, where it was not possible easily to parcel out territory in an equitable and acceptable way. The trouble with justice is that there is never enough of it to go round. 1 Had the political and military leaders of the Serbs, Croatians and Muslims and their backers from outside acted in a more circumspect fashion and been more willing to compromise, the fighting might have been avoided. Wars are made by politicians and generals who command organizations designed for that purpose. They are in that respect quite different from jokes, or prices arrived at in a free market, or conversations, which are a form of spontaneous order resulting from the unplanned interaction of individuals. An artillery barrage and ethnic jokes are about as unlike as any two social phenomena can be; yet if we pay attention to the latter it could in some cases lead us to take precautions which would enable us to avoid the former. What can be said with certainty is that the pre-existing Jugoslav jokes about stupid Bosnians played no significant part in creating or exacerbating the present conflicts; the conflicts had been rumbling since the last years of that ailing curiosity, the Ottoman Empire, a Muslim, Asian colonial empire, many of whose subjects were European Christians. Within the twentieth century Jugoslavia has been prevented by the Austrians and Hungarians, created by the French, destroyed by the Germans and precariously held together by fear of the Russians. The fall of the Soviet Empire took away the Jugoslav fear of a Russian invasion via its Warsaw pact allies and left the different ethnic groups and semi-nations that constituted Jugoslavia free to fight among

6

Introduction

themselves. Politics is about politics, i.e. the behaviour of those who hold power and can command the use of organised force. The telling of ethnic jokes did not and could not have been a causal factor in the Jugoslav conflict but jokes are a source of information as in the following Jugoslav joke from the 1960s: Two African students met in their home-town. One was a graduate of the University of Belgrade [in Serbia] and the other of Zagreb University [in Croatia]. They began to quarrel over some trivial issue. Finally, one shouted at the other, "Go fuck your Serbian Mother". The other replied: "Huh, go fuck your Croatian mother".

At the time (late 1960s) the official line put out by the Jugoslav government claimed that there was no internal ethnic dissension in Jugoslavia, but the British army was already training its officers with a war-game called "Death of Tito," in which each of the republics that made up the federal state of Jugoslavia had its own player in the game. They were concerned, lest World War III, like World War I, should begin in Sarajevo, sparked off by a local dispute, and they wanted to be prepared for it. The joke quoted above, far from rendering an inter-ethnic Serb-Croat dispute more likely, shows a certain awareness of dangerous tensions on the part of those who shared it. Had the politicians and military men shown a similar degree of amused detachment, the recent fighting might have been avoided. I have discussed the case of the Jugoslav jokes at some length, not because they are of any great importance for the study of humour, but in order to dismiss the politically correct view that there is something damaging and reprehensible about the telling of ethnic jokes. War is waged by blood and iron, not by jokes In Chapter 3 the coincidence that the word Milesian applies both to the Irish who are the butt of modern British jokes about stupidity and to the citizens of Miletus, about whom the ancient Greeks told much the same kind of jokes, is also used to explore and emphasize the continuities between ancient and modern humour. In thriving commercial cities such as Athens there was clearly already scope for stupidity jokes to be told by those at the centre of Greek civilizations about those who lived at its edge. Even though the ancient Greeks knew nothing of the rapid technical innovation that has shaped the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it can be argued that they were an alert, widely-travelled, trading and questioning people who were thus able to tell "modern" jokes about stupidity. Alternatively, the view may be taken that today's stupidity jokes are thousands of years old and universal and that the

Introduction

1

growth of modern industrial societies has merely given them a boost. A further boost has been given to specifically ethnic jokes by the rise of the modern nation-state which has provided its citizens with a national and ethnic, as distinct from a local loyalty. Since stupidity jokes are told about a group similar to the joke-tellers, then this change is likely to lead to a corresponding shift in the butt of ethnic jokes from being about a neighbouring town or village like the joke-tellers' own town or village, to being about a different but similar nation or ethnic group. What the jokers see themselves as being also determines what kind of group they will perceive as being like a distorted version of themselves and thus suited to be the butt of jokes about stupidity. Towns laugh at towns and countries laugh at countries. In Chapter 4 the jokes about those "canny" groups who, like the Scots, have a Calvinist background will be examined in the light of Max Weber's notable thesis The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber's work on bureaucracy will likewise be used to analyse both a wide range of stupidity jokes and a broad spectrum of jokes that can be opposed to them, jokes that mock the over-diligent and the over-obedient as well as the excessively canny. Chapter 5 has accordingly been given the title "Stupidity and rationality: Jokes from the iron cage". In this chapter, and in the chapter which follows (Chapter 6: "Humour for the future and a future for humour") emphasis is placed on the political jokes from the formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe and in particular on the way jokes were created that exposed the irrational aspect of the politicised bureaucracies that dominated those societies. In many cases the stupidity jokes that were told in these countries, when they were under communist rule, about politicians, apparatchiks and the militia, are identical or very similar to the ethnic jokes told about stupidity in the rest of the world. This coincidence is not accidental and poses some interesting sociological problems that need to be resolved. There are many ethnic jokes about the consumption of alcohol, which is not surprising given that alcohol is both the main legal euphoriant drug in Western societies and a source of serious social problems. In particular it conflicts with the work ethic of modern industrial societies which requires sobriety, diligence, reliability and regularity. Given the ambivalent attitudes to alcohol held in many societies, it seems likely that there should exist a similar dichotomy in ethnic jokes about alcohol to that outlined earlier regarding the contrasting ethnic jokes about the stupid and the canny. Indeed, a careful examination of ethnic jokes about alcohol does reveal a contrast between ethnic jokes about over-enthusiastic drinkers on the one hand and ethnic jokes about those who live in societies where one part of the society at

8

Introduction

least takes a strongly negative and puritanical attitude towards the drinking of alcohol. It is important also to note the jokes that could exist but don't; there are very few alcohol jokes about ethnic groups such as the Jews who drink in moderation. Also there is no simple one to one relationship between the kind of ethnic jokes about alcohol consumption that get pinned on a group and the ethnic jokes about the stupid and the canny. Rather there is a complex series of relationships between these two kinds of ethnic jokes and the purpose of Chapter 7 is to elucidate these relationships. In Chapters 8 and 9 the analysis of jokes which has been the basis of the previous chapters is taken one stage further and applied to other humorous items; first modern urban legends which have recently been extensively studied, particularly by folklorists, and secondly the humorous novels of a particular writer, H. G. Wells. Urban legends have often been treated as a completely separate genre from jokes but in fact there is often a considerable similarity between the two, both in content and in structure. Indeed, it is difficult in some cases to tell whether a tale is a joke that is known to be a mere invention and intended to make people laugh or a modern urban legend that purports to be a true account of the experience of a friend of a friend and is intended to shock. Jokes and urban legends are overlapping sets and this is particularly true in the case of (a) ethnic jokes about stupidity and (b) sick jokes; both kinds of jokes tend to end in disaster, which in turn is a key element in many of today's "nasty" modern legends and particularly those that involve advanced technology. In principle it ought to be possible to analyse them together. Jokes are numerous and have no author, which makes it possible to use them to compare one culture with another, by noting which jokes are constant across cultures and which are peculiar to some cultures and missing from others. The joke that isn't told, though in principle it could be, such as the absence of American or British jokes about the Japanese in World War II, is also a highly significant phenomenon. The absence of jokes about the Japanese is hardly compatible with the view that jokes are primarily vehicles for expressing hostility. Likewise it is significant that the British and the French do not include dirtiness in the traits they ascribe to the butts of their stupidity jokes (the Irish and the Belgians respectively) despite examples of parallel jokes being available to them in the American jokes about Poles and the bilingual (in English and French) Canadian jokes about Newfoundlanders, both of which treat dirtiness as just one more aspect of stupidity. Given that in serious discourse "dirty" has a stronger negative connotation than "stupid" (e.g. dirty bugger is stronger than silly bugger), a believer in the hostility theory of humour

Introduction

9

should infer that the Americans and Canadians feel more hostile towards the Poles and Newfoundlanders than the British and French do towards the Irish and Belgians respectively. Unfortunately, for the proponents of this theory there is no independent evidence at all to show that this is the case, so the theory is falsified. It is clearly much more difficult to apply this kind of method to longer, authored, humorous works such as a novel. However, if the ethnic jokes about the stupid and the canny are, as has been suggested here, related to the pressures of work in a modern society, then the generalizations derived from the analysis of these jokes should have some application to comedies whose core is the way individuals experience work in a modem society. The comic novels of H. G. Wells fall into this category, which is why they have been chosen for analysis here. Although Wells' comedies deal with work as it was experienced by the lower middle classes in Britain in the years before the First World War, they still have a relevance to the way work impinges on people today. A fortunate few may be able to retreat into a post-modern world where hobbies and obsessions rule, but for most people work is both an important aspect of their lives and one that is very much plugged into a harsh modern reality; their working lives are shaped by the market-place and bureaucracy, just as they were when H. G. Wells was writing at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is a measure of Wells' genius that he could write comedies about the tedium of work, the frustration of crushed creativity and the horrors of unemployment and bankruptcy in a way that is both cheerful and funny. Both those who fail to fit in with the work ethic of their society and those who have been totally taken over by it, both the stupid and the canny, appear prominently in Wells' comedies. Wells' comedies can be seen as criticisms of the capitalist society of his own time and indeed he makes these criticisms in a much more explicit way in his other writings. In his comedies he portrays capitalism as an economic system which endlessly squeezes people to obtain more out of less and which forces individuals to compete with one another until the stupid and the canny have been relentlessly sorted out. In the process it destroys the social world which characterises those who get labelled stupid in the jokes, a world of stability, tradition, inertia and strong personal ties. Wells' canny characters are equally the victims of such a society for they lead narrow specialised lives obsessed with financial or bureaucratic matters, as indeed was indicated by Max Weber writing at much the same time as H. G. Wells. Capitalism, with its many faults, is the worst of all economic systems, except for all the others. In particular capitalism has proved superior to the

10

Introduction

former socialist economies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe where work was far more tedious and oppressive again than in capitalist societies and the economic rewards considerably less. If the ethnic jokes about the stupid and the canny can be perceived as expressing the discontents of a capitalist society, then the political jokes of the former socialist countries may well have expressed the far greater discontents of the socialist system. At the same time it must be realised that this interpretation of jokes, which by their very nature are ambiguous, is an arbitrary one and individual East European joke-tellers may have found many other meanings in their jokes. The jokes from Eastern Europe are a reminder to the reader of H. G. Wells' humorous novels that these comedies are set in England prior to the First World War and that Wells' explicit and implicit social criticism now seems dated, both because of the rise and fall of the socialist alternative since that time and because the liberal, capitalist societies of the West have evolved in unexpected directions, solved old problems and encountered new ones. Despite this, Wells' humour is timeless in the sense that, say, the humour of Cervantes or Rabelais or Swift or Hasek is timeless; it is not necessary to grasp all the contemporary references in their work to appreciate the humour. Also the core of Wells' comedies, the mockery of work, is still valid in a world that remains harshly modern and the reader can still recognize and laugh with the plight of his inept lower-middle class small heroes. Also as with the ethnic jokes about the canny, we can easily laugh at Wells' materially successful characters, who enforce the oppressive work ethic of their society, yet are also clearly trapped by it themselves.

Chapter 2 Fooltowns: Traditional and modern Local, regional and ethnic jokes about stupidity

Fooltowns: Centre versus periphery, urban versus rural Jokes about stupidity have always been pinned on peoples of, or from, a particular village, town, region or nation. The jokes told today in Egypt about the simplicity of the Nubians from the far south are based on a comic script about Nubians that is thousands of years old.1 The Nubians then, as now, lived on the southern periphery of Egyptian civilization, a group of distant rustic provincials, neither entirely foreign nor wholly Egyptian. 2 The ancient origins of ethnic jokes of this type was noted at least as long ago as 1622 when Thomas Fuller ([1662] 1811, 2: 206) noted (see p. 32) that such jokes were told about the Phrygians, Abderites and Boeotians in the ancient world. The Boeotians, like so many other butts of ethnic jokes about stupidity, were the rustic peasant neighbours of a great urban metropolis (Andrewes 1971: 94). Athens was a commercial city and one of the centres of Greek civilization, whilst their neighbours were "a whole class of free and independent farmers operating on a small scale in Boetia around 700 BC" (Andrewes 1971: 101). These ancient jokes of the city dwellers of Athens about the predominantly pastoral and agricultural Boeotians survive, even today, in the adjective "Boeotian", meaning an illiterate rustic, and so do the jokes about Abdera, which have given us the terms "abderite" and "abderitic" for a foolish simple-minded person ( Brewer's Dictionary 1981: 137; Grambs 1986: 27; von Wieland 1861). Many of the jokes the classical world told about allegedly stupid communities such as Cumae or Abdera have been written down and recorded. Such cities and regions were often seen as ambiguous; the peoples mocked by the ancient Greeks, for instance, often lived in Greek cities at the edge of Greek civilization or were surrounded, and in consequence influenced and penetrated by, the incomprehensibly babbling and thus, by extension, uncultured ba-babarians ( Brewer's Dictionary 1981: 80).1 Many of the ancient jokes about their stupidity have survived to the present day:

12 Fooltowns: Traditional and modern

The father of a man of Cumae having died at Alexandria, the son dutifully took the body to the embalmers. When he returned at the appointed time to fetch it away, there happened to be a number of bodies in the same place, so he was asked if his father had any peculiarity by which his body might be recognized and the wittol replied, "he had a cough". (Clouston 1888: 15) A man of Abdera was trying to hang himself but the rope broke and he cut his head. He went to the doctor to have it patched up and then returned and hanged himself. (Ferguson 1968: 96) Jokes about foolish communities were later to be found all over Europe. Just as today, every country has its own ethnic jokes about stupidity (see pp. 2-3), so in the past every region had a foolish town or village whose "stupidity" formed the basis of many jests and anecdotes — for example, Gotham and Austwick in England; Risca and Abercregan in Wales; Gordon and Assynt in Scotland; Schilde, Domna, Fiinsing, Mundinga and Teterow in Germany; Mols and Agger in Denmark; Kampen in Holland; Dinant and Malleghem in Belgium; Saint-Maixent in France; Belmont in Switzerland; Selpice, Vazec, Zahoriah, Prelouch and Nova Lhota in the former Czechoslovakia; Ràtót in Hungary; Beira in Portugal; Lepe in Spain; and Pitsilia in Cyprus. 4 In some countries there were a number of such foolish communities that became the butt of jokes: indeed as many as forty-five have been noted in England alone (Briggs 1970: Part A, 2, 1-5; Briggs 1977: 51-55). The reputation of a community for comic stupidity might well last for hundreds of years. Alfred Stapleton (1900: 9; see also 9-11, 47-48) has traced the tales of the foolish men of Gotham back to a fifteenth-century manuscript and notes that "we have an extent of four and a half centuries during which we know the reputation of the village has been current. Beyond this, as in other cases, we can safely assume the tradition had been current long anterior to the earliest recorded notice." It seems likely that jokes about stupidity were attached to local communities in the past for much the same reasons as they are tied to ethnic minorities and neighbouring nations today. An undesirable quality is rendered comic and exported to another group who live on the edge of the joke-tellers' social universe. When people define who they are in terms of their membership of a local community, then they will tell jokes about the stupidity of the people of some other local community, defining who they are not in terms of a social unit similar to the one which gives them their basic identity. In traditional societies, where people derive one of their most important social identities from their membership of a local community, the jokes are told about the

Centre versus periphery, urban versus rural

13

members of a group that is recognizably similar and who, to the joke-tellers look like themselves as seen in a distorting mirror. Just as we laugh at the reflections of ourselves we see in a hall of curved mirrors, so too we laugh at jokes about the stupidity of our nearest neighbours. The members of a joke-telling and joke-sharing group enjoy a "sudden burst of glory" as the stupidity of the others is unveiled and their own superiority is briefly confirmed. We should not mistake the glee of the winners in this successful piece of playful aggression for real hostility. In the past it was often the people of the next village, township or parish who were seen as rivals, a group known to be essentially similar to one's own and yet also held to be inferior, though perhaps only by location.5 If the sense of superiority to one's rival is or was buttressed by the recognized advantages that a community on the main routes of transport and trade has over a more remote community at the periphery, or that an urban centre has over its rural hinterland, then jokes about the alleged stupidity of the latter are likely to emerge. The oncefamous jokes about the village of Gotham in England certainly seem to reflect its position as a relatively isolated village seen in contrast to the busy market and manufacturing town of the "smiths" of Nottingham. In more recent times jokes have been told in Port Talbot in Glamorgan in Wales about the alleged stupidity of the people of Abercregan, a mining village at the head of a "dead-end" valley, close to the industrial town of Port Talbot, which is a port, a major steel- and tinplate-manufacturing town and on the main roadand rail-routes from Wales to London. Similarly, in the busy manufacturing, market and university town of Reading in England, people in their eighties still remember the time when jokes "akin to present day Irish jokes" or American Polish jokes were told about the people of the village of Tadley. Roger Searing (1984) wrote of his boyhood excursions by bicycle from Reading to Tadley in the 1920s that they never lingered in Tadley, for the "wild lads of Tadley seemed as foreign to us as Red Indians or Hottentots... we didn't wait to find a solution to the mysterious tales we had heard of this strange village". The jokes of the 1920s seem to stem from the (then) remoteness of the village, whose people worked as logcutters and wore distinctive "pattens", a kind of wooden clog for walking through the muddy woods around Tadley (a comic occupational badge equivalent to the present day jokes about the rubber boots, known as "wellies" of Irish labourers on English building sites or the long rubber boots worn by Newfoundland fisherman). They made hurdles, fencing, pegs and besom brooms from the local wood. The last of these gave rise to local jokes about the "Tadley witch".

14 Fooltowns: Traditional and modern

In the 1920s the tendency for Tadley to be the butt of local wags was reinforced by the skill of touring professional comedians acting as "switchers" of jokes. Roger Searing (1984) wrote: There must have been a member of staff at the Palace Theatre in Reading in the '20s who was consulted by all of the comedians for advice on local joke material and he must have had a particular relationship with Tadley. There was frequent referencefromthe stage to "Tadley-God-help-us", "Tadley Treacle Mines", "The Tadley Witch", jokes concerning Tadley akin to present day Irish jokes.

From local to ethnic jokes The decline of Tadley jokes and other similar jokes and their replacement by Irish jokes in Britain is in part due to the creation of national media networks, with a corresponding decline in the vitality of the local theatres and music halls where the touring comedians performed. Comedians now tend to tell jokes which latch on to ethnic scripts and joke-conventions which are widely understood, and to abandon comic references which only have a very local and restricted meaning. Economies of scale have likewise led to the replacement of local joke-books by nationally available books of ethnic jokes. A more deep-rooted reason for the switch to ethnic jokes is the decay of people's sense of being primarily members of a local community, and its replacement by ethnic nationalism as the basis of their identity (Smith 1981 : 69-71). People's sense of what they are not has also become ethnic. Accordingly, comic stupidity has to be exported into the domain of another ethnic group rather than that of another local community. Also, the expansion of the urban world into rural areas has forced once-remote villages to become part of an integrated economy of increasingly mobile people (Pähl 1968: 269277). Tadley jokes are no longer told and would have no meaning for the younger citizens of Reading, for Tadley is now a commuter village and many of the people who live there are scientists and technicians in the nearby Atomic Weapons Research Establishment set up at Aldermaston in 1951. Jokes from Reading now export stupidity safely to Ireland; it would hardly do to locate it in atomic Aldermaston. In Britain, as in many other countries, ethnic jokes about stupidity have largely replaced those about foolish communities. Today even the jokes about Gotham are almost forgotten. When the village was

From local to ethnic jokes

15

damaged by a tornado in 1984, the reports in the British press did not so much as mention its former fame. One piece of indirect evidence that the change from local to ethnic jokes about stupidity has been the result of the rise of national and ethnic loyalties at the expense of local ones is that jokes about "stupid" towns and villages have survived best in countries where the sense of national identity is relatively weak and local ties are very strong. Thus in Italy there are jokes about the individual quirks and characteristics of the people of almost every city and province, though it is significant that stupidity, when not pinned on Southern Italians in general or on the Carabinieri is sometimes assigned to the citizens of Cuneo, a town set on a wedge of land between two rivers at the very edge of Italy, close to the border with France at the foot of the Alpes Maritimes. Local, as distinct from ethnic or national, jokes are even more prevalent in Syria and Lebanon. In both countries many jokes are still told about the inhabitants of two towns, Horns and Hama, who are reputedly always quarrelling with each other and are renowned for their alleged stupidity. The two towns both lie on the river Asi (Orontes), and the jokes often depict them as engaged in endless disputes concerning the best way to divide up the river between them. In one such joke: Finally they decided upon a place to draw the line and they put a rope across the river to mark it. One evening while some people from Horns were passing in the area of this line of demarcation, they heard some noise by the river. Upon checking, they found some people from Hama taking buckets of water from the Horns side and putting them in the Hama side. So the people from Horns got really mad and took the buckets away and started removing water from the Hama side and putting it back in the Horns side. (UCBFA, Lebanese file. Collected by Nan Elliott 1970) 6

Other jokes contrast the canny people of the capital cities Beirut and Damascus with the simplicity of provincials from towns such as Aleppo: A young Aleppan wants to go to Beirut and an older Aleppan is giving his advice: "Beirut is a city of crooks and when you buy anything always bargain the price down half." The young Aleppan listens and goes to Beirut and goes into a shop and asks for a pair of pants. And the shopkeeper says: "This costs 100 Lebanese liras." So the Aleppan says: "Aha you can't fool me — 50." They are bargaining. The shop-keeper says: "Well I'll make it 80."

16 Fooltowns:

Traditional and modern

So the Aleppan says: "I'll only pay 40." They bargain, and the shop-keeper says 70 and the Aleppan 35. And it continues. Finally the shop-keeper is intrigued by the guy and says: "I'll give you the pants for free." Then the Aleppan says: "I'll take half the pants!" (UCBFA, Lebanese file) 7

Jacqueline Ferraro who collected this joke added: When I asked Seteney [her informant, a Jordanian who heard the joke in Beirut, Lebanon] about the fact that their jokes were ascribed to individuals from a particular city, she commented on the strong city attachment that people in the Middle East feel. Historically there was a large empire there and people felt they belonged to their city or village rather than anything else.

Foreign rule by the Turks and the French — which in each case only came to an end as a result of British military intervention — arbitrary frontiers and, in the case of Lebanon, communal strife, not merely between Christians, Muslims and Druze but between different sects, has inhibited the growth of any kind of secure national identity in the Levant (see Longrigg 1958: 2-24,123, 244, 358, 369). Local ties and local jokes continue to prevail. Today, in many countries in which the inhabitants of towns or districts are depicted as either foolish or canny, the small community referred to in the jokes may simply symbolize a larger region or a deeper ethnic division. Thus Persian jokes about people from the north-western provincial town of Rasht in Iran refer to a linguistic minority who live on the borders between Iran on the one hand and Turkey and Azerbaijan on the other. Similarly, Danish jokes about the people of the town of Aarhus (which is very close to Mois, a remote rural settlement that was traditionally the butt for Danish jokes about stupidity) may well refer to Jutes in general, for Aarhus is the capital of Jutland, one of the three major seagirt subdivisions of Denmark (Holbek 1975: 327-349). Guatemalan jokes about Guitecos, the people of the "Indian" town of Guite east of Guatamala City, are probably ethnic jokes about Indians as distinct from the people of Spanish descent or culture who live in the capital (Toledo 1965: 82-85,93-138).The former are labelled foolish (and the latter canny?) in jokes like the one below: Two Guitecos arrived at Guatemala City and wanted to take to their town the National Palace because they thought it was beautiful and they did not have an equal in their town. They then put down their suitcases on the ground and began to push the building. After two hours they saw that their suitcases were

The social roots of regional and local jokes

17

not there and one said: "Already we've gone far, because we cannot see the suitcases." (UCBFA, Guatemala file)

The social roots of regional and local jokes Although ethnic jokes have replaced jokes about smaller communities or groups, the latter often survive locally, and the ethnic jokes that prevail across a nation or even internationally still get adapted for local use. In the United States, for instance, the ubiquitous Polish jokes are adapted locally, not only as ethnic jokes about the Portuguese in San Francisco, the Italians in New Jersey, the Norwegians in the Dakotas, the Finns in Northern Michigan and so on, but also as jokes about the inhabitants of particular American states or the students and alumni of particular universities, such as Texas A and M (the "Aggies"), Virginia Tech (the Hokies) or Carolina State." In Britain, the standard pair of ethnic jokes about the "stupid" and the "canny", which today are usually told about the Irish and the Scots respectively, have a local equivalent in the north of England, where jokes about "canny" Yorkshiremen and "stupid" Lancastrians have a long history and indeed have outlived the shires that gave rise to them. 9 Local people may well still identify themselves with one of the two great northern rivals, Lancashire and Yorkshire, or even with the now obsolete "Ridings" into which Yorkshire was once divided. They certainly did in the past as can be seen from their jokes in both the twentieth (Spencer 1938: 247-248) and the nineteenth centuries: The late Lord Mansfield told the following anecdote about himself from the bench: He had turned off his coachman for certain acts of peculation, not uncommon in this class of person. The fellow begged his lordship to give him a character. "What kind of character can I give you?" said his lordship. "Oh my lord, any character your lordship chooses to give me I shall most thankfully receive." His lordship accordingly sat down and wrote as follows: "The bearer, JOHN has served me three years in the capacity of coachman, He is an able driver and a very sober man. I discharged him because he cheated me. (signed) MANSFIELD." John thanked his lordship and walked off. A few mornings afterwards when his lordship was going through his lobby to step into his coach for Westminster Hall, a man in a very handsome livery made him a low bow. To his surprise he recognized his late coachman. "Why, John", said his lordship,"you seem to have got an excellent place; how could you manage this with the character I gave you?" "Oh my lord", said John, "it was an exceedingly good character and I am come to return you thanks for it. My

18 Fooltowns: Traditional and modern

new master on reading it, said he observed your lordship recommended me as an able driver and a sober man." "These", said he, "are just the qualities I want in a coachman. I observe his lordship adds that he discharged you because you cheated him." "Hark you, sirrah", said he, "I'm a Yorkshireman, I'll defy you to cheat mei" (Howe 1891: 52-53) Mary Sidebottom was busy baking one evening, whilst Albert Edward, her husband, looked on. "Here", she said, "ah'll find thee summat to do. Here's a bob, slip deawn to t'stores an' fotch me a pound o'currants". "Aw reet", said Albert Edward, and putting on his cap, was leaving the room when his wife called him back. "Here's another bob", she said, "tha might as weel get a pound o' raisins too". Albert Edward toddled off, but not having returned after two hours his wife decided it was time to see what had happened. The store was only at the bottom of the street, so putting on her shawl she went in search of the missing husband. Arriving at the stores she saw Albert Edward standing in front of the shop. "Wheer dosta think tha's bin?" she shouted. "An' what art a doin' stondin' in front o't' shop fur?" Then to pile on the agony added: "Tha'rt a gawmless fool". Albert Edward looked relieved, and holding out both hands, each containing a shilling, he said: "Bi gum, lass, ah'm fain th'as coom, ah dunnot know which bob is fur currants, an' which is fur raisins." (Joell 1944: 34-35) Two Lancashire businessmen discussing a Yorkshireman who had recently joined their firm. "He's not a bad bloke", said one, "but have you noticed how he always lets one of us pick up the bill when we have a meal together?" "Aye", said the other. "He's got an impediment in his reach." (Crompton 1970a: 24) Buying her Sunday joint, the Yorkshirewoman noticed a large bone in the meat as the butcher put it on the scales. "I'm not 'avin' that", she said angrily. "You're givin' me a big piece o'bone." "Nay I'm not, lass", replied the butcher. "Tha's payin' for it." (Crompton 1970b: 26) British jokes about "canny" Yorkshiremen can be found as early as the late eighteenth century and still survive today, though on nothing like the scale of jokes about the Scots. The English saying "He's too far north for me", meaning "He's too canny, too cunning, a hard bargainer" refers to the people of Yorkshire in the north of England, though it can also apply to the people who live much further north again in Scotland, and even as far north as Aberdeen.

The social roots of regional and local jokes

19

"To come Yorkshire over someone" likewise means to swindle them ( Brewer's Dictionary 1981: 791; Grose [1811] 1971). Atone time Yorkshire, a very large county, was divided into three sub-sections called ridings for administrative purposes. These were the North Riding, the East Riding and the West Riding. The traditional strength of Puritan and Nonconformist Protestantism in the manufacturing towns of what used to be the West Riding of Yorkshire may well underlie the image of the canny Yorkshireman. In support of this suggestion it should be noted that Yorkshire "canny" jokes were also told about the people of the West Riding by those who lived in the East Riding of Yorkshire (see also pp.000). In Lancashire by contrast the strength of Roman Catholicism, both in the past (Braxnap 1910: 3) and in more recent times (Walker 1981: 7-10), may underlie (see pp. 61-62) the comic image of the gormless Lancastrian. In Yorkshire there has been a stronger sense of county identity than elsewhere in Britain, for in general the counties have become mere administrative districts that today can be merged and dissected at the whim of the central government. During the major reorganization of county boundaries in the 1970s, however, a minor alteration in the boundary between Lancashire and Yorkshire caused great indignation on the part of the people affected, who did not wish to alter the colour of their roses. Lancashire, along with the West Riding of Yorkshire and South Wales, was one of the pioneering centres of the industrial revolution and the word "Manchestertum" signifying the rule of hard-headed, competitive, industrial capitalists was once capable of reducing German romantics, militarists and socialists to a frenzy of impotent fury (Davis 1914: 268; Engels 1958: xxiii, XXX, 50-51). However, a great part of the workforce in the large mechanized cotton mills of Lancashire was unskilled and female, in contrast to the substantial strata of small masters and skilled workers to be found in the woollen industry of the West Riding or the metal industry in South Wales. As Adam Smith ([1776] 1896: book 5, chapter 1, article 2) had predicted and in other contexts pointed out, the extreme division of labour in Lancashire rendered people stupid because their work was so routinized that they never needed to think. Also it is common for the skilled male workers of industries that entrench traditional sex roles to mock men employed in occupations where there is a high demand for female labour, as in the Welsh miners' description of trading estates as "doll's eyes factories". My father, who was the son of a Welsh coal-miner, always described anything done in an inept or slapdash fashion as "proper Penclawdd"; Penclawdd was a village close to his own village of Three Crosses also known as Crwys. When I asked him about this, he explained that the cockle-women of Penclawdd (in contrast to the wives of

20 Fooltowns: Traditional and modern

coal-miners) were the bread-winners of the family and would not only collect the cockles from the shore, but take them to market as far afield as Bristol in England. There, he claimed, they would be courted by idle, foreign, English layabouts with their eyes on the cockle-money, who would then become househusbands in Penclawdd and drink beer all day while their wives slaved over the cockles. Such a way of life was abhorrent to the miners, whose sense of self-respect came from the money they made in a tough all-male occupation. In Lancashire the male "tacklers", or overlookers, were often the butts of jokes about stupidity told by the weavers, who were mainly women (Spencer 1938: 265). These jokes may well be the basis of jokes about Lancastrians and the source of the image of the amiable but dumb male Lancastrian which was made internationally famous by the shrewd Lancashire comedian Stan Laurel. Men in families, industries, villages (such as Pitsilia in Cyprus), and by extension regions, based on female work and earnings seem very often to be the butts of jokes that make them out to be absolutely foolish (Rockwell 1982: 51).

From fooltowns to ethnic jokes: Continuity rather than change Jokes about fooltowns and foolregions are essentially similar to ethnic jokes about stupidity which, as I have shown elsewhere (Davies 1990), are rooted in such universal sociological contrasts as centre versus periphery, urban versus rural, white-collar versus blue-collar, skilled versus unskilled and competition versus monopoly. It is necessary to stress this because so many scholars with some slight knowledge of the folklore of jokes claim that modern ethnic jokes about stupidity are "hostile" in a way that the fooltown jokes of the past were not, and imply that the modern jokes are rooted in bitter inter-ethnic conflicts, apparently unknown in an idyllic past, when folk lived in contented self-sufficient communities and exchanged gentle jests about Gothamite drolleries, numskulls and noodles. This is not merely nonsense, it is nonsense on stilts. Before the emergence of the modern state with its monopoly of organized force and the right and the capacity to enforce the King's Peace and the King's Justice, it was often unsafe for an individual to venture alone from his or her own local community into the territory of another village or small town, and vicious territorial fights between rustic louts were common (Baechler 1979: 29). By contrast with this, Hamtramck, the Voorstreek, Jutland, Kerry and Fribourg are havens of peace and order. The benign peasants of Ostfriesland, who today are the butts of German jokes about stupidity, were

Fromfooltowns to ethnic jokes 21

in the past violently intolerant of visiting strangers whose habits and apparel were slightly different from their own; hence the proverb "Don't wear a brown hat in Friesland" (Brewer's Dictionary 1981: 534). Friesland was clearly not a safe place for brown-hatters. O n e of the silliest attacks on modern ethnic jokes comes from Alvin Schwartz (1973: 109), who contrasts the "gentle, good-natured" jokes of the 1940s with today's "angry, insulting hate jokes" about ethnic stupidity, which he sees as a hostile put-down for the butts of the jokes. Jokes about fooltowns would seem to come in the gentle category, as in the case of the Molboer jokes about the people of the Danish community of Mols, which Schwartz curiously refers to as "Noi", as in the Cromwell after whom Freud named his son. Schwartz seems to suggest that Americans telling jokes about Poles actually hate Polish-Americans and that the cause of this hate lies in interethnic competition for jobs and housing (Schwartz 1973: 75), but he provides no factual evidence to support either assertion. Roger L. Welsch's study of "American Numskull Tales: The Polack Joke" provides another display of equally inadequate scholarship buttressed by frequent use of the evasive adverb "probably"; he writes: Throughout Europe there are individual communities that enjoy the reputation of being populated by idiots: Gotham in England, Kampen in Holland, Mol in Denmark, Schildau in Germany for example... In the United States the numskull tale has taken on an interesting aberration, perhaps reflecting the geographic, economic, and ethnic mobility of American society... in general numskull tales have been associated with various immigrant groups.

Far from being an "aberration", the United States is very similar to much of the rest of the world. Jokes about "stupid" ethnic minorities are extremely common and widespread, and there is less difference than Welsch thinks between internal and trans-national migration. British jokes about the Irish have been common since the seventeenth century when the Irish first emigrated to Britain in search of unskilled work as labourers, hay-makers and domestic servants. Such jokes are far more popular than the tales told about Gotham, which are now of interest only to the antiquarian. Had Welsch studied in rather more depth and detail the modern culture and history of societies other than the United States, it might have occurred to him that comic tales about Gotham are no longer told on the upper deck of the Clapham omnibus (if they ever were), having long been supplanted by jokes about Hibernian stupidity. Ethnic jokes about stupidity are, for Roger L. Welsch, above all a sign that

22 Fooltowns: Traditional and modern

the butt of the jokes is perceived as a threat. This type of joke, according to Welsch (1967: 183), "probably represents a reaction to the imagined threats posed by a sudden influx of an immigrant group at a particular point in history. Thus Pat and Mike jokes gained particular prominence in the mid-nineteenth century because of the great Irish immigration following the potato famine and Hans and Fritz jokes... reflected the insecurity of the American public in the face of mid-to-late nineteenth-century German immigrations. The Polack joke is probably a parallel phenomenon. As the Polish laborer has gained greater social mobility from increased affluence and the influence of labor in general, he has moved into neighbourhoods outside of the Polish ghetto, usually to the less magnificent apartments of that area for example basements... As other social and economic strata come into contact with Polacks — American Poles — they learn more about their character, real and supposed, and feel more and more threatened by them." This passage is full of muddled thinking and of assertions that are not supported by data or references. The problem Welsch has failed to confront is that some immigrants are perceived as very threatening and some as not threatening at all; equally some immigrants and ethnic minorities are the butts of jokes about their stupidity and others are not. There is no simple relationship between the degree of threateningness and being the butt of stupidity jokes, for there are cases of high perceived threat and few jokes (for example in the past the Japanese in California) and of low perceived threat and many jokes (e.g. Polish-Americans in the 1960s, 1970 and 1980s). The Poles may well have been seen as a threat in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when there was a huge wave of immigration to America of poor peasants from the most backward parts of Poland and again in the inter-war period when the Irish and Germans who were a little higher up the economic ladder tried to prevent the Poles from having access to skilled jobs. At that time, however, there were few jokes about stupid Polacks. 10 Indeed, throughout the period stupidity jokes continued to be largely told about the Irish. In the period after World War II the Polish-Americans were not a threat to anyone. The children and grandchildren of the original immigrants had been Americanized, spoke English, revered cleanliness and were absorbed into the well-paid, blue-collared, hard-hatted American working class. Their rate of upward social mobility out of this class was slow, gradual and nonthreatening, for they valued security rather than success." This is in marked contrast to the record of the Jews from Eastern Europe who only remained industrial workers for one generation. Their fathers in Europe had been pedlars

From fooltowns to ethnic jokes

23

and artisans, their children were businessmen and professionals. Many antiSemitic Americans did perceive the Jews as threatening, though, contrary to Welsch's theory, they did not tell jokes about their stupidity.12 The Poles were not perceived as particularly threatening, precisely because they were neither very successful nor competitive. Also the Poles of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s did not threaten property values or cause non-Polish families to flee the neighbourhood. Welsch's image of beleaguered, joke-telling, old-stock, urban Americans cowering at the thought that "The Polacks are coming!" is absurd. The threat-and-hate model of stupidity jokes also permeates, the otherwise observant, comparative work of Sandra McCosh (1979) on children's humour. McCosh has noted both the similarity and the differences between the ethnic jokes told about the Poles in America and those told about the Irish in Britain. She (1976: 120) correctly states that "the Irish stereotype [in British jokes]... appears as stupid and foolish, but also loveable... In contrast the Polish-stereotype in the United States is a much nastier image and the Polack is compared to shit and has other nasty habits." She (1976: 120) explains this difference in terms of the same entirely unproven and unsubstantiated sociological thesis used by Schwartz and Welsch, and declares that the basic script of the American Polish jokes is more negative in content than that of the British jokes about the Irish because: The Polack is a newer immigrant group and is threatening jobs and positions traditionally held by other groups. In England the Irish although at times immigrants are considered members of Great Britain and are not a visible ethnic group and therefore are acceptable.

In this statement the hypothesis of the threatening upward mobility of the Polish-Americans is combined by implication with an absence of such mobility by the Irish in Bridan. No evidence whatsoever is presented concerning either Polish or Irish mobility. Also every factual statement she makes here about the Irish is wrong. Ireland has never been part of Great Britain, and the Irish Republic (formerly the Irish Free State) has been an independent state since 1922. The vast majority of Polish-Americans were born in the United States and Polish immigration has been at a relatively low level since World War I. By contrast there are about a million people who were born in Ireland living in Britain, making them easily the largest community of recent immigrants. They are as individuals far more recognizable than Polish Americans in the United States, mainly because they speak English with a very distinctive accent,

24 Fooltowns: Traditional and modern

or rather set of accents, for the English spoken on the Shankill Road in Belfast differs from that of Mullingar and those who speak Dublin English laugh at the brogue of the Kerryman (Brown 1972). The error in McCosh's argument lies, not in her fieldwork nor in her logic, but in the theory about jokes that underpins her analysis. If it were the case that ethnic jokes about stupidity could be reduced to disguised hostile remarks about the butts of the joke, then jokes that depict such people as filthy and faecal as well as stupid would indeed indicate even greater levels of hostility, and would presumably emanate from a situation of considerably more intense inter-ethnic conflict. However, in point of fact Anglo-Irish relations have been rather more fraught than those between Poles and other Americans. There is no Polish equivalent of the IRA setting off bombs in Hamtramck and no Polish-American version of Sinn Fein. In consequence it is clear that the initial assumption which McCosh takes for granted is wrong. Jokes about stupidity cannot be reduced to hostile, but disguised, serious statements. Even the children who provided Sandra McCosh with her jokes had enough insight to see that, for, as two English boys said, "We have nothing against the Irish; my father and his father are Irish. They're just supposed to be stupid." (McCosh 1979: 117).

Concluding thoughts on fooltowns It is difficult to know for certain whether the traditional jokes of the past about fooltowns and stupid regions are essentially the same as the stupidity jokes pinned on ethnic groups today, especially since it is often impossible to know how the peoples of the past used such jokes. In certain respects the stupidity jokes of today, like all modern jokes, do differ from those of past times. They are, for instance, more likely to dwell on ignorance of modern machines and artefacts rather than on more local and arbitrary errors of speech or social convention. There are, after all, far more technical devices to be ignorant about (Davies 1990: 17-28, 145-166). Also the modern jokes are likely to be snappier and less discursive, and built around a formula that leads directly and unerringly to a surprise punch line (Raskin 1985, Utley 1965 and 1971-3). In most other respects, though, the modern ethnic jokes do seem to resemble traditional jokes about stupidity quite closely, and the reason is a simple one. Everyone enjoys, and always has enjoyed, jokes at the expense of some other group's stupidity, regardless of whether they like, dislike or feel indif-

Concluding thoughts on fooltowns

25

ferent towards the butt of the jokes. It is pointless to search for hidden motives and resentments and, indeed, the attempt to do so, far from advancing our understanding of humour, has hindered it. The key factor that should be examined is not how the joke-tellers feel about the individual members of the group who are the butts of the jokes, but how they categorize the group in social terms. The objective evidence about the relative social and economic positions of joke-tellers and butts is so consistent (Davies 1990: 40-83) that it is reasonable to infer that the joke-tellers associate the butts of jokes about stupidity with a relatively static, uncompetitive and uninnovating way of life in which stability is more highly valued than individual success. The jokes represent the centre laughing at the periphery, townies laughing at rustics, skilled and white-collar workers laughing at the unskilled, and the established laughing at the greenhorns.

Chapter 3 From the Milesians to the Milesians: The Irish-Pontian joke, its history and its absence in China and Japan

Milesians are not stupid, I aver, But they behave the same as if they were. Milesians are not stupid, no, not they. They merely act as if they were that way.1

By an odd coincidence both the ancient Greeks and the modern British tell jokes about stupid Milesians. The Greeks told such jokes about the citizens of Miletus, an Ionian city on the coast of Asia Minor, the British about the Irish who are jocularly known as Milesians after Miledh or Milesius a legendary Spanish king, who according to myth conquered Ireland in about 1300 B.C. and repopulated it, after eliminating the aboriginal Firbolgs (Brewer's Dictionary 1981). The Greek Milesians were a trading people who founded numerous cities and colonies round the coast of the Black Sea (Cook 1962; Dunham 1915; Koromila 1991). The Black Sea or Pontus continued to attract Greek settlers in modern times and they were to be found until recently on the coasts of Bulgaria, Romania, the Ukraine, Georgia and Turkey (see Koromila 1991). As a result of the political upheavals of the twentieth century, many Black Sea Greeks were forced to return to Greece, where they are known as Pontians. By another odd coincidence they have become the butts of modern Greek jokes about stupidity (Petropoulos 1987: 46-47). The Irish and the Pontians are, of course, not alone in having such jokes told about them, for in the modern world most countries have a region, neighbouring country or ethnic minority about whom such jokes are told (Davies 1990: 40-83). Many of these jokes could not have been told in the ancient world, for the artifacts to which they refer had not yet been invented. The proliferation of new machines, gadgets and types of vehicle in modern times means that there are far more things to be ignorant of and to use in jokes about the alleged ignorance of others. Why does a Pontian housewife have two washing machines? So that she can balance the scrubbing board on them.

28 From the Milesians to the Milesians

How can you tell an Irish word-processor? By the Tipp-Ex on the screen. How do you recognize a Belgian in a submarine? He's the one with a parachute on his back. Why was the Irish train-driver on the underground sacked? For over-taking. Jokes of this kind are extremely popular in the modern world and there exist literally thousands of ethnic j o k e s about the alleged stupidity of some other group. With the exception of jokes about sex, there are more j o k e s about stupidity and particularly ethnic stupidity than on any other theme. T h e more complicated the everyday material world becomes and the greater the corresponding emphasis on skill, know-how and intelligence, the more we tell j o k e s about others who are allegedly unable to understand even the simplest of artifacts or principles. It is possible that the source of much of this h u m o u r is the uneasiness people may feel because they routinely use and even repair machines whose m o d e of operation is a mystery to them (see Holbek 1975; K u m a r 1978: 241). M u c h of the support for green parties stems f r o m the bafflement spread by the use of modern techniques whose m o d e of operation is not easily discernable. The hysterical fears aroused by Western nuclear p o w e r stations and the opposition to the storage of the nuclear waste f r o m these p o w e r stations which are out of all proportion to the risks involved, stem f r o m the invisible, intangible and seemingly unnatural quality of this method of generating power. It is far more dangerous to dwell in a house built on and of granite with a substantial cellar and energy-saving double-glazing, insulation and draft excluders than to live next door to a British, American or West European nuclear power station. M o r e British children died in one day at Aberfan when an old coal tip moved and engulfed their school than are ever likely to be casualties f r o m the storage of nuclear waste in Britain. H o w ever, for our present purposes the irrationality of the fears people have about modern technology is less important than the fact that such fears are widespread (Wildavsky 1991: 111-145). T h e anxieties that the Greens exploit for sinister political ends, joke-tellers dexterously use to produce laughter. We laugh at the ignorance of others because we are conscious of our own. Most people in an industrial society cannot give a coherent account of how even such "old" and familiar items as a telephone or a telescope work. I can remember everyone in a high school

From the Milesians to the Milesians 29

physics class laughing at a friend of mine who refused to believe that sound could not travel through a vacuum, because in that case how was it that we were able to communicate with space satellites. I can also recall the amusement of another fellow student of physics at my own expense, when I was unable to imagine how it was possible to construct a telescope from a turntable, a plane mirror and a beaker of mercury and had to have it explained to me. The jokes about Irish stupidity possibly exist in part at least to reassure the joke-tellers (i.e. in this case the British) that they themselves aren't stupid. Manager on the phone: How are you getting on, Pat? Irish foreman: Very well sir. The goods is sent off. Manager: What have you been drinking? Pat: Ach, look at that now, me breath has given me away again. (Mr. Punch's Irish Humour 1908: 116) The observatory took on a new Irish night-porter who watched with amazement one of the astronomers setting up and operating a large telescope. Presently, as the astronomer moved the telescope into position , a shooting star shot across the sky, falling rapidly. "Begorrah", said the porter, to the astronomer, "I've never seen such foine shooting." (Copeland and Copeland 1939: 728; see also Further Sunbeams 1924: 122) Ethnic jokes about stupidity are not told about a people who are very distant, different or alien from ourselves, but always about a neighbouring and similar people, whom we can perceive as a comic imitation of ourselves, just as we might visit a hall of mirrors to laugh at our own distorted reflections. This is a general rule that can be observed in countries all over the modern world as can be seen in Table 1 (see pp. 2-3). It should be noted, though, that it only works for ethnic jokes about stupidity. Ethnic jokes about other negative equalities such as craftiness, brutality, cowardice, greed, stinginess, or perverse sexuality are ascribed to other peoples on the basis of quite different sets of principles (see Davies 1990). The relationship between each pair of joke tellers and butts of ethnic jokes about stupidity is in every case one of centre and periphery with those at the dominant centre of a culture laughing at their imitators on the periphery. It is always that way round. A Frenchman can laugh at a Belgian for being a funny imitation of a Frenchman but neither the Belgians nor the French nor anyone else is going to see the French as a funny imitation of the Belgians. Not even Simenon or Hercule Poirot could convince us otherwise. Indeed Captain Hastings once caught Poirot in possession of a newspaper cutting with an advertisement that began "How to

30 From the Milesians to the

Milesians

speak French like a Frenchman". Language is one important dimension of the dominant position of those at the centre. Walloons try to speak "pure" Parisian French and to eradicate Belgicisms from their speech but the French never attempt to master Bruxellois. Likewise middle-class Dubliners laugh at the brogue of the Kerryman even though it is more truly Irish than their own relatively Anglicized speech. In the nineteenth century the Pontians of Turkey's Black Sea coast sought to improve their Greek by importing schoolmasters, first from Constantinople, the Greek metropolis of the Ottoman Empire and then later from Athens — they wanted to speak like Athenians. Most cultures and nations have a dominant centre of this kind, whose supremacy is implicitly acknowledged by these obvious patterns of imitation and deference. The most that militant members of the peripheral group can hope for is a greater degree of autonomy in their own backyard, for they will never be able to reverse the pattern of dominance. Hinduism is never going to become an offshoot of the Sikh religion, nor is Erse going to emerge from the Gaeltacht and become the language of Dublin let alone Liverpool, Kilburn or Kentish Town. The jokes themselves reflect the comic possibilities of the peripheral groups' idiosyncratic version of a common language as can be seen from the jokes below about the Irish use of English: Learn to speak Irish in one easy lesson. Say very quickly: WHALE OIL BEEF HOOKED (Whitelands Rag, 1985) I'm an Irish tinker Oh! And what are you t'inking about? (O'Leary and O'Larry 1983) Is your father alive yet? No, not yet. Garda(policeman): "Yer name's obliterated." Lorry driver: "Yer a liar, it's O'Flaherty." A train stopped at a small station in the West of Ireland. Kieran Moriarty got out and ordered a drink at the bar. To his horror the train started pulling out of the station. He ran after it shouting: "Stop, stop! There's a man on board that's been left behind!"

From the Milesians to the Milesians

31

The cultural and linguistic periphery is often, though by no means always, economically backward and often dependent on the centre, with an agricultural economy and a surplus of unskilled labour which migrates to the centre. Ireland for instance has in turn provided the pick and shovel labourers for Britain's canals, railways and motorways, and Irish emigrants to America, Australia and New Zealand have had to take the same kinds of jobs. The same is true of the Poles in America, the Newfies (Newfoundlanders) in Ontario and the Ukrainians in Alberta. Their rustic origins and lowly occupations are often directly referred to in the jokes. Why did the Irish expedition to climb Mt Everest fail? They ran out of scaffolding. (British 1970s) Why was the wheelbarrow invented? To teach the Irish to stand upright. (British 1980s) What's the first thing a Pole buys for his baby son? Booties with cleats. (American 1960s) How can you tell an Aer Lingus pilot? By the three gold rings on his wellies. (British 1970s; see also Hornby 1977: 84) How does a Newfie count? One fish, two fish, another fish, and another. G.Thomas 1976: 144)

(Canadian 1970s; see also

The jokes about stupidity that are so popular in the modern world and so adapted to it, nonetheless have a long history. In a relative sense we are more ignorant than our ancestors were, for each of us can only master an ever smaller proportion of a growing body of knowledge, but the average citizen today has access to modes of reasoning that were not available to the rustic majority of past civilizations. Today in industrial societies it is taken for granted that most people can read and write and perform calculations and also that from an early age they have a basic familiarity with simple machines such as toys and bicycles, that can be taken to bits and reassembled or run backwards. In the past only a minority enjoyed these privileges and in consequence only they were able to understand basic ideas of cause and effect and of the conservation of length, mass and volume. For most other people reasoning could only be based on analogies with the puzzling tangle of nature and the idiosyncratic

32 From the Milesians to the Milesians

structure of their language or of the local social order (see Hallpike 1979: vvi), which led to a world view that incorporated magic, oracles and witchcraft. The equivalent today would be a mass commitment to homeopathy, flying saucers and the Gaia hypothesis; given time we'll no doubt regress to the world we have lost! Inequalities in intellectual performance are probably at their greatest in societies where a few people are literate and numerate and have a taken for granted familiarity with simple machines including toys but in which the mass of the population are trapped in that idiocy of rural life where wisdom masquerades as understanding (see Hallpike 1979: 261-262; but see also Minogue 1987: 12). The earliest British jokes about the Irish of the seventeenth century have to be seen in this context, as do other comparable jokes of that time. An Irish servant was asked by his master to bring him a pint of claret and a pint of sack (sherry). The servant poured them into one pot and said, "I prithee, master, drink off the claret first, for the sack is all in the bottom." (Banquet of Jests 1633) An English gentleman travelling from Corke to Waterford met a native of whom he enquired, How many miles it was from Corke to Waterford. The other, considering it awhile at length, returned ; "Bee Chreesht, Dear Joy, I cannot tell dee how many miles it ish from Corke to Waterford but it ish about eighteen miles from Waterford to Corke." (Teagueland Jests or Bogg Witticisms 1690: 104)

In the seventeenth century Thomas Fuller ([1662] 1811,2: 206) had already noted the universality of ethnic jokes about stupidity even in the ancient world and cited jokes about Phrygians, Abderites and Boeotians. Men in all ages have made themselves merry with singling out some place, and fixing the staple of stupidity and stolidity therein. Thus the Phrygians were accounted the Fools of all Asia and the anvils of other men's wits to work upon. Sero sapient Phryges, Phryx nisi ictus non sapit [The Phrygians are wise too late, unless struck they haven't any sense]. In Grecia take a single City and then Abdera in Thracia carried it away for Dull-heads,—Abderitanae pectora plebis habes [You have the brains of an Abderite (i.e. not much) is a quotation from Martial Book 10, Epigram 25, Line 4]. But for a whole Country, commend us to the Boetians for Block-heads; and Boeticum ingenium [Boetian intelligence (it is used ironically as if one were to say Irish logic or Goyischer kop)] is notoriously known".

From the Milesians to the Milesians 33

To Fuller's list may be added the Milesians and the people of Cumae. There were many such fooltowns in the ancient world and classicists have recorded numerous jokes about them in both Latin and Greek. A visitor to Cumae saw a funeral and asked, "Who is dead?" A native pointed to the coffin and replied, "He is." (Ferguson 1968) A Cumaen who was trying to sell honey explained why it didn't taste good: "If a mouse hadn't fallen into it, I wouldn't be selling it." (Feinburg 1978: 51 ; see also Clouston 1888)

It may be hypothesised that the same kinds of peoples were the butts of jokes about stupidity in ancient as in modern times, i.e. those living at the edge of a culture or civilization who looked like a comically distorted version of the joke-tellers themselves or else rustics living in the hinterland of a major city. A few cases will be considered here but a more thorough testing of the hypothesis would require the skills of professional classicists and specialists in ancient history. Those who were the butts of jokes about stupidity for the ancient Greeks were in the main not barbarians, but the inhabitants of Greek colonies and cities far away from the core of Greek civilization in Greece itself; settlements at the edge of Greek civilization surrounded by and in consequence influenced and penetrated by non-Greek peoples — such as Abdera in Thrace, or Miletus in Asia Minor. The Phrygians who lived in Anatolia were not Greek, but spoke a related language which was written using the Greek alphabet. All these peoples were in some measure ambiguous, and thus a frequent source of humour rather than being truly foreign, barbarian and incomprehensible. Homer (¡Iliad Book 2 lines 868 et. seq.) spoke of "the uncouth-tongued Carians of Miletus" who were allied to Troy during the Trojan war but the Milesians of the jokes were much later Greek settlers of mixed descent, (Cretans, Athenians, Thebans, Phocians, etc.) who had colonized Miletus and intermarried with the indigenous Carians. 2 Herodotos (The Histories Book I line 146 et. seq.) tells a curious story of their customs and origins which would seem to indicate that the Milesians were seen as odd and ambiguous by other Greeks: Even those who started from the Government house in Athens and believed themselves to be of the purest Ionian blood took no women with them, but married Carian girls, whose parents they had killed. The fact that these women

34 From the Milesians to the Milesians

were forced into marriage after the murder of their fathers, husbands, and sons was the origin of the law, established by oath and passed down to their female descendants, forbidding them to sit at table with their husbands or to address them by name. It was at Miletus that this took place. When Milesian navigators later founded numerous colonies in the Black Sea, other Greeks in search of fresh opportunities went first to Miletus before becoming colonists (Cook 1962: 51; Dunham 1915: 47), and presumably this again led to the mixing and confusing of dialects. There is, though, nothing in the economic life of Miletus that would have reinforced the comic image of the Milesians as stupid, for theirs was a successful trading city whose merchants were seen as "steady, austere and honorable in their transactions" (Cook 1962: 91). The diverse contacts of the Milesians with distant lands, the flexibility demanded of a trading people together with the need for practical skills in geometry, navigation and astronomy, and the growth of a leisure class excluded from politics led to the development in Miletus of a school of rational, questioning, sceptical philosophers and speculative scientists. (Cook 1962: 91-93; Dunham 1915:77). Scholars such as Thaies, Anaximander and Hecateus freed themselves from earlier pre-conceived myths and notions concerning the nature of the universe and the origin of life and questioned and found alternative explanations for accepted tradition. In retrospect these scholars seem in advance of their time and it is odd that the Milesians who produced them should be laughed at as stupid, but it is possible that their more prosaic Greek neighbours thought that such speculations were bizarre, impractical and "stupid". The Milesians may be contrasted with the rustic Boeotians, who were neighbours to Athens, a great commercial city and a key centre of Greek civilization. The Boeotians were the butts of jokes told by the Athenians who "affected to despise the agricultural sluggishness of their neighbours the 'Boetian pigs' ... as dull and thick as their own atmosphere" (Andrewes 1971: 94; see also Buck 1979: 94; Demand 1982: 3 & 10). The Boeotians were free and independent peasants whose polity was a stable, balanced federation of small units controlled by an aristocratic oligarchy, in contrast to Attica where the Athenians had a unitary state. In Boeotia not even the citizens of Thebes were traders, for well-to-do landed families dominated the social and political order and were opposed to the social and political changes that extensive involvement in trade would bring about (Demand 1982: 10). The landed aristocracy of Boeotia were a conservative group whose ideal was a self-sufficient agrarian society (Demand 1982: 10). Aristocrats of this type, like peas-

From the Milesians to the Milesians

35

ants, are often the butt of jokes about stupidity told by city slickers (see pp. 166-170). In Athenian comedies, notably those of Aristophanes (see also Demand 1982: 3), the dumb Theban like the Boetian pig was as much a stock type as the stage Irishman in eighteenth century Britain and nineteenth century Britain and America. Possibly too, the Boetian dialect, which was based on several diverse Greek sources (Buck 1979:75-81,171) was a further source of amusement. In ancient Egypt jokes, apparently based on stupidity, were told about the Nubians (Russell 1982: 4) and indeed similar jokes are still told today. Then as now, the Nubians lived on the southern edge of Egyptian civilization, a group of distant provincial rustics neither really foreign nor wholly Egyptian (Fairservis 1960: 14, 85, 90, 126, 182; Kees 1961: 39, 142, 308, 332). If the jokes told in Egypt today (El-Shami 1980) are in fact the same as the ancient ones, then these are the oldest ethnic jokes in the world. In ancient China by contrast there do not seem to have been many ethnic (Kowallis 1986: 8) jokes about stupidity, even though the Chinese have long had clear stereotypes concerning peoples from different regions, provinces and cities (Hücker 1975: 10). It is clear that just as jokes based on a particular script such as stupidity can be popular in the absence of any corresponding seriously held stereotype, so too stereotypes can exist without giving rise to jokes. There are many ancient Chinese jokes about stupid individuals but they do not seem to take on a consistent ethnic or regional form; even when stupidity jokes are pinned on a particular place or people, the locale or butt varies from joke to joke: In the land of Lu (now in Shandong province), there was once a man who tried to enter a city gate while carrying a long pole. If held vertically, the pole was too high to make it under the gate; if held horizontally the gate was too narrow to allow him to advance. Unable to think of any other way to get it through, the man was presently approached by an elderly gentleman, who announced: "Though sage I be none, I have witnessed many things in my life-time. Pray couldst thou not saw thine staff in half and then clear the limits of the portal with it in hand?" The man then acted accordingly and split his own pole in two! (Wit and Humor from Old Cathay 1986: If A simpleton from Dongzishang village in the district of Huxian was sent by his aged father to the market, there to buy a slave. The father instructed him before-hand: "It is said that in Chang'an, when they deal in quality slaves, the fact that the slave is up for sale is always concealed from him, and he is kept in some other place until the price and details have all been concluded."

36 From the Milesians to the Milesians

Arriving at the market, the son chanced to step before a mirror. In the mirror he saw a young and able-bodied man. Pointing at the mirror, he asked its seller: "How much do you expect to get for this slave?" Seeing the young man's ignorance, the wily seller said, "This slave is worth ten thousand cash, easily!" The young man then paid him that amount of money for the mirror and brought it home with him. On his return home, however, his father met him at the gate and demanded: "Where is the slave that you were to have bought?" "Right here," replied the son, drawing the mirror out from under his coat and presenting it to his father. But the father saw in it the features of an old man with hair and eyebrows white and a dark wrinkled face. In a fit of anger, he made ready to beat his son, yelling: "How could you spend ten thousand cash on this old man of a slave?" and wielded his walking stick menacingly at the lad. In a great fright, the son called out for his mother, who rushed in with her young daughter in her arms, came forward and asked to have a look at the slave. She too became instantly infuriated, but this time at her husband, saying: "You old idiot, my son spent only ten thousand cash and got two slaves for it — one maid and her daughter, too! And you call that extravagant!" (Wit and Humor from Old Cathay 1986: 13-14)4 In the state of Zheng, a man who wished to purchase a pair of shoes first measured his feet with a piece of string. On arriving at a shoe stall in the market, however, he discovered he had forgotten to bring the measurements with him. With a pair of shoes already in hand, he exclaimed: "Oh no! I have forgotten my measurements at home," dropped the shoes and returned home to fetch the string with which he had measured his size. On his return to the market, the stalls had already closed. A man then queried: "Why didn't you just try on the shoes?" "Because I have more confidence in a measurement than in myself," the man replied. (Wit and Humor from Old Cathay 1986: 33; see also Jiang Yu Dai 1986: 29)5 While crossing a river, the sword of a man from Chu fell from the boat he was riding on into the water. He hastened to place a mark on the side of the boat, telling his companions: "This is exactly where the sword fell." When at last the boat came to shore, he stepped out and waded through the shallow water there, groping around for his sword just below the mark he had made on the side of the boat. (Wit and Humor from Old Cathay 1986: 131 )6 A northerner came down to the South for a rare visit. He was entertained by his host with fresh bamboo shoots. It was the first time he had ever eaten

From the Milesians to the Milesians 37 them. He found the dish extremely tasty. He asked what they were and his host explained to him that they were bamboo shoots and that they would become bamboo trees when they matured. Back home in the North the northerner often missed the delicious dish, but he could not find any in his region. One day he was delighted to discover that his mat was woven of bamboo: He took it apart and cooked it. But no matter now long he cooked it, the bamboo remained hard and tough. He said angrily: "That southerner is a big cheat. He has tricked me and made me suffer." (Jiang Yu Dai 1989: 10) It is a moot point whether these jokes, several of which are from the anthology Wit and Humour of Old Cathay, are in fact ethnic or fooltown jokes and in any case there are only six such jokes out of a total of two hundred and ninety one jokes in that anthology. It is perhaps even more significant that there are, in the Old Cathay anthology, a further total of fifty nine jokes about stupidity that do not refer to any particular place or region. Of these fifty nine jokes, seventeen are totally unspecific mentioning neither the name, the place of origin nor the occupation of the stupid party, while twelve refer to particular named individuals; there are a further seven jokes about stupid rustics and four about stupid servants similar to those told in both an ethnic and a nonethnic context in other countries and another seven refer to stupid persons in various other occupations, mainly officials. The most striking contrast with modern European or American jokes is that eight of the old Chinese jokes are about stupid sons. Presumably this indicates the importance of father-son ties in a society that stressed filial piety and lineage. The relative absence of ethnic jokes about stupidity in Kowallis' particular anthology of Old Chinese jokes may of course simply reflect the compiler's preferences (see Kowallis 1986: 8-9) and selection of items, or be the result of the chance survival of particular texts, but the same paucity of ethnic jokes about stupidity is to be found in Jiang Yu Dai's anthology. Out of the one hundred jokes in the anthology there are twelve jokes about stupidity but only one could be called ethnic or regional, it is about southerners laughing at northerners. One joke begins, "A rich nigger" (Jiang Yu Dai 1989:37) but this is probably an error of translation. One is about a foolish pedantic scholar and one is about a foolish son. The rest do not specify who the stupid person was. The absence of specifically ethnic jokes about stupidity does fit in with other familiar contrasts between the Chinese and other civilizations, particularly those of Europe. The Chinese are and long have been an extremely numerous people occupying a large empire in which they are ninety-five per cent of the population. They have no myth of origin, no account of how they first came to China or

38 From the Milesians to the Milesians

why it is theirs. In the past the Chinese had a taken for granted confidence in their own identity and superiority, which was only shaken by European and Japanese incursions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Until then their world consisted of China alone and beyond China there were only the outer barbarians such as the Mongols, Turks and Tibetans. There were no zones of ambiguity and no concern with cultural boundaries, for not only aboriginal and bordering peoples but also foreign dynasties such as the Yuan descendants of Genghis (Chingis) Khan or the Manchus were easily Sinicized and absorbed into Chinese civilization. Also as Hücker (1975: 72) has noted: Since the Chinese conceive of the universe, seen and unseen as a single integrated organism, they are not inclined, as most Westerners are, to think in terms of contending, antagonistic polarities such as natural versus supernatural, life versus death, us versus them, this versus that. Perhaps with a philosophy of this kind and an immense hierarchical, political and social order, so much in contrast to the ever changing congeries of small, squabbling independent nations and ethnic groups that make up most of the rest of the world, the Chinese did not feel inclined to joke about the centre versus comic periphery divide, which has provided the basis of ethnic jokes about stupidity in most of the rest of the world. Elsewhere, in much of Europe, Africa, Australia, North and South America, the Middle East and South and South-East Asia, jokes about the stupidity of the local equivalents of the Milesians proliferate and in some cases may have done so for millenia. In modern China, as in the former Eastern Europe, there are many jokes about the stupidity of the Communist cadres many of whom are or were ignorant rustics (Butterfield 1982: 289), so that China, in recent times at least, is not an exception to the generalisation that jokes about stupidity foisted onto others are universal throughout the civilized world. However, Japan is just such an exception. Despite having given a public lecture in Osaka on the subject of ethnic and political jokes about stupidity, I have been unable to discover any Japanese equivalent of these jokes. Possibly the humour of the Japanese comedian Morita Kazuyoshi, known as Yamori, about the alleged stupidity of the people of Nagoya, which he called a "great countryside", are an example of my theory that stupidity jokes are told at the centre about the periphery, for Nagoya is half-way between the two great rival metropolitan areas of Tokyo and Osaka. It is difficult, though, to say whether his humour can be called jokes in the way that that word has been used here. Also whilst many books of foreign jokes classified by country and subject have been

From the Milesians to the Milesians 39

translated from many languages into Japanese for Japanese readers, Hiroo Onoda the Japanese publisher has told me that there are not enough modern Japanese jokes to be translated into other languages for the benefit of nonJapanese. Many very ancient Japanese jokes from much older times have been translated by folklorists but these tend not to be useful in resolving the issue raised here; most of these jokes translated from the Japanese have erotic themes. From watching Japanese television programmes with translations or sub-titles involving absurd competitions, it is clear to foreigners that the Japanese can and do laugh at other people being made to look foolish, as when competitors in game shows try to see which of them can remain longest on a snow covered mountain wearing only a swimming costume or who can best stand the discomfort of being dragged on one's stomach across a rough gravel desert. However, these shows seem to be unique to Japan, are not in general found to be humorous by foreigners and cannot easily be related to the verbal jokes about stupidity I have analysed here. It may be that the Japanese (and also, in a rather different and quite separate way, the Chinese) have such a strong and dichotomous sense of the difference between themselves and all foreigners, that there exists no intermediate people sufficiently similar to the Japanese to be seen by the Japanese as a comic version of themselves, i.e. as themselves viewed in a distorting mirror. Everyone else is too different for this to be possible. In Europe the entire continent is broken up into a kaleidoscope of different little nations and peoples who gradually shade into one another; indeed important differences in national identity can coincide with great similarities in language and way of life as, say, within the British Isles or Scandinavia or the French-speaking parts of Europe. Japan, by contrast, is an island with a long history of isolated self-sufficiency, and a largely homogeneous population. There are no transitional, ambiguous, "almost but not quite Japanese" groups about whom stupidity jokes could be told. Japanese colleagues when asked about the absence of ethnic stupidity jokes in Japan, are apt to answer in terms of the widely accepted, though fallacious, theory that such jokes are a means of expressing hostility; the Japanese, they claim, are much too amiable to tell such jokes about regional rustics, neighbouring peoples or ethnic minorities. It is doubtful whether their Chinese or Korean neighbours and former colonial peoples or the Korean minority in Japan itself would agree with this benign proposition. The best candidates to become the butt of stupidity jokes in Japan are probably the people of Tohoku, the six north eastern prefectures of Honshu (namely Aomori, Akita, Iwata, Yamagata, Miyagi and Fukushima), not because

40 From the Milesians to the Milesians

Tohoku people are particularly stupid but because they are the one's predicted by the centre-periphery model. They live at the back of beyond, in an area formerly called Michinoku or back-roads because of its remoteness. Tohoku is at the very edge of the main island of Japan and this area was the last part of Honshu to be transformed from subsistence farming to the modem Japanese economy of industry and services. In consequence, many Tohoku men were forced to go south to work as labourers on construction sites in the major urban areas, where, like the Irish in Britain, they were perceived as tough, good-humoured and distinctive in speech and appearance. Their thick rustic accent called zu zu ben in Japanese, spoken through compressed lips in their cold winters, departs from koku-go, the elegant national language of Japan (based on the dialect of the Tokyo region, which has in practice been Japan's capital for nearly 400 years) in the same way that an Irish brogue differs from standard British English or the slow slurred Jutland Danish of Aaaaaarhus [Aarhus as pronounced by a Jute] from that of Copenhagen. Thus, on both economic and cultural grounds the people of Tohoku seem the most likely candidates for Japanese jokes about stupidity. The people of Tohuku are not in any sense outsiders in relation to the rest of Japan; indeed to foreigners they may appear as the most typical of Japanese because they have been less touched by foreign and cosmopolitan influences. But to those who live in the great urban centres, they will appear as a comic, distorted, rustic, out-of-date version of themselves, to be viewed humorously, albeit in a sympathetic and even nostalgic and affectionate way. Indeed this is very much the way in which the Tohoku rustics are depicted in Japanese television comedy. Despite this, they are not and never have been the butts of popular Japanese jokes about stupidity, to be exchanged as shared narratives or riddles when a group of people meet informally. There is no equivalent in Japan of the jokes told in Canada about Newfoundlanders or in Ireland about Kerrymen. The Japanese find foreign jokes of this type extremely funny when they are translated into Japanese and presented in an appropriate context, 7 but they do not invent and circulate their own indigenous version of such jokes. The absence of Japanese jokes about stupidity, indeed the paucity of Japanese jokes of any kind, remains an enigma. Unlike China, Japan has never fallen under Communist rule and is today one of the world's most economically successful, socially stable and culturally distinctive countries. The Japanese do not seem to have much respect for their politicians and indeed this may be why they have been willing to elect comedians to high political office in major cities. However, in an open democratic system, where politicians have limited powers, it is difficult to make

From the Milesians to the Milesians

41

them the universal butt of jokes about stupidity. If they are stupid, then so are the joke-tellers who voted them into office. Also the autonomous success of Japan's designers, engineers, capitalists, novelists and founders of religious movements makes the apparent failure of the Japanese politicians largely irrelevant. Japanese society has shown remarkable progress in all fields even if Japanese politics seems to be in a state of chaos. Even in the Tokugawa period, when the government bureaucracy sought to regulate the colour of people's clothes or the size of their umbrellas, there does not seem to have been extensive joking about the stupidity of the society's rulers. This attempt to control status by law and to prevent the rise of an independently powerful merchant class failed, for the same reason that communism failed in Eastern Europe. There are no laws of history, only of economics. But Tokugawa Japan unlike Eastern Europe did not produce jokes. Perhaps then we have yet another example of Japanese exceptional ism and Japanese uniqueness. It may be that unlike most modern societies, Japan lacks both the ethnic and political structures and the social pressures that elsewhere have made jokes about the stupidity of particular ethnic, regional or political groups almost universally popular. On the other hand, as shown by the assessment above of the potential for the development of the Tohoku joke, it is quite possible that such jokes will emerge in the future. However, even if it did, the absence of Japanese jokes about stupidity in the past and indeed the paucity of Japanese jokes of any kind in the 1980s and 1990s remains an important social fact for which there is no satisfactory sociological explanation. For those of us who are not Chinese or Japanese, ethnic jokes of the type told about the Milesians and the Milesians are, though, the oldest and longest surviving item of popular culture that we possess. It is thus imperative that we should strive to record and preserve the ethnic jokes about stupidity of the past which are so important a part of everyone's cultural heritage. Furthermore, we have a duty to go on inventing and telling new jokes of this kind in order to maintain in being an important living tradition that connects us with the ancient world.

Chapter 4 The Protestant ethic and the comic spirit of capitalism

There are two linked yet also opposed connections between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. The first is the well known thesis' put forward by Max Weber that one of the key factors responsible for the early development of capitalism and modem industry in the West (rather than within some other civilization possessing relatively advanced forms of technology and organization) was the distinctive ethos of work, thrift and systematic calculation developed by the members of the Reformed Protestant churches. The second may well be termed the Protestant ethic and the comic spirit of capitalism. By this I mean the steady growth in capitalist societies of jokes and humour at the expense of groups perceived as strongly committed to the Protestant ethic. This humour is both of interest in itself and also provides evidence relevant to an assessment of Weber's theory. In order to demonstrate this it is first necessary to give a brief summary of Weber's work, noting in passing his own occasional use of humorous sources. Then I shall discuss the nature and chronology of the humorous material from capitalist societies that pokes fun at the Protestant ethic and indicate why it should lead us to think differently about Weber's thesis. The humorous data may be said generally to support Weber's main thesis concerning the affinity between Protestantism and capitalism. However, a careful analysis of the content and chronology of popular humour at the expense of the Protestant ethic in capitalist societies does cast considerable doubt on Weber's rather dichotomous view of the difference between early Protestant-ethic-driven capitalism and the mature capitalism of his own times. The new data derived from the study of humour thus provides the basis for a fundamental criticism of the way in which Weber perceived the capitalist societies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Weber thesis In his pioneering study The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism Weber pointed out that even in his own time in countries of mixed religious composition such as Germany there were among business leaders and capi-

44 The Protestant ethic

talists, and also among managers and skilled workers with technical and commercial qualifications, proportionately far more Protestants than Catholics (Weber 1930: 35-39). He further noted that in the past Protestant individuals and groups and especially those of a Calvinist persuasion not uncommonly combined an "extraordinary capitalistic business sense" with "the most intensive forms of piety" which penetrated and dominated their whole lives (Weber 1930:43). For Weber the ethos to be explained consisted of "the earning of more and more money" not as a means of satisfying material needs but as an end in itself combined with "the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life" (Weber 1930: 58). He describes this way of life as "irrational from a naive point of view" (Weber 1930: 53), in that it brings the individual who espouses it little enjoyment and a good deal of painful toil and anxiety, but as also in another sense extremely rational. This other sense of rationality refers to the calculative virtues of concentration, self-control, frugality and methodical conduct that are conducive to an ability to prosper by rigorously squeezing more out of less and by accumulating capital through saving and investment (see Weber 1930: 63, 67-68). Weber felt that an ethos of this kind, though fitting for the capitalist economies of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was unlikely to have evolved merely in response to economic opportunity. What is also striking is that this calculative outlook was already to be found in economically backward areas such as New England and Pennsylvania in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries or Scotland in the seventeenth century (Marshall 1980: 263; Smout 1972: 89-91), after the Scottish Reformation but well prior to urbanization and industrialization (Marshall 1980:272). Gordon Marshall's (1980: 222) empirical study Presbyteries and Profits shows clearly that "the development of the secular ethic of modern Scottish capitalism and of puritanical Scottish Calvinism was parallel, both developing contemporaneously during the seventeenth century ..." and Marshall (1980: 222) claims to have "demonstrated an 'elective affinity' between the ethic of Scottish Calvinism and that of Scottish capitalist enterprise during the period in question". That Weber and Marshall can discern the spirit of capitalism in Calvinist Scotland and in the Puritan colonies in America long before these peoples created, as they were to do later, a modern capitalist economy is of particular importance. In seventeenth-century Scotland the "principles of modern capitalist conduct, including those relating to the accumulation of capital as an end in itself, the rational maximization of profits, frugality in consumption and so forth" (Marshall 1980: 272) were already present; it was the "structural" preconditions of capitalism and the related economic opportunities that

The evidence from humour 45

were missing. As soon as the union with England and Wales, improved transportation and the discovery of indigenous sources of power remedied this, the Scots became notable capitalists not only at home but throughout the English speaking world (Jackson 1968). Indeed they became known for their skill in exploiting economic opportunities abroad that local people less endowed with the Protestant ethic had neglected. The Protestant ethic of the later Calvinists consisted of the virtues of diligence in one's calling, and this-worldly asceticism reinforced by the psychological uncertainty engendered by the doctrine of predestination which divided human beings into the elect (predestined for salvation by Divine decree) and the more numerous reprobate. The doctrine of predestination as originally formulated by Calvin could have led in time to an erosion of morality as those whose minds dwelt overmuch on the immutability of their ultimate fate lapsed into despair, fatalism or antinomianism (Weber 1930: 232) 2 . However, Calvin's successors (sometimes termed neo-Calvinists), in addition to laying great emphasis on the duty to labour in one's calling and to leading a frugal and systematically moral life, interpreted and added to the doctrine of predestination in ways that strengthened these moral precepts. One could not improve one's prospects of salvation through good works but to display an ability to lead a life of diligence and methodical self-control provided a sign that one belonged to the elect not only to others but to oneself; the sense of one's own rectitude confirmed and reinforced a self-confident inner faith of having been both called and chosen. The doubts of the diligent were dispelled by their intense and continuous immersion in active duties as a means of proving their faith and reinforcing their inner certainty of being in a state of grace (Weber 1930: 1 ΙΟΙ 15, 121). The qualities that constitute the Protestant ethic which are so preeminently displayed by Weber's Calvinists both helped to pave the way for capitalist economic development and survived on in the resulting capitalist society, even after secularization appears to have undermined the religious commitment from which they sprang.

The evidence from humour If we now turn to the evidence of popular humour, notably from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a picture emerges which confirms Weber's central thesis of the affinity between the ethic of the Reformed Churches and the spirit of capitalism but which, as we shall see later, contradicts his final

46 The Protestant ethic

glum but ambivalent peroration about the nature of modern capitalism. Weber himself was of course aware of the significance of humour as an index and reflection of social attitudes for he speaks of Ferdinand Kürnberger's "clever and malicious" Picture of American culture (Weber 1930: 50-51), and notes that the "opponents of the Nonconformists, even in the eighteenth century, again and again ridiculed them for personifying the spirit of shopkeepers, and for having ruined the ideals of old England" (Weber 1930: 180), though it may be doubted whether Weber understood and appreciated the subtle satires of Defoe. Popular humour at the expense of those most strongly endowed with the Protestant ethic, far from ceasing with the triumph of industrial capitalism, flourished enormously. In particular the inhabitants of countries and regions with a strongly Calvinist population or tradition such as Scotland, Holland, N e w England or the Calvinist Swiss cantons were and are the butts of j o k e s and humorous sketches about their allegedly stingy, calculating and irrationally rational disposition. The comic stage Scotsman of the English theatre was first seen in the latter half of the eighteenth century and became increasingly popular over time. On the basis of an analysis of all English printed plays J.O.Bartley noted that the theme of Scottish " e c o n o m y " only became significant after 1770 but by the turn of the century nearly a fifth of all plays containing Scottish characters mentioned this trait (Bartley 1954: Diagram Β and 235). Bartley (1954: 232-235) notes of the period 1756-1800 that: The impression which he [the Scotsman] was actually making on the English during these years was such as to stress the sober, hard-headed and calculating aspects of his character ... Though canniness is not always highlighted it is nearly always present in the make-up of the stage Scots of these years... [Jests in plays about the parsimony of the Scots] only began in the later eighteenth century and there is only one such reference — which may have been added later — ina play of before 1770. The word used is almost always "oeconomy" and twice it is significantly paired with "forecast". "Ye have nae kind of oeconomy, nae forecast" says Sergeant Trumbull to Sergeant O'Bradley in Pilon's Siege of Gibraltar, "you dinna heed the proverb — clap your hand twice to your bonnet for once to your pouch; aw gangs oot, naithing gangs in." ... In Lady Graven's "Miniature Picture" (1780) Lord MacGrinnon says, "I would no more squander my breath than I would my money, unless I were to get cent percent interest for it", to which Eliza replies, "I dare say not: true Scottish oeconomy". Jokes about canny Scots and N e w Englanders became increasingly popular

The evidence from humour

47

in the early nineteenth century at first mainly taking the form of jocular anecdotes located in particular settings and half pretending to be true tales: In the year 1797, when democratic notions ran high, it may be remembered that the king's coach was attacked as his majesty was going to the House of Peers. A gigantic Hibernian on that occasion was conspicuously loyal in repelling the mob. Soon after, to his no small surprise, he received a message from Mr. Dundas to attend at his office. He went, and met with a gracious reception from the great man, who after passing a few encomiums on his active loyalty, desired him to point out any way in which he would wish to be advanced, His Majesty having particularly noticed his courageous conduct, and being desirous to reward it. Pat scratched and scraped for a while, half thunder-struck — "The devil take me if I know what I'm fit for." "Nay, my good fellow," cried Henry, "think a moment, and dinna throw yoursel out o' the way o' fortun." Pat hesitated another moment, then smirking as if some odd idea had taken hold of his noddle, he said — "I'll tell you what mister, make a Scotchman of me, and, by St. Patrick, there'll be no fear of my getting on." The Minister gazed a while at the mal-apropos wit — "Make a Scotchman of you, sir, that's impossible, for I can't give you prudence." (Wit and Wisdom 1826: 335-336) A New England merchant who had accumulated a vast property by care and industry yet still was as busy as ever in adding vessel to vessel and store to store though considerably advanced in life, being asked by a neighbour how much property he supposed would satisfy a human being, after a short pause replied, "A little more." (The American Jest-Book 1833: 91). The American historian Ray Ginger has collected many early American and Canadian jokes about the Scots often with a distinctive North American setting: Did ye hear about Ramsay? Scalped by the Indians. Poor chap. Just two days since he paid fifty cents for a haircut. (Ginger 1974: anecdote 30) Ginger comments somewhat crassly on his jokes: Virtually without exception jokes against the Scots in America have focused on one charge: they are covetous. A few hours reading in the business correspondence of Scottish and Scot-Irish merchants and cotton factors of the eighteenth century might make anybody wonder if this canard did not originate from hard realities. Persons not American are referred to the practices, mid-

48 The Protestant ethic

twentieth century of Scottish bankers on Bay Street in Toronto or Sherbrooke Street in Montreal. (Ginger 1974: comment on anecdote 30) More recently jokes about the canny Scot have spread throughout the world not only in countries such as Canada or New Zealand to which there has been an extensive emigration of Scots but in countries such as France, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Slovakia or Greece, with relatively little direct experience of the Scots. In these latter countries they not only import jokes about Scots but invent new Scottish jokes often with a distinctly local setting: A Scotsman went into a boulevard cafe and asked the price of a glass of wine. "Four francs", replied the waiter. "That's a lot", said the Scotsman. "Well then, don't drink sitting on the terrace. If you stand at the counter it will only cost you two and a half francs". "Ah", said the Scotsman, "and how much will it cost me to drink at the counter if I stand on one leg?" (French 1970s; see also Bramieri 1980: 277) Jokes about the canny Calvinists have long shown them as incapable of spontaneous pleasure, as absurdly parsimonious and as applying calculative rationality in an excessive, inappropriate and tasteless way. The central characters of the jokes act out a caricature of the Protestant ethic in a wide range of inappropriate contexts ranging from golf to toothache. They are comic because whenever money is at stake they are unable to break out of their Protestant ethic cage and follow the ordinary everyday utilitarian pattern of life in which people pursue pleasure and avoid pain: An Aberdeen man had most violent toothache for more than a week, but he bore the agony rather than spend money having the offending molar extracted. At last, however, he could stand the pain no longer, and boldly rang the Dentist's bell. "Fat's yer chairge, ma mannie, for haulin' oot an auld, decayed tooth?" he asked, "it'll no' tak' a clever chiel like you a couple o' seconds tae yark it oot!" "Five shillings, Sir, and I may say that the operation will be entirely painless," said the Dentist. "It's a lot o' siller, five shillings for a wee job like that," commented the Aberdonian. Then he went silent for a few seconds. "Look here!" he exclaimed. "Could ye no just slacken it for a shillin', an' then I could pull it out masel?" (Lauder 1929: 13-14)

The evidence from humour

49

"I've nae use for thae cork-tipped ceegarettes", said Mr. Craw, "I canna thole the taste o' the burnin' cork." (Bell 1929: 17) Employer: "Do you mean to tell me, MacNab, that you want your summer holidays now, in February?" MacNab: "It's my youngest boy, Angus: He'll be over twelve years if I dinna gang noo." (Junior 1929: 30) Wee Willie Dougan loved his game of golf but one bright sunny day his friends saw him sitting disconsolately in the club house, his clubs nowhere in sight. "Why aren't you out playing, Willie?" asked a friend. "Ach I nae can play agin", sighed Willie. "Why not?" asked his friend. "Ach", said Willie "I lost me ball." (Cerf 1945: 16) In jokes of this type all considerations other than financial calculation disappear, so that a political office becomes merely a business investment and foxhunting the unaccountable in pursuit of the unsaleable. For acute N e w Englanders motives other than profit are incomprehensible and the pursuit of foxes, stripped of its ethical meaning and associated mundane passions, has ceased to have the character of a sport: A group of wealthy Southerners, Virginians and Carolinians mostly, were on a train returning from a meeting of the National Fox-hunting Association. Naturally the talk dealt largely with the sport of which they were devotees. A lank Vermonter, who apparently had never done much travelling, was an interested auditor of the conversation. Presently, when the company in the smoking compartment had thinned out he turned to one of the party who had stayed on. He wanted to know how many horses the Southerner kept for fox-hunting purposes and large a pack of hounds he maintained and about how many foxes on an average he killed in the course of a season. The Southerner told him. In silence for a minute or two the Vermonter mulled the disclosures over in his mind. Then he said: "Wall, with fodder fetching such high prices and with dog meat for hounds a costin' what it must cost and with fox pelts as cheap as they are in the open market and taking one thing with another, I don't see how you kin expect to clear much money out of this business in the course of a year." (Cobb 1923: 191-192)

50 The Protestant ethic

Apolitical office in a small New Hampshire town was vacant. The office paid $250 a year and there was keen competition for it. One of the candidates, Ezekiel Hicks, was a shrewd old fellow, and a neat campaign fund was turned over to him. To the astonishment of all, however, he was defeated. "I can't account for it", said one of the leaders of Hicks' party, gloomily. "With all that money, we should have won. How did you lay it out, Ezekiel?" "Well", said Ezekiel, slowly milking his chin whiskers, "ye see that office only pays $250 a year salary, an' I didn't see no sense in paying $900 out to get the office, so I bought a little truck farm instead." (Braude 1979: 186-187)3 The unco' canny folk about whom such jokes are told carry book-keeping to the characteristically tasteless extreme4 of treating one's own life or one's spouse's corpse as commodities and exercises in accountancy. Asceticism, parsimony and calculativeness could hardly go much further than this: An Aberdonian sat at the bedside of his friend who was a patient in a nursing home. "Ye seem to be cheerier the day, John," said the visitor. "Aye man, I thocht I was going to dee but the doctor tells me he can save my life. It's to cost a hunner pounds." "Eh, that's terrible extravagance! Do ye think it's worth it?" (Moffat 1928: 16) An Aberdonian and his wife went to Rothesay for a holiday and went for a sail. Unfortunately the wife fell overboard and was drowned. The Aberdonian asked the pier-master to let him know if her body was found. Two weeks later he received a wire saying, "Body recovered yesterday covered with crabs. Send instructions." The Aberdonian sent a wire back saying "Sell crabs, send on money, reset bait." (HHGBA) The jokes are not intended to be realistic; (see Raskin 1985 on ethnic scripts), rather they employ an erratic version of Weber's ideal type methodology (Weber 1948: 59-60), and the ideal type of the Protestant ethic is ludicrously funny. The ideal type ethic of the mythical Scots and Yankees of the jokes may be summed up in Weber's own terms as the earning of more and more money, combined with the strict avoidance of all spontaneous enjoyment of life ... above all completely devoid of any eudaemonistic not to say hedonistic, admixture. It is thought of so purely as an end in itself, that from the point of view of the happiness of, or utility to,

Religion in the jokes

51

the single individual, it appears entirely transcendental and absolutely irrational. (Weber 1930: 53; see also note 9 to chapter 2: 193-194) The subjects of the jokes are comic precisely because their behaviour is, to use Brentano's description of it, "a rationalization toward an irrational mode of life" (quoted by Weber 1930: note 9 to chapter 2, 194). Their rational irrationality (or is it irrational rationality?) indicates once again the "complexity of the only superficially simple concept of the rational" (Weber 1930: note 9 to chapter 2, 194).

Religion in the jokes In the jokes of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century about canny people there is frequent mention of their religious background or beliefs: Irate Landlord (and Free-Kirk Elder, after being called in, for the fiftieth time about some repairs). "The fact is, Mrs. McRacket, ye'll ne'er be content till ye're i' the hoose made wi'out hands"— Severely—"See Second Corinthians, fifth chapter, an firrst vairse, Mrs. McRacket!" {Mr. Punch's Scotland 1908: 80) The Doctor's Daughter. "I declare you're a dreadful fanatic, Mrs. McCizzom. I do believe you think nobody will be saved but you and your minister!" Old Lady. "A weel my dear, ah whiles hae ma doots about the meenister!" (.Mr.Punch's Scotland 1908: 93) In some jokes there are even explicit references though in a rather muddled or fuddled way to the distinctive doctrine of predestination held by strict Calviniste: Predestination Always ready in a tight corner and quick to meet an emergency, a faithful member of a Glasgow kirk, much addicted to frequent liquid refreshment, met one of the elders of his congregation as he, the tippler, came out of a publichouse one Saturday night. Unsteady, but wary, he bad the elder "a fine nicht!" But the elder fixed him with a meaning glare in his eye. Not a bit abashed, the unsteady one invited the other to gaze at that "bonnie mune" shining in the clear frosty night. Still that steady, boring gaze. Then, the embarrassed one links his arm in the elder's and confidently says: "Now, Elder, tell me, between

52 The Protestant ethic man to man, what dae ye really think about predestination?" "We'll talk about predestination, Sandy, when you are in a more fitting condition." "Na, na, Elder, when aw'm sober a dinna care a damn about predestination!" (Ferguson 1933: 26) A yankee preacher on predestination Let us for argument's sake grant that I, the Rev. Elder Sprightly, am foreordained to be drowned in the river at Smith's ferry, next Thursday morning, at twenty minutes after ten o'clock; and suppose I know it; and suppose I am a free, moral, voluntary, accountable agent — do you think I am going to be drowned? I should rather guess not! I should stay at home; and you'll never ketch the Rev. Elder Sprightly at Smith's ferry nohow, nor near the river neither. (Dr. Merry n.d: 239) These tales lack something of Weber's subtle and speculative inquiry into the links between the later Calvinist theology of predestination and this-worldly asceticism and diligence, but they do indicate a popular awareness that the theological beliefs and the moral behaviour were characteristic of the same selection of peoples. There is little point in asking whether such jokes originate from within the people being laughed at, or whether they are told from the outside, for they very soon become the common property of both groups. Jokes have no author, for they are spontaneously generated and the compilers of joke-books are merely responsible for the particular wording of these items of diffuse and diverse popular origin. 5 The orderly patterns that can be perceived when large number of jokes are analysed are not the result of any deliberate design; they are akin not to the planned order of a machine or of Weber's ideal type bureaucracy (Weber 1948: 214), but to the spontaneous order of a competitive market or of language itself (Barry 1982: 7-58; Polanyi 1951: 156, 185).

Support for Weber At the very time Weber was writing there existed, then, a large number of jokes about the commitment to the Protestant ethic of the citizens of Calvinist nations or regions. In one respect the existence of this spontaneous popular humour reinforces Weber's argument, for it depicts Cal vinists rather than other religious or national groups as extraordinarily steeped in an ethic of thisworldly asceticism, frugality and calculation. The jokes are, of course, far too

Support for Weber

53

fantastic to be regarded as a description of the way of life of the peoples of Calvinist nations. Nonetheless, the jokes do demonstrate that the way of life of the butts of the jokes was seen as distinctly different from that of their nonCalvinist neighbours to the point where it could become the basis of humour. Also they indicate that the link between Calvinism on the one hand and the calculative, calculating spirit of capitalism on the other was specifically recognized by the joke-tellers and incorporated into their humour. Thus far Weber is supported by the evidence of humour, which corroborates the contemporary evidence (i.e. of Weber's own time) showing the greater aptitude for success in business or commerce of Protestants relative to Catholics with which he begins his essay (Weber 1930: 35-40). However the existence and popularity of such jokes contradicts the view put forward by Weber towards the end of his study that the religious ethic that formerly underpinned capitalism had now departed and become unnecessary. In a characteristic blend of pessimism and stoicism, Weber wrote of the then modem world at the turn of the century: The puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force ... Today the spirit of religious asceticism — whether finally, who knows? — has escaped from the cage. But victorious capitalism, since it rests on mechanical foundations, needs its support no longer. (Weber 1930: 181-182)

The jokes create a problem for Weber's view of his own contemporary world quoted above because the jokes were also his contemporaries. If the spirit of religious asceticism had escaped from the cage, why was it still such a popular subject for jokes? Whilst it may be true that a weakening spirit of religious asceticism is an easier target for jokes than one which enjoys established hegemony, it is equally true that, if it had escaped altogether, there should have been little left to joke about. A consideration of this point also leads one to wonder how Weber could possibly reconcile the great disparities between Protestant and Catholic economic achievement of his own day with his view of a now established and victorious capitalism which has no need of a religious backing to help it persist. Weber rightly explains this major difference between Protestants and Catholics in terms of the "mental and spiritual pecu-

54 The Protestant ethic

liarities acquired from the environment, here the type of education favoured by the religious atmosphere of the home community and the parental home" (Weber 1930: 49). But how could mere peculiarities have had such a potent influence in a world in which materialism for its own sake had become dominant? Weber's essay was a bold challenge to the "one-sided materialistic ... causal interpretation of culture and history" (Weber 1930: 183), notably in relation to the origins of the spirit of capitalism. The evidence from contemporary humour added to Weber's own contemporary data suggests that he could have been bolder and emphasised the continued elective affinity between Protestantism and capitalism in his own day, such that Protestantism continued to be an important factor in the renewing and reproducing of the capitalist spirit. Whilst Weber was, to a large extent, right in seeing capitalism as having become by his own time a securely established economic system able to survive without the support of an independently generated Protestant ethic (Weber 1930: 181-182), this view of economic life is based on an oversimple dichotomy between capitalist and non-capitalist (which in this particular context means traditional [Weber 1930: 58-68]) economies and societies. However, in practice some capitalist societies are far more capitalist than others and this is an important factor that helps to decide whether their economies thrive and compete or languish and falter (Wiener 1985). Here I have in mind not so much differences in particular economic institutions between one society and another, such as the relative degree of state as opposed to private control over banks, credit or money or over particular industries, as the variations in the degree to which the citizens of a society, or indeed the members of important groups within it, are motivated by what Weber termed the spirit of capitalism. In principle at least this spirit is a continuous rather than a dichotomous variable and is far stronger in some capitalist societies than in others with the consequence that individual capitalist societies differ greatly not only in prosperity but in their very way of life. It is in this sense that I want to argue that, while all capitalist societies are capitalist, some are more capitalist than others. Among the factors determining how capitalist a society is will be the relative presence or absence of the Protestant ethic. Thus Weber gave too much away when he wrote that "the idea of duty in one's calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs" (Weber 1930: 182). The Calvinist way of life was far from being a mere Geist of Banko6, even though the vigour with which the adherents of competing religious ethics opposed one another had in general declined to the point where their adherents no longer fought but made fun of one another and even of themselves. Likewise, Weber was wrong to suggest that the German reader

Secularization and the calculating Cardis

55

of 1905 could no longer enjoy the humour of Ferdinand Kürnberger's satire Der Amerikamüde (Frankfurt 1855), written fifty years earlier, about the foibles of the zealously commercial Yankee because (presumably) the differences in outlook between the two peoples were "now long since blurred over" (Weber 1930: 192; see also 283, note 115). The differences between the two peoples had no doubt diminished but even on Weber's own evidence they were still striking and visible at the turn of the century. It is certainly the case that the Americans of the time (like the English and French) laughed a good deal at German cultural peculiarities and there is no reason to suppose that the Germans were unable to return the compliment. Finally it is difficult to see how Weber could write that "the modern man is in general, even with the best will, unable to give religious ideas a significance for culture and national character which they deserve" (Weber 1930: 183). This may have been true of many of Weber's colleagues, blinded by intellectual fashion or ideological prejudice, but contemporary popular culture in many countries took such a view for granted and it certainly became incorporated in humorous accounts of nations of Calvinists. A piece of doggerel of 1901 describes Scotland as: Land o'canny, careful' bodies — Foes to a' ungodly fun; Those who sum up man's whole duty — Heaven, hell and number one. (Ford 1901: 167)7

Weber was more prophetic than accurate in his account of the degree of secularization of industrial Europe and America at the beginning of the twentieth century. He correctly spotted a trend towards secularization but overestimated the extent to which changes in the direction of that trend had already come about. Europeans reading Weber towards the end of the twentieth century can recognize their own societies in his work, but they also know how vastly more secular these societies are than they were in Weber's day (Acquaviva 1979).

Secularization and the calculating Cardis Secularization can occur either because of a shift in the content of a particular people's or denomination's religious beliefs, as when Calvinists become deists or unitarians, or in a general falling away from religion into indifferent agnosticism and non-participation. Both of these processes form part of

56 The Protestant ethic

Weber's account of the social changes that have taken place in mature capitalist societies and both can be discerned in popular humour about the Protestant ethic. In his account of the moral attitudes and character of Benjamin Franklin, Weber writes: If we thus ask, why should "money be made out of men", Benjamin Franklin himself, although he was a colourless deist, answers in his autobiography with a quotation from the Bible, which his strict Calvinistic father drummed into him again and again in his youth: "Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings (Prov. xxii 29)." (Weber 1930: 53; see also 52-56)

Weber here stresses Franklin's combination of a lack of religious fervour with a strong continued commitment to the Protestant ethic he had acquired from his Calvinist ancestors. Deism is only one of the possible end products of a decaying Calvinism and probably has fewer adherents than the Unitarians, a small denomination, whose members are renowned both for their hard-headed entrepreneurial vigour (Wilson 1969: 184), and for their ultra-rational and unemotional religion that even denies the divinity of Christ. They are in one sense almost the ideal type of Weberian Protestantism in so far as they have stripped their religion of all magical elements whatsoever. They are the creedless as opposed to the credulous. The Unitarians, though, have retained their Protestant ethic and in some respects they even benefited materially from the stripping away of pieties which could have been a hindrance to business-like conduct as well as providing the motive force for that conduct. It is not surprising, therefore, that jokes about canny New Englanders survived their slide from Calvinism into Unitarianism which was in turn cyclically followed by an evangelical re-awakening (Vidier 1961: 239, 236-237; Weber 1930). At no point was the Protestant ethic seriously weakened. The most remarkable instance of regional based jokes about canny Unitarians is to be found in Wales with the jokes about "Cardis", the people of Cardiganshire, which are in essence similar to those told about the Scots, the Dutch and the New Englanders. The crafty Cardi A very important man died down in Pembrokeshire and he was a wealthy man you see. And he had three special friends and he had made his will; all was to be shared between the three: one from Carmarthenshire, one from Pembrokeshire and a Cardi — these were the three. Well, all three had to be

Secularization and the calculating Cordis 57

present at his funeral and they were supposed to place a hundred pounds each in his hand in the coffin on the morning of the funeral. And so it happened. The men came, all three together. The Pembrokeshire man came forward and placed the hundred pounds in his hand in the coffin. The Carmarthenshire man went forward and placed the same amount in the coffin. That was two hundred pounds then, wasn't it? Well now, this meant that the other one was to place another hundred in after that. Three hundred pounds would have gone to him then, wouldn't they? But the Cardi had come forward now and took out his wallet from his pocket: there wasn't even a halfpenny in the wallet, he had left everything behind. "Never mind, though," he said, "the old man will not be without his due. What shall I do?" And he took a cheque book from his pocket and wrote a cheque for three hundred pounds. And then, to compensate himself, and also to gain, he took the notes that were already in the dead man's hand and then gave him the cheque to cover everything. (Ranke 1972: 67; see also Bell 1929: 24)

The significance of the Welsh jokes about the Cardis is that Cardiganshire was and is, in most respects, quite indistinguishable from the rest of West Wales. West Wales was historically, and to a fair extent still is, a poor, remote and mountainous region with an acid infertile soil and a people who are largely Welsh speaking Nonconformists with a strong sense of a distinctive Welsh national identity. Throughout Wales Methodism has largely taken a Calvinistic rather than a Wesleyan form, for it was Whitefield the Methodist upholder of predestination and his Welsh speaking colleagues who carried out the work of evangelism among the Welsh people (Morgan 1982: 16, Williams 1884), who had previously been rather apathetic Anglicans. Had Weber added a knowledge of Wales and its people to the remarkable range of cultures and languages that he had mastered, he would not have written that "Whitefield, the leader of the predestinationist group, which after his death dissolved for lack of organisation, rejected Wesley's doctrine of perfection in its essentials" (Weber 1930: 25; see also 125). In England such a dissolution may have occurred but in West Wales the vigour of the Calvinistic Methodist chapels, later also known as the Presbyterian Church of Wales, indicates the opposite. In the Teifi valley of south Cardiganshire, and there alone, the Calvinism of West Wales was subsequently transmuted into Unitarianism to produce the only rural area in Britain with a large number of Unitarian chapels (Report of the Commission 1910). Throughout the rest of Wales, a country often gripped by outbursts of emotional religious fervour (Evans 1969, Morgan 1909), the Cardis were viewed with a curious mixture of horror and admiration. There was horror at their heretical rejection of the Trinity which led to their region

58 The Protestant ethic

being labelled the "black spot" of Wales (Davies 1980), and their ministers barred from the pulpits, assemblies and collaborative enterprises of the other Nonconformists, but admiration for their Biblical and secular scholarship, which even led to their employment as instructors in colleges for the training of the trinitarian Welsh Nonconformist clergy (Rees 1883: 463). These same Cardis were also disproportionately successful in manufacturing and commerce, setting up woollen mills in their own rural county and emigrating to London and other English cities, where they were prominent in the drapery business and the dairy trade (Francis-Jones 1984, Morgan 1982:6). The Welsh jokes about the "rational parsimony" (Wallis-Jones 1898: 148-149) of the Cardis grew out of this combination of theological distinctiveness and demonstrable commercial acumen, and have survived down to the present day (Davies 1978).

The comic cultural contradictions of modern capitalism In the culture of mature capitalist societies a distinctively modern hedonism and consumerism, a thirst for affluent leisure and aspirations for self-expression and self-fulfilment (Herzberg 1968), exist alongside Weber's spirit of capitalism, both complementing, and in opposition to, it. These may not be universally available or even desired, but they are now sufficiently widespread for it to be reasonable for Daniel Bell (1979) to speak of the "cultural contradictions of capitalism". Their present importance allows us to recognize in retrospect (much more easily than Weber could) the origins of these forces, running counter to the Protestant ethic as far back as the industrial revolution itself, with a further strong growth in mass consumption and organized leisure in the nineteenth century (Cunningham 1980; Lowerson and Myerscough 1977). A growing capitalist economy needs consumers of advertised delights, as well as dedicated savers, and thus needs leisure and frivolity (Wolfenstein 1975: 394-402), as well as work and seriousness. The individual in a mature capitalist society is not so much trapped in Weber's iron cage as walking a tight-rope. A neglect of the virtues of work, thrift and calculation will lead to economic failure, but there also exists the opposite type of failure in the form of the grim, tedious, pleasureless and over-inhibited existence that is seen as the fate of those who are excessive in their devotion to a diligent, methodical ethic. Before capitalism came to be seen as a normal taken-for-granted economic order such persons might be regarded as sinful misers or fearful strangers

The secularization of humour 59 threatening to disturb a traditional economic order (see Weber 1930: 67-69). In modern jokes they are seen, rather, as comic figures trapped by their espousal of the Protestant ethic into an excessive adhesion to one of the contrary spirits of capitalism. The devotees of the traditional Protestant ethic are portrayed in the jokes as trapped within a rigid iron cage and unable to make sophisticated choices. Those who tell the jokes about them, by contrast, see external goods and cares as a light cloak that can be taken up or thrown aside (Weber 1930: 181, notably his reference to Baxter), as an aid to maintaining one's balance in a complex world of competing moral and material pressures. Ever since the jokes about the canny Calvinists began, those citizens of capitalist societies whose commitment to the Weberian spirit of capitalism is secular, balanced, contingent, utilitarian and "associated with mundane passions which often actually give it the character of sport" (Weber 1930: 182), have mocked the Protestant-ethic-bound Calvinists as comically rigid victims of a religion inspired "mécanisation de la vie" (Bergson 1911). Their laughter indicates that they see themselves as free individuals and perceive the modern world of capitalism, industry and machinery not as an iron cage but as offering unique opportunities for human choice and flexibility, provided that its citizens are emancipated from the moral compulsion of the Protestant ethic. The joke-tellers are celebrating their freedom from a religiongenerated set of constraints, rather than bemoaning with Weber the nullity that exists when the fulfilment of a calling can no longer "directly be related to the highest spiritual and cultural values" (Weber 1930: 182). Those who like myself sympathize with Weber's criticism of modern bureaucratic society may well argue that the mass of the people who tell, share and enjoy jokes about the Protestant ethic have a mistaken notion of the nature of freedom, but the people will laugh at us too. Risus populi, vox Dei.

The secularization of humour The laughter of the people has, however, itself become secularized during the last eighty or so years, since Weber first composed his Protestant ethic thesis, and the general falling away from religion that Weber mistakenly claimed for his own times has become a reality in our own (Acquaviva 1979). In this respect Weber was a better predictor than observer but this is a tribute to his prescience, to his ability to discern the dominant trends of the future at a time when it was not clear which of many contradictory possibilities was likely to prevail. Towards the end of the twentieth century the jokes about canny peoples

60 The Protestant ethic

have also become secular in character. The internationally popular jokes of today about the Scots unlike those of the past do not stress their distinctive national religious culture and this reflects both the secularization of much of Scottish life and the secular cultures of those who enjoy jokes about Scots. The same point may be made in relation to humour about the Dutch (compare for example Werner 1894 with van den Broeck 1976). Jokes about Cardis and New Englanders have lost much of their earlier popularity as these regions have lost their former distinctiveness. This distinctiveness was rooted in a particular religious culture, which has since been eroded by the general secularization of the societies of which they form a part. Scottish jokes can now be constructed by using a formula based on an easily recognizable script that lacks any particular reference to the Scots. In these jokes, which often take the form of a comic riddle, "Scotsman" or "Scottish" is merely an indirect signal that an unlikely tale is being told which will have a punch line based on canniness. Likewise any mention of religion, theology or the Deity is purely incidental to the jokes as can be seen from the third of the examples quoted below about the Swiss: Why do traffic lights have an orange light as well as a red and a green one? To give Scottish drivers time to start their engines. (HHGBA) Scotland Yard? Two feet, eleven inches. (Wilde 1978: 221) The Swiss share with the Scots an innate genius for commerce. This is well known. A genius for commerce and for stinginess. Everyone knows the story of Bolomey who carefully preserves the gold watch which his father sold him on his death bed. This is the story of how Switzerland was created. On the sixth day God created Switzerland and its mountains, meadows and cows. Then God said to the first Swiss: — "What can I make for you?" — "I would like plenty of milk!" said the Swiss. God did as he was asked and a little later asked him: — "Is the milk good?" — "Yes it isn't bad at all! Taste it!" — "It is very good!" After tasting it God said: "Is there anything else you would like?" — "Yes!" said the Swiss, "one franc eighty for the glass of milk." (Isnard 1979: 93; see also Herdi 1979: 8)

The comedy of Calvinists and Catholics

61

What is the shortest book in the world? La dolce vita in Scotland. (Dundes 1971: 190-191) A Belgian and a Dutchman had a competition to see who could tell the most fantastic story. The Dutchman began: "Once upon a time there was a very generous Dutchman ..."

"Stop", cried the Belgian, "you've won." (van den Broeck 1976)

The comedy of Calvinists and Catholics In the late twentieth century there exist many sources of jokes about the canny, only some of which have a Calvinistic people as their butt. Many jokes of this type have no religious basis but refer, for instance, to the alleged canny characteristics of the citizens of towns that have pioneered industrial or commercial development in otherwise economically backward countries, such as the Gabrovonians of Gabrovo in Bulgaria, the Regiomontanos of Monterrey in Mexico and the Paisas of Medellin in the province of Antioquia in Colombia (Davies 1987, 1990). So far as I know the entrepreneurial vigour of the Gabrovonians, Regiomontanos and Paisas has no present or past religious basis. It is interesting, nonetheless, that in both the Latin-American cases the joke-tellers subscribe half-seriously to the myth that the citizens of Monterrey and Medellin are or were originally "New Christians", i.e. Spanish Jews who had pretended to convert to Catholicism. They did so in order to avoid expulsion from Spain at a time of persecution, while secretly retaining their old religion, and it is popularly believed that they subsequently emigrated to remote towns in the Spanish empire in the New World to avoid the attentions of the Inquisition. However, despite the development ofjokes about other "canny" groups, Calvinistic peoples are still disproportionately likely to be the butt of jokes about the canny virtues and vices. In contrast to the jokes about canny Calvinists, jokes about stupidity are likely to be pinned on peoples whose myth of faith and nation is a Roman Catholic one (Martin 1978: 102, 107); as with the jokes about the Irish in Britain and Australia, about the Poles, Italians and Portuguese in the USA, about the Belgians in France and the Netherlands, the Limburghers in the rest of the Netherlands, the Slovaks in the Czech lands, the Fribourgers in Switzerland and in Colombia about the distinctively pious and conservative Pastusos from Pasto in Nariño (Davies 1988: 44-65; Davies 1990). Those who tell such jokes, by contrast, typically have a national myth whose basis is

62 The Protestant ethic

Protestant, secular or even anti-clerical (Martin 1978: 101-103). The humorous images conveyed in ethnic jokes about stupidity are the very opposite of the comic business acumen on which the tales about canny Calvinists were based. The stupidity jokes make the butts of the jokes appear inept and ignorant in the face of commercial pressures and technical change, and often depict them as Catholic peasants and labourers from economically backward countries or regions, who are trapped by their own traditions and unable and unwilling to adapt to the modern world. The only Calvinist group to be the butt of jokes of this kind are the Afrikaners (Carver 1980), whose remote and rural isolation from developments in Calvinist theology in Europe and North America and strong corporate outlook have rendered them a peculiar case (Martin 1978: 207; Moodie 1975; Wilkins and Strydom 1980).

Has the spirit finally escaped from the cage? The humour of the end of the twentieth century suggests that the link between Protestantism and capitalism postulated by Weber still exists in the minds of the joke tellers, though in a much diminished way, which is in line with other evidence indicating that there are still significant, albeit smaller, differences between the economic behaviour of Protestants and Catholics (Golde 1975). Perhaps by now it is safe to treat such differences as merely the result of the inertia of tradition, but in doing so we may be making the very mistake that Weber made in 1905, at a time when the Protestant ethic was alive and well and still making an independent contribution to the spirit of capitalism.

Chapter 5 Stupidity and rationality: Jokes from the iron cage

One of the most outstanding features of the jokes told in industrial societies is the enormous and universal popularity of jokes told at the expense of allegedly stupid groups of people. In the Western industrial countries these jokes are usually told about an ethnic group or minority, whilst in the former socialist Eastern Europe the jokes were of a political nature. It is perhaps not surprising that, apart from jokes about sex, ethnic jokes of all kinds are perhaps the most popular and numerous of all jokes in the West whilst political jokes tended to dominate the popular humour of Eastern Europe. However, what is remarkable is the range, durability and popularity of jokes about stupidity in both types of industrial society. It is a phenomenon that calls for a sociological explanation. Why, for instance, do people in Western industrial societies prefer jokes about "stupid" ethnic minorities to almost any other kind of joke? Why are they so fond of jokes like these: A Polish couple decided to have a chicken farm. They bought two chickens, took them home, dug a hole in their backyard and buried the chickens head first. Next morning they discovered the chickens were dead. They bought two more chickens, this time planting them in the yard feet down. By the next morning the fowl had died. They wrote to the Polish consulate explaining their problem. Within a week they received a prompt reply from the Polish consul. The letter said, "Please send us a soil sample." (Wilde 1978: 176) Article in Irish medical journal: "Are vasectomies hereditary?" (Chambers 1980: 94) A Sabena (Belgian airlines) aeroplane was unable to land at Brussels airport. The Belgian pilot signalled to the control tower that the landing-strip was too short for him to land on. "Your landing strip", he said in amazement, "is only a few dozen metres long and several kilometres wide." (French 1980s)

Practically every Western industrial country has its own "stupid" group about whom such jokes are told, as can be seen from Table 1 (see pp. 2-3). The jokes are told in each case about a group living on the social or geographical

64 Stupidity and rationality

periphery of the country where the jokes are told. The group is usually an ethnic minority but the jokes may well be applied to the inhabitants of a neighbouring country (such as the Belgians) or of a peripheral provincial town or district (such as Aarhus or Ostfriesland). Often identical jokes are to be found in different countries and it is sometimes clear that the jokes of one country have been adapted or translated for consumption in another. The joke-tellers may dislike, despise, feel indifferent towards or feel affection for the group who are the butt of their jokes. In a sense the victims are important and in general attempts to explain such jokes simply in terms of the relationships between particular ethnic groups are mistaken. The key facts about these jokes is that they reflect a wish that people have to tell jokes about a group of stupid outsiders. By telling jokes about the stupidity of a group on the periphery of their society, people can place this despised and feared quality at a distance and gain a brief sense of reassurance that they and the members of their own group are not themselves stupid or irrational. There have always been jokes about simpletons, noodles and village idiots and in many pre-industrial societies joke-tellers have fastened the label "stupid" on the inhabitants of a particular village, town, region or country. Towns such as Abdera in Thrace, Chelm in Eastern Europe, Kampen in Holland and Sidon in Phoenicia were made the butt of jokes about the foolishness of their inhabitants (see chapters 2 and 3; Esar 1978: 295-296; Rosten 1970: 85-86) long before modern industrial societies came into being. However, in the pre-industrial world there was nothing to compare with the great flood of "Polish jokes", "Irish jokes", Ostfriesenwitze and other jokes about stupid outsiders that has characterized the industrial societies, particularly since the 1960s. In the pre-industrial world stupidity was just one among many despised traits that was mocked in jokes, whereas in the advanced industrial countries of Western Europe and North America, jokes about stupidity have become something of an obsession. There certainly seems to be a correlation between the increased popularity of ethnic jokes about stupid minorities and the development and intensification of industrial society. Jokes about the alleged stupidity of the Irish first appeared towards the end of the seventeenth century and showed a steady growth in popularity during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the period when Britain was becoming the world's first industrial country (See Bartley 1954; Joe Miller's Jests [ 1739] 1963). Irish jokes have remained popular in Britain ever since and the Irish have also been the main butt of jokes about stupidity in Australia, New Zealand and until relatively recently, the United States.1 Jokes about stupidity have, as one might expect, always been

Stupidity and rationality 65 popular in the United States and have been pinned on a variety of immigrant groups — the Irish, the Italians, the Portuguese, the Swedes, as well as the Poles. The Polish jokes which have been so popular in the United States since the 1960s are only the most recent in a long tradition of American jokes about stupid ethnic outsiders. Since the Second World War countries as diverse as India, Mexico, Iran and South Africa have advanced considerably along the road to industrialization and have also begun to produce large numbers of jokes about their own "stupid" minorities as shown in Table 1 on pp. 2-3. The reason for the enormous popularity of jokes about stupidity in Western industrial societies must be sought in the antithesis between the attitudes and behaviour displayed by the member of the "stupid" minority in the joke on the one hand and the intensely and increasingly "rational" character of industrial society on the other. Modern industrial societies are dominated by a belief in technical and economic efficiency, by the view that all institutions should be "rationally" organized via the interplay of the key impersonal forces of the market place, bureaucracy and modern science so as to maximize the stated goals of these institutions from the means at their disposal. At one level, then, we may see jokes about stupid outsiders as an affirmation of the value of rationality, efficiency and applied intelligence on the part of the joketellers, for any failure to live up to and conform to these qualities is ascribed to outsiders and then subjected to severe ridicule. It is they who are comically stupid and irrational and we who are intelligent, skilled and organized. By apportioning implicit praise and direct mockery in this way, the jokes presumably act as a minor means of social control. They are one more factor pressing individuals into conformity with the "rational" demands of modern organizations and society. However, in order to provide a full explanation of the popularity of these jokes, it is necessary also to consider the negative impact of rational social organization on the individual. The key question that must be asked is: "What aspect of such a rational social order is likely to make individuals anxious about their position in the rational world in which they live and to want to indulge in jokes about stupid outsiders as a temporary release from this anxiety?" The answer to this question probably lies in the high degree of specialization and division of labour imposed on them by the market, bureaucracy and modern science. The mass market encourages individuals to become specialists who sell their particular skills in the market place and thus take advantage of the enhanced over-all efficiency and profitability created by the market-coordinated division of labour (Smith 1896). Modern bureaucratic organizations of all kinds are, almost by definition, organized around

66 Stupidity and

rationality

the principle of the division of labour. As Weber put it, "bureaucracy rests upon expert training, a functional specialisation of work and an attitude set for habitual and virtuoso-like mastery of single, yet methodically integrated functions" (Weber 1948:229). Modern science, even where it is not organized along bureaucratic and market-oriented lines (which it usually is) (Toynbee 1934, 1: 2; see also Weber 1948: 223-224), also demands a high degree of specialization from those who become scientific workers of all kinds, simply because of the enormous and increasing body of scientific knowledge (Toynbee 1934, 1: 2) that now exists. No one can know and understand more than a fraction of it or keep up with the torrent of new research findings, except within a severely limited area of study. The extreme division of labour that characterizes Western industrial society has produced a situation where everyone, including even the most highly skilled and intelligent of individuals is aware that he or she is a minor part of a system (be it a market, a bureaucracy or a science) that contains far more skill and knowledge than he or she can ever master. They are all specialists whose individual efforts in isolation might amount to very little. Each individual specialist knows that he or she is perpetually dependent on innumerable other specialists whose work and skills he or she cannot reproduce and possibly cannot even comprehend. Under these circumstances even the most knowledgeable and skilled person is aware of how little he or she knows and how little he or she can do in a world that puts an enormous emphasis on skill and knowledge. In such a world everyone needs to be reassured that they are not really stupid and that real stupidity is safely restricted to the ranks of the Poles, the Irish, or whoever is the butt of the local ethnic joke. It is significant in this context to note how many of the jokes about a stupid minority have as their setting an aeroplane, a submarine 2 or a space rocket where everyone is locked in a technically sophisticated artificial environment and dependent for survival on the intelligent behaviour of highly skilled specialists. The situation of people caught up in such a scientifically controlled and constructed but potentially dangerous situation is an extreme metaphor 1 of the anxious and dependent position of anyone trapped like Weber's bureaucrat as "a single cog in an ever-moving mechanism which prescribes to him an essentially fixed route of march" (Weber 1948: 228). The introduction of a stupid outsider into the artificial situation of the joke has disastrous, but comic, results: Pokorski got a job as a test pilot. He took a helicopter up to 5000 feet ... 10,000 feet... 15,000 feet. All of a sudden it crashed. Pokorski woke up in the hospital ward. His boss was there asking him what had happened. "It got too

Stupidity and rationality

cold", said the Polish pilot, "so I turned off the fan." (Wilde 1977: 135) "How do you sink a Belgian submarine?" "You knock on a port-hole and wait for someone to come and open it" (Steeman 1977:95) Van was a wealthy Free State farmer with his own aeroplane. One day while on a holiday in the Cape his friend Van Tonder asked Van if he would like to fly his seaplane. Van gratefuly accepted and did a perfect take-off from the bay accompanied by Van Tonder as his co-pilot. After flying around for some time Van began letting down over the aerodrome much to Van Tonder's alarm. "Hey, Van"! he said. "This is a seaplane not an aeroplane. You must land on water not on land." Van thanked Van Tonder for his timely advice, pushed forward the throttle and flew off to the bay where he did a graceful landing. He then turned to Van Tonder and said: "I cannot thank you enough for reminding me not to land on the aerodrome. If you had not pointed it out, it would have been the end of us." With these words he stepped out of the plane into the water. (Carver 1980: 39) The pilot of a plane approaching Heathrow airport asked the control tower for a time check. The control tower replied: "If that's Quaint-arse the Australian airline, well the time is now three o'clock. If it's Air France, well the time is now fifteen hundred hours. And if you're Aer Fungus, the Irish airline, well the big hand is on the twelve and the little hand is on the three." (British 1970s) Aer Fungus, the Irish airline, introduced a completely automatic plane on their flight from Dublin to London. As the plane took off from Dublin airport a deep voice announced on the loudspeaker: "This is your computer control speaker. You are now travelling in the world's first pilotless completely computerised and automatic aircraft. Everything has been carefully programmed by the very best Irish engineers and you can rest assured that nothing can possible go wrong, go wrong, go wrong, go wrong...." (British 1960s, see also p. 144) In 1990 the Swedes sent their first rocket up into outer space with a crew consisting of a chimpanzee and a Norwegian. On the control panel in front of them was a red light and a green light. When the red light flashed it indicated that instructions were about to come through for the Norwegian and when the green light showed, it signalled an imminent instruction for the chimpanzee. Ten minutes after blast-off the green light flashed and the chimpanzee was

67

68

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instructed to alter the course of the rocket slightly, to take infra-red photographs of Sweden and to repair the radio transmitter. Half an hour later the green light flashed again and the chimpanzee was told to calculate the rate of fuel consumption, adjust the computer and make observations in connection with the earth's magnetic field. By this time the Norwegian was getting restless at having nothing to do and resentful of the busy chimpanzee. Then one hour later the red light flashed and the Norwegian eagerly awaited his instructions. A minute later came the order: "Feed the chimpanzee." (Swedish 1977; see also Wilde 1973: 22) Thus far there has been an emphasis on one aspect of the rational society that in one way or another impinges on everyone — everyone at some time feels inadequate as a lone individual faced with the complexity of modern technology and social organization and likes to feel superior to the comic outsider who cannot cope with it. However, in a society with a high degree of occupational specialization and division of labour, people are divided into highly diverse and unequal groups, differentiated by the degree of skill, training and acumen demanded by their work. At one extreme we have highly skilled specialists who must regularly undertake complex tasks involving a high degree of intelligence, knowledge, judgment or dexterity. A surgeon, a pilot, an electrical engineer, a barrister, a bank manager, a dealer in grain futures simply must get it right most of the time, if they are to survive in their chosen business or profession. For such people jokes about stupid outsiders are a release from the strain of having to exercise a perpetual intelligent vigilance, of having to live by one's wits. Jokes about other people's stupidity can serve to dissipate any anxiety about losing their skill or intellectual powers at a crucial moment. It was probably for a similar reason that in the pre-industrial world jokes about stupidity seem to have been most popular in trading and commercial communities such as those of the ancient Athenians — with their gibes at nearby peasant societies such as Boeotia or their trading rivals from Sidon (Esar 1978: 295) — and of the Jews of Eastern Europe with their jokes about Chelm and about Schlemiels (Spalding 1976: 119). Where a community has to live by its wits, stupidity is likely to be a despised, feared and widely mocked characteristic. At the other extreme of a society characterized by a very high degree of division of labour are those who perform extremely simple, repetitive tasks that are but a fragment of some complex industrial or bureaucratic process and which require the exercise of hardly any skill or intelligence at all. The effect of such a job on the person who does it was clearly outlined by Adam

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Smith (1896, 2: 301-302), one of the earliest observers of the introduction of the modern division of labour: The understanding of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations of which the effects too are perhaps always the same or very nearly the same has no occasion to exert his understanding or to exercise his invention in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.

People of this kind are also likely to be anxious about stupidity. They are anxious about their own low status in a society which prizes skill, intelligence and rationality, and are anxious lest the complex and baffling society in which they live should make unexpected demands on them which they will not know how to fulfil. Such anxieties are relieved by jokes about ethnic groups reputedly so stupid that they cannot even reach the level of social and economic competence attained by the least skilled of the occupational groups created by the division of labour. For such people perhaps the one remaining source of intellectual self-esteem that they have is the belief that they are more sophisticated than the newly arrived immigrant from the provinces, the countryside or a technically-backward country. An unskilled person may well feel over-awed by the complexity of the world in which he works, but his very familiarity with its complexity enables him to feel superior to the ignorant newcomer. Hence the fund of stories about immigrant bumpkins who have not yet learned to master even the simplest task. Did you hear about the Polack who lost his elevator operator's job because he couldn't learn the route? (Wilde 1977: 152) A Toronto woman called a firm which was renowned for its landscaping and interior decorating. A man from the company soon arrived and the lady showed him round the house. Every time she asked what colours he would recommend for a particular room he used to go to the window, raise it and call out "Green sides up?" before aswering her. This happened several times and the woman's curiosity got the better of her. "Is this some kind of a ritual?" she asked. "No", he replied, "it's simply that I've got two Newfies next door laying sod." (Thomas 1976: 148)

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A Sardarji [Sikh] working on a building site was trying to knock a nail into the wall head first. Another Sardarji seeing that his efforts were unavailing said to him, "You're using the wrong kind of nail. That nail is meant for the wall opposite." (Told to me in Srinagar, Kashmir in 1980) Perhaps, then, the universal appeal of j o k e s about stupid outsiders lies in the fact that they have the power to relieve and defuse the various f o r m s of anxiety experienced by the citizens of a rational society. Such anxieties may be generally experienced or specific to those occupying a particular niche in the division of labour with its own level of skills and intellectual demands and attendant fears. Different people may well laugh at j o k e s involving stupid ethnic minorities f o r widely differing mixtures of reasons, but the nature of the modern rational world is such that everyone may well have some reason to feel anxious, some reason to laugh at ethnic jokes of this kind. Thus, the predominant ethnic jokes of the Western industrial societies serve the cause of rationality by denigrating its opposite — stupidity — and perhaps also by defusing the various anxieties of those w h o live in the modern rational world. A s such, they constitute a minor form of social control. T h e Irish joke, the Polish joke, the Ostfriesenwitze in some small way reconcile each trapped individual to his fate as one who, like W e b e r ' s "individual bureaucrat, cannot squirm out of the apparatus in which he is harnessed" (Weber 1948: 228) or who is "chained to his activity by his entire material and ideal existence" (Weber 1948: 214). The jokes about stupid outsiders constitute part of that ideal existence — they are one small item helping to inculcate into people a secure belief in a "rational" world devoted to the pursuit of "precision, speed, unambiguity, knowledge of the files, continuity, discretion, unity, strict subordination, reduction of friction and of material and personal costs" (Weber 1948: 214). However, a careful study of the world of ethnic jokes reveals also an awareness that the rational world of "rules, means, ends and matter of factness" (Weber 1948: 244) that we have created is, at a deeper level, irrational. T h e successful pursuit of efficiency has created "a joyless e c o n o m y " (Scitovsky 1976), a world in which work is, for many people, tedious, monotonous and uncreative and where leisure is all too often simply a mirror-image of such work (Bell 1960). If this is what the pursuit of rationality has achieved then perhaps the pursuit was itself irrational. In a pessimistic mood, M a x Weber (1930: 181) wrote of the trap in which we now find ourselves: The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when

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asceticism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life and began to dominate worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized fuel is burnt. In Baxter's view, the care for external goods should lie on the shoulders of the "saint like a light cloak which can be thrown aside at any moment". But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage ... in the United States the pursuit of wealth stripped of its religious and ethical meaning tends to become associated with purely mundane passions which often actually give it the character of a sport. No one knows who will live in this cage in the future or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals or if neither, mechanised petrification embellished with a sort of compulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development it might truly be said: specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilisation never before achieved. Ethnic jokes protesting against the constraints of the iron cage are less popular, less numerous and less insistent than the jokes that pillory those groups too stupid to survive within its bars. Nonetheless, diverse ethnic jokes of this kind do exist and three types may be cited, each of which reveals one facet of the revolt against rationality. These are jokes about work-addicted Americans, jokes about rigid, pedantic, over-obedient Germans and jokes about stingy, over-rational, humourless Scotsmen. In each case the the joke-tellers mock the members of another ethnic group for their excessive subordination to the world of work, money and duty. They are portrayed as senseless beings who have locked themselves in the iron cage and thrown away the key. Their very rationality is irrational, for their methodical manipulation of means towards ends robs their lives of the possibility of human joy and freedom. An American businessman visiting in Mexico watched an Indian making pottery vases. He asked the price. "Twenty centavos each." — "And for 100?" The native thought it over and then answered: "That will be 40 centavos each." The American thought the Indian was making a mistake in his quotation of the price so he tried again. "And if I bought 1000 all alike?" "All alike?" he said. "One thousand? Well, Senor, then they would cost you 60 centavos apiece." "Impossible! Why you must be insane!" "It could be", replied the Indian, "but I'd have to make so many and all alike

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and I wouldn't like that. So you see you would have to pay me for my boredom as well as for my work." (Braude [1958] 1976: 38-39) An engineer was trying to put through a railroad project in one of the Latin American countries and he was seeking some local support for it. "How long does it take you to get your goods to market on a burro?" he inquired of a native. "Four days", he was told. "See there", cried the engineer triumphantly, "with our road you could get your goods to market and be back in one day." "But Senor", protested the native, "what would we do with the other three days?" (Lewis and Wachs [1966] 1972: 255) A couple of French tourists winding up an extensive trip around the United States passed an old folks' home. The inmates were rocking back and forth vigorously in their chairs on the porch. "Regardez, Clarinda", remarked the French husband, "these crazy Americans keep up their mad pace to the very end." (Cerf 1959: 195) An American teacher undertook the task of convincing an indolent native son of the Philippines that it was his duty to get out and hustle. "But why should I work?" inquired the guileless Filipino. "In order to make money." declared the thrifty teacher. "But what do I want with money?" persisted the brown brother. "Why when you get plenty of money you will be independent and will not have to work any more", replied the teacher. "I don't have to work now", said the native. And the teacher gave up in disgust. (Copeland and Copeland 1939:76; see also Lewis and Wachs 1972: 352; Wilde 1978: 170) Northern visitor (in Georgia): "I see you raise hogs almost exclusively here. Do you find they pay better than corn and potatoes?" Native (slowly): "Wal no, but yer see, stranger, hogs don't need hoeing." (Lawson 1923: 16) In a South Carolina town a businessman beset by domestic and financial worries had blown his brains out. Naturally the tragedy, for the time being, was the main local topic of conversation. A resident who knew the suicide slightly was discussing the sad affair with his negro office servant. "Joe", he said, "speaking of such things, I've been struck by a curious circumstance. To the best of my recollection, I never heard a member of your race deliberately killing himself because of private troubles and yet every day in

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the papers we see where white people have been taking their own lives. I wonder why this should be? You're a negro yourself, what are your theories on the subject?" "Mista Barnwell", said Joe, "yere's de way it tis: a white man gits hisself in a jam and he can't seem to see no way out of it and he sets down and thinks about it and thinks about it some mo' and after a while he grabs up a pistol and shoots hisself. A black man, he gits snarled up in trouble the same way and he sets down and starts thinkin' and after a while he goes to sleep!" (Cobb 1925: 233) These Yankee jokes, though at one level patronising about the lack of a workethnic among Latin-Americans, Filipinos, blacks, white Southerners, etc., also reveal an uneasiness about their own work-obsessed society. There lurks in all these jokes a distinctly subversive message about the value and purpose of work and about the rationality of being a hustling American workaholic. 4 There is a similar subversive message to be found in jokes about those dour, rational, stingy Scotsmen in whose Calvin-bounded lives the idea of duty in one's calling prowls about in a far from ghost-like way (see p. 54). A Deeside wife listened for a whole evening to the jokes and patter of Billy Connolly without a hint of a smile. Next day she confided to a friend, "He's a great comic. It was all I could do tae keep from laughing." (Hodes 1978: 58) An Aberdonian with a rotten molar went to his dentist who said he would charge £5 to pull it out. Aberdonian: "Couldn't you loosen it for a £1 so that I can pull it out myself?" (HHGBA, 1968) An undertaker at a Rotary dinner offered a free funeral to the first member of the club to die. Suddenly there was a shot from the back of the room. A Scotsman had shot himself. (HHGBA, 1968) A young Scotsman, methodical, painstaking, and sincere, as so many of his race are, had been a bachelor of long standing. Since coming to this country he had saved his money until now he felt he was qualified properly to support a domestic establishment. One day he went to a friend: "I've about decided to get married", he said, "In fact, I'm looking around now for a wife." "Where are you looking?" asked his friend. "I'll tell you", said the Scot. "It's my belief that the girls who work as clerks in the big department stores here in New York, are mighty fine types. As a rule,

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they are well dressed and tidy and good-looking and have nice ways. They must be self-reliant or they wouldn't be working. They have to be intelligent or they couldn't hold their jobs. They know how to make a dollar go a long distance, or they couldn't dress as well as they do on the modest wages most of them get. My notion is this: On pretext of wanting to buy something, I am going to tour the big shops until I see a girl behind a counter who seems to fill my requirements. Then I'm going to find out her name and make private inquiries as to her character and disposition, and if she answers all the requirements, I'll secure an introduction to her and if she seems to like me I'm going to ask her to marry me." Six months went by. The cautious Scot and the man to whom he had confided his plan of campaign met again. The latter thought his friend looked rather careworn and unhappy. "How are you getting along?" "Well", said the Scot, "I'm a married man, if that's what you mean." "Well, did you follow the scheme you had in mind — I mean the one you told me about the last time I saw you?" "Yes. I married a girl that worked at Macy's." "Congratulations. How's everything getting along?" The Scot fetched a small sigh. "Sometimes", he said, "I can't help thinking that maybe I might have done better at Gimbel's". (Cobb 1925: 238) Here it is thrift, self-control and rational calculation that are comically undermined and subverted. The Scotsman's excessive adherence to these three bars of the iron cage is shown as being self-defeating and even self-destructive, for it is a world from which warmth and enjoyment have been banished. A third example of an ethnic joke "against the cage" depicts the typical German's orderly methodical, pedantic, procedure-bound and obedient behaviour as equally self-destructive. A Stickler for the Code A survivor of Mosby's Cavalry told me this one years ago, as illustrative of the German's love for regularity and orderly routine in all the affairs of life: A Bavarian immigrant joined a Union regiment and in the third year of the (American Civil) war was sent to Virginia. One night he imbibed too heavily of strong drink and fell asleep in a corn crib. When he wakened he discovered that during the night a negro camp follower had stolen his uniform, leaving behind a ragged civilian outfit. The German clothed himself in these tatters and set out to find his command.

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Presently another and an even more disagreable circumstance than the theft of his wardrobe impressed itself upon him. By certain signs he was made aware that the Federal forces had withdrawn from their old positions and the enemy had advanced so that he was now inside the foe's lines. As he limped towards the rear hoping to overtake the retreating force, a squad of ragged gray troopers came whirling out of a thicket and surrounded him. Quite frankly he told them who and what he was and they took him prisoner. Presently his captors halted him where a tree limb stretched across the road, and one of the Southerners unlooping a plow line from his saddle-bow, proceeded to fashion a slip-noose in one end of it. The captive inquired of the lieutenant in command what the purpose of all this might be. "Why," said the lieutenant, "we're going to treat you as we would any Yank caught inside our lines in disguise. Under the laws of war we're going to hang you as a spy." "Veil", said the German, "votefer is der rule!" (Cobb 1925: 201) On a Lufthansa flight from Heathrow to Berlin the captain's speech to the passengers went something like this: "Gut mornink, ladies und jentlemen, ziss iss your captain shpeakink. Ve took off from Heat'row precisely on time at 10.30 hours British Mean Time, unt ve are now flyink at a height of fifteen thousand feet. In two hours and forty three minutes ve shall descent to ten thousand feet und sixteen minutes und fifteen second later ve shall descent to five thousand feet. Ve shall remain at this height for seven minutes and twentyeight seconds and then ve shall land at 13.56 precisely. In the event of an emergency you vili all follow to the letter the safety regulations printed on the cards in front of you. There need be no panic or any casualties provided you all do exactly AS YOU ARE TOLD!" (Kilgarriff 1975: 24) Lufthansa hostess: "Good mornink, ladies and schentlemen. You vili enjoy the flight." (British 1960s) Two Germans in a bar in Mexico city see a third man coming in. First German: "That man is a police officer." Second German: "How do you know?" First German: "He's wearing a uniform." (Told by a Mexican in Mexico City 1979) A small child walking down Ben Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv asked an adult the time. "It is precisely seventeen and a half minutes past three," replied the adult. "Are you a Yekke [German Jew]?" asked the child. "Yes, but how did you know?" (Told in England 1980)

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Easy for the trained mind I was a reporter on the New York Evening World. The body of a young woman, expensively dressed, was found in a thicket in a lonely and remote part of Long Island. She had been murdered — shot through the head. Harry Stowe of our staff, since deceased, was the first reporter to reach the place. The body had not been moved and in searching about it Stowe happened upon something the local coroner had overlooked — a scrap of discoloured paper bearing printed and written words in German upon it. Stowe quietly slipped the paper into his pocket and caught the first train for town. He couldn't read German himself so he took his find to the office of the German consul. There he met an elderly, spectacled, exceedingly serious-looking under-secretary who translated the printed and written inscriptions for him. Then the secretary wanted to know what it was all about. Stowe told him, explaining that the identity of the murdered woman was still a profound mystery — that nobody could guess who or what she was. He described her clothing in some detail. "Pooh!" snorted the German, "Stupid fools that these American policemen are! To the trained mind the whole thing is simplicity itself. By process of elimination and deduction it is possible to ascertain beyond question exactly what manner of woman this was." "Could you do it?" asked Stowe, hopefully. "In one little minute", said the under-secretary impressively. "Go ahead then, please and do it", begged Stowe. "Very well", said the German. "My young friend, please follow me closely. This paper shows that some woman bought at a store in Leipzig certain small articles, kitchen utensils — a bread knife, a potato masher, a coffee grinder. No woman in Germany unless she was a housewife would buy such things. So! On the other hand, this woman, you tell me, wore forty-dollar corsets. No woman in Germany unless she was an actress would wear forty-dollar corsets. No actress would buy common household utensils. That would make her a housewife! No housewife would wear forty-dollar corsets. That would make her an actress. And there you are!" (Cobb 1925: 238) Sign in a continental train: E pericoloso sporgersi Dangerous to lean out Nicht Hinauslehnen! (Continental train 1981 )s All these ethnic jokes about the "rational" Americans, Scots and Germans are the mirror-image of the earlier jokes about stupid ethnic groups. The exces-

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sive devotion to work, money, order, rules, precision, rationality of the latter ethnic groups are also portrayed as forms of stupidity. Jokes which depict such an enthusiasm for the iron cage as stupid after its own fashion and which project such stupid traits safely on to other groups are a protest against the encroachments of the bars. They also serve to dispel our anxiety that we too may become completely absorbed into a competitive and bureaucratic world. The comforting message of the jokes is that it is the others who are irrationally rational whilst we are wise enough not to be trapped in the constricting formal and technical rationality of the iron cage. The jokes about stupidity and irrationality so far discussed have been mainly in relation to the ethnic jokes of the Western industrial capitalist societies. However, practically identical jokes about stupid groups were just as numerous and popular in the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe. What is significant, though, is that in Eastern Europe such jokes were told about groups holding or exercising political power rather than about ethnic minorities. The people portrayed as stupid in East European jokes tended to be the leaders of the Communist Party, apparatchiks, official heroes and members of the militia (police). Thus the East European equivalent of Irish and Polish-American jokes were told about groups defined not in ethnic but political terms. Why do Polish militiamen have a stripe round their elbows? So that they can remember where to bend their arms. (Polish 1981 via Michael Beckham) A Czech militiaman went to see his doctor with severe burns on both his ears. "How did this happen?" asked the doctor. "Well, someone rang up while I was ironing", said the policeman. "Yes, but how did you manage to burn both ears?" asked the doctors. "Well, then I had to ring for an ambulance", said the militiaman. (Czech 1981 ) Why do Czech militiamen go round in groups of three? One can read, one can write and the other is keeping an eye on the two intellectuals. (Czech 1981) The phone rang in the Kremlin one night. Brezhnev woke up, put on the light, put on his glasses, fumbled in his pyjama pocket for the appropriate scrap of paper, picked up the phone and read out carefully: "Who is it?" (Russian 1981 ) All Brezhnev's speeches at the Olympic games in Moscow carried as a heading the Olympic symbol OOO. As a result Brezhnev began all his speeches

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with the phrase "Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh! Oh!" (Russian; told to me in 1980 by Emil Draitser) Why was Grechko made a Marshal of the Soviet Union? Because he was too stupid to be a General. (Kolasky 1972: 70) Husak one day held a reception for Mrs. Gandhi and the staff of the Indian Embassy in Prague. He and his wife arranged a curry buffet and had all the Czechs dress up in Indian Costume. Half way through the reception, Husak's wife came over and said: "Gustav, we're not dressed right." "What do you mean?" asked Husak. "You've got to paint a red spot on your forehead like Mrs. Gandhi", said his wife. "Why?" said Husak. "Well", said his wife, "all the Indians are looking at you and tapping their foreheads with a finger." (Czech 1981) What is May 1st? Socialist April Fools' Day. (East European 1981). The content of these jokes about stupidity is the same as in the Western jokes cited earlier, but instead of the jokes being told about peripheral groups in the society they were told about groups at the very heart of the political order. What the jokes reflected is the awareness in the minds of the East Europeans who invented and told them of the unresolved tension in their societies between the pressures towards rationality inherent in any modern industrial economy and the dictates of their then political system. The jokes were, as in the West, an expression of the values of rationality and of the anxieties engendered by modern forms of rational social organization but they were also a protest against the perceived irrationality of the dominant modes of political authority and coercion. The jokes were a form of social control upholding the technostructure of society and yet also a means of subverting the legitimacy of the political order. The jokes exalt work and deny politics. East European jokes about stupidity underline the fundamental contradiction that existed in these societies between the rational outlook engendered by modern processes of production, administration and scientific enquiry, and the irrational, arbitrary, muddled and obstructive exercise of power that emerged from their political system (Hirszowicz 1980: 131-132). The politicization of jokes about stupidity is a reflection of the general politicization of society in the former socialist societies of Eastern Europe, a

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politicization which was both irrational in itself and productive of unforeseen irrational consequences. At one level the irrationality can be seen simply as a result of continual arbitrary and irrelevant political interference with the workings of the basic "rational" processes of modern society — the market, bureaucracy and science — for reasons of ideology or expediency, to such an extent that the rational and routine functioning of these processes was perceptibly disrupted. At another and possibly more fundamental level, the irrational aspects of the former socialist East European societies can be seen to be the inherent result of attempts to extend ostensibly rational forms of bureaucratic planning and control beyond what is possible and beyond what is rational to attempt. All societies, all economic and legal systems, all modes of production consist of a blend of two interacting and complementary forms of order, the specifically planned order of, say, a machine, a factory process or a bureaucracy, and forms of spontaneous order such as the market place or the advance of science. Any workable social, legal or economic system necessarily includes both forms of order. A rational social order is not one which seeks to maximise planned order (or, come to that, spontaneous order) but one which combines elements of planned and spontaneous order, of corporate and selfadjusting systems in an optimal way. The fundamental irrationality of the socialist societies of Eastern Europe (Polanyi 1951: 156) stemmed, to a large extent, from their excessive reliance on specifically planned order and in particular (a) their self-defeating "attempts to exercise more specific control over the machinery of economic life than is compatible with the rules of an effectively functioning system of production" (Polanyi 1951: 152-153), (b) their failure to establish a fully workable and independent system of private law which could have impartially enforced contractual obligations, e.g. between two state enterprises (Polanyi 1951: 185-186), and (c) their attempts to predict and determine the advance of scientific knowledge (Ruhemann 1937: 445-447; Webb and Webb 1944: 769-793). These East European socialist attempts to impose massive constraints on the spontaneous form of order in society together with a failure to provide an institutional framework within which such forms of order can operate effectively would necessarily have had horrendous irrational consequences even if the over-riding specifically planned order had been rationally designed. 6 In practice, of course, the pervasive, intrusive and irresponsible nature of East European politics ensured that even those smaller simpler social tasks that could be planned on a rational basis were subject to irrational pressures and distortions (Hirszowicz 1980: 127-167).

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East European jokes about stupidity did not only involve the ascribing of lack of intelligence to those individuals and groups most responsible for or most expressive of the irrational aspects of their social order. They also focussed specifically on just those departures from the rational operations of the market, bureaucracy and science outlined above. Such anecdotes and jokes arose, for instance, from the conflict between the arbitrary exercise of political power and the rational operation of bureaucratic administration. One source of jokes about the irrationality and stupidity of political processes in Eastern Europe was the contradiction between the "rational" view that managers, officials, etc., should be appointed on the basis of ability, experience, skills and qualifications, and the Party view that political reliability and affirmative action by social class should take precedence (Hirszowicz 1980:101 -102). Hence the jokes about the stupidity of those whose position depended mainly or entirely on political power, political loyalty or political ideology. By attempting to politicise management or science or civil administration and to make political power prevail over expertise in these areas, the politicians sparked off a comic counter-attack in which rational expertise prevails over stupid politics. Similarly, the attempt to elevate men like Chapaev to hero status largely because of their unlettered origins led to a counter-attack by the proponents of skill and education in which these erstwhile peasants and proletarians were made to look stupid. Such processes were often mocked both directly and implicitly in East European jokes. A Czech interview: "What was your father's occupation?" "I don't rightly know ... He used to mingle with the crowds in market places and at soccer games and come back in the morning loaded with money." "In other words, a pick-pocket. And your mother?" "I don't rightly know. She used to leave at night and come back in the morning loaded with money." "In other words, a prostitute. Anybody else in the family?" "There was an uncle. He used to go from door to door selling combs and brushes." "A petit-bourgeois businessman! You fool, you could have been a first-class cadre but your uncle spoiled it all for you!" (Beckmann 1980: 84)

The greatest number of Eastern European jokes directly concerned with the irrationality of the system dealt with the failures of central economic planning, particularly in relation to agriculture and consumer goods. The queues, shortages and bottlenecks that result from the inability of a centrally directed

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system of prices and outputs to adjust rapidly to changing conditions of production and demand were probably the most popular theme of all in East European jokes. East European centrally directed economic plans aimed to be rational, yet fundamentally they were irrational, for they often attempted to achieve something that is administratively impossible — "impossible in the same sense in which it is impossible for a cat to swim the Atlantic" (Polany i 1951: 126). East European jokes mocked both the irrational consequences of such a system and its ideological justifications. Why do the Poles build their meat shops two miles apart? So that the queues (lines) won't get mixed up. (Polish 1981) At the May Day parade in Moscow, Leonid Brezhnev and other Russian officials watched as usual the long parade of Soviet military power — missiles, tanks, armoured cars and the like. At the end of the parade came a little truck with three middle-aged men sitting in it. Comrade Brezhnev turned to the Defence Minister and asked: "Who are they?" The Defence Minister replied: "Those are three economists. You would not believe the destructive power they possess." (Russian 1981) The Russians have absolute proof that the Bible is wrong. According to the Holy Book originally there was chaos and then there was order. The Russians know from experience that this is not so. First there was planning and then there was chaos. (Kolasky 1972: 129) A Russian economist gave a lecture in Moscow about a visit he had made to West Germany. "The poverty to be seen in West Germany, comrades, is quite incredible. The shops everywhere are full of the finest goods and produce but no one can afford to buy them. There is not a single queue to be seen anywhere in the whole country." (Russian 1981; see also Benton and Loomes 1976: 98) What do the Polish and American economies have in common? In neither country can you buy anything with zloties. (Larson 1980: 90) Under capitalism you get rigid discipline in production and chaos in consumption. Under socialist economic planning you get rigid discipline in consumption and chaos in production. (Benton and Loomes 1976: 98) There may have been chaos in production but it was nonetheless disciplined chaos. The departures from rationality that were made fun of in East Euro-

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pean jokes did not release anyone from the iron cage. They merely ensured that everyone was caged twice — first in the familiar iron cage of rationality and secondly in a separate iron curtain cage whose bars were political, ideological and irrational. Neither cage enclosed the other. Rather they were set at an angle to one another so that the hapless inmates were doubly constrained by some of the bars of each. Under socialism it was every bit as tedious to work on an assembly line in Togliattigrad, in a tractor factory in Budapest (Haraszti 1977) or in an insurance office in Prague as in their Western equivalents. As the Czech economist Ota §ik (1967: 139) guardedly noted at the time: "At the socialist stage of development labour is still relatively onerous (long hours) and intensive. There is a relative lack of variety, work is monotonous and for most people offers little creative scope. There is still a fairly rigid division of labour binding the majority to one occupation for life." This fact, too, has been noted in the political jokes of the former communist states of Eastern Europe (Beckmann 1969: 102; Isnard 1979: 95), which thus provided a protest against the irrationality of rationality as well as the irrationality of irrationality. In conclusion we may note that in all industrial countries jokes about stupidity are immensely popular and this reflects the fact that the crucial institutions of these societies are organized along rational lines in the narrow sense that they are designed to extract the maximum ends from given means. Jokes about stupidity are an affirmation of rationality and a release from the anxieties and tensions engendered by a zealously rational social organization. As such they consitutute a minor form of social control; but other jokes act as a protest against the iron cage of rational organization and question the rationality of "rationality". Such jokes suggest that it is irrational for human beings to lead joyless, tedious lives spent in the pursuit of work or wealth. In the Western capitalist countries the key vehicle for jokes about stupidity has been the ethnic joke which places this despised quality at a safe distance by pinning it on to a peripheral ethnic minority. "They may be stupid but we and our society are rational" may well be the implicit message of the jokes. In the former Eastern Europe jokes about stupidity were political and ascribed this quality to those holding or exercising political power at the core of society. In this way the political order itself was criticized for its perceived irrationality. Such jokes may have been a significant vehicle of protest in a type of society which lacked many such outlets. The way in which the citizens of the Eastern European countries stopped joking as soon as they had

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freedom of speech provides strong support for this view. At the same time the very ambiguity of humour means that all these jokes would have also had other and very different meanings for the individuals who shared them.

Chapter 6 Humour for the future and a future for humour

It is often stated that jokes in an authoritarian society are one of the few avenues of political criticism open to people and that jokes are a way of expressing political resentments, grievances and grumbles (Larsen 1980). At this point the argument often dissolves into a sterile wrangle as to whether political jokes are a means by which political dissent is kept alive and the morale of the dissenters maintained or a safety valve which protects authoritarian regimes by channelling political resentments into a harmless form. The purpose of this chapter is to try and get away from the pointless debates of functionalists and conflict theorists and to look at the actual content of the jokes as a form of implicit politics. Even individuals who, from compulsion or choice, from frustration or apparent apathy take no active part in politics, have an internal map of the political world that impinges on them, its nature, its failings and its prospects. Equally they have a notion of what that political world ought to be like, of the future they would like to see, even if it appears impossible right now. In a free society there are many ways of studying this implicit politics. It can be inferred from certain consistent patterns of behaviour and comment (often in non-political contexts) that indicate their view of the nature of social and political organization, of power, of political morality. It is also possible simply to go and ask people questions either by the use of questionnaires whose answers can be coded and quantified or by in-depth interviews. Yet despite the plethora of data that is available, it is still possible to learn new and sometimes unexpected aspects of people's implicit politics through the study of their folklore in general and their jokes in particular. Alan Dundes' (1984) book Life is Like a Chicken-Coop Ladder, for instance, is a study of German social and political life through folklore which provides insights into the "implicit politics" of the German people that it would have been difficult to obtain by other methods. Similarly the study of ethnic jokes and the scripts they employ can tell us a great deal not merely about the joke-teller's attitudes to the butts of the jokes but about the relationship between them and about the kind of negative qualities that the joke-teller's wish to "export." Thus while both the British and the Americans agree in telling jokes which pin "stupidity" on familiar ethnic groups living on the periphery of their society, the

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Americans alone also depict these groups as dirty. Why? It is not because they are dirty but rather because the American evaluation of hygiene and the American view of the nature of the boundaries of their society differ from those of the British. One of the trickiest of political questions that can be asked is "Where are the boundaries of our people, of our land, of our nation?" Most citizens do not regularly grapple with such problems or even think about them very much except perhaps in a crisis but they frequently tell jokes that explore this very issue. Similarly most people — quite rightly — do not bother their heads with, say, the labour theory of value which still survives despite being either false or circular depending on how it is formulated. They know it is absurd, for everyday experience teaches people the meaning of scarcity, the value of land, location, rare talents, intangible services — and they demonstrate the fact by their willingness to pay for these things. Admittedly, there are a few implicit believers in the labour theory of value but they are soon put in their place — by jokes: An old man came into town to have a tooth extracted by the dentist. Afterwards he asked how much it would cost and was told: five pounds. "Five pounds!" he exclaimed in astonishment, "Why it only took you a minute. The blacksmith in my village took a tooth out for me a year ago and it took him nearly two hours. He dragged me all round the room and lost his grip half a dozen times at least. I never saw such hard work, and after all that, he only charged me two pounds. And now you want five pounds for a mere minute's work!" An engineer was called in to repair a large piece of machinery in a factory. He examined it carefully and tapped it gently with his hammer until it sprung to life. Later he sent in the following bill: For tapping machine For knowing where to tap

£5 £50

If the study of jokes is a useful part of the analysis of the implicit politics of a free society, it is even more valuable in relation to the exploration of the implicit politics of authoritarian societies. Here jokes are more important both because other forms of political expression are limited and because of the difficulties a researcher faces in exploring a people's implicit politics — for quite different reasons neither the regime nor the people would be willing to trust him or her. The regime would

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seek to prevent or at least to curtail such research lest the findings prove embarrassing while the people might well feel inhibited from expressing critical views that could lead to repercussions. These problems also face the collectors and interpreters of jokes but at least it is possible to assess those that were in common circulation in the former Soviet Union and its Eastern European colonial dependencies and to compare them with the jokes told in freer societies. On this basis it is possible at least to say something about what were the joke-tellers implicit views of life under socialism and hopes and expectations for the future. One of the most striking features of the old East European jokes was the way in which politicians were depicted in these jokes as utterly stupid, not merely in their political role but in ordinary everyday life. Some of them no doubt were stupid but they were not all stupid and even the stupid ones were not that stupid. The jokes are not descriptions of individuals or even a class of individuals any more than, say, the similar ethnic jokes told in the West about the alleged stupidity of the witty Irish, the enterprising Belgians or the canny citizens of French-speaking Switzerland. They were rather a ritual statement about the lack of legitimacy of a certain category of politicians. The range both of subjects and of targets in the jokes about stupidity from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union is quite remarkable: After the successful Apollo-Soyuz space flight Leonid Brezhnev called to congratulate the cosmonauts. However, he also reproached them with: "The Americans are winning the space race. We must accomplish something to outdo them. They've already landed on the moon so we in the Politburo have decided to send you for a landing on the sun." The cosmonauts groaned: "But, Comrade Brezhnev, we'll be burned alive." "What do you think," interrupted Brezhnev, "that we don't understand anything? Don't worry, we've already planned all the details. First of all you are going to complete the landing at night." (Draitser 1978: 56) What is the average I.Q. of Poland? Fifty Ochab. (UCBFA, Polish file 1969, collected by Juliana Roth) Antonin Novotny (president of Czechoslovakia from 1957 to 1968) wanted to take his wife to the annual ball of the Academy of Sciences but his advisers tried to dissuade him. "They are a nasty lot. They will ignore you." The Novotnys went all the same. The next day he bawled out his advisers: "Ignore us my foot! Nobody took the slightest notice of us!"

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At the same ball Mrs. Novotny had noticed the beautiful complexion of some of the ladies. Novotny set his spies to work: "Find out how they do it." They report back within a few minutes: "They use eau de toilette, Mr. President." "Oh-d — what?" "Toilet water, Mr. President." When he comes home next evening his wife has a big bump on her head. "What happened to you?" he asks. "I tried this thing with the toilet water," says the first lady "but the lid dropped on my head." (Beckmann 1969: 94) When Gierek was secretary of the Polish Communist party, he was renowned for making long, dull and boring speeches. After one particularly tedious threehour speech one of his colleagues hinted that a shorter speech might go down better with his audience. Gierek took the hint and told his secretary to limit his speeches to twenty minutes. At his next public appearance, however, he spoke for a full hour to the great irritation of his colleagues. The next day Gierek said angrily to his secretary: "I gave you definite instructions that my speech was under no circumstances to be longer than twenty minutes." "But, Comrade Gierek," replied the secretary, "I wrote you a twenty minute speech just as you requested and as usual I gave you two carbon copies to go with it." (Polish 1981; see also Kolasky 1972: 38-39 for a similar joke about Gomulka)

The uniform total stupidity that was assigned to all politicians' in the old East European jokes is quite striking when compared with the jokes that have been told about politicians in the free societies of the West which pin highly particular and very diverse traits onto recognizable individuals: the jokes about the deviousness of Lloyd George, the taciturn Calvin Coolidge, the bluntness of Harry Truman, the aloof pride of General de Gaulle, the self-effacing modesty of Clement Attlee, the toughness of Barry Goldwater, the wobbling vacillation of Jimmy Carter (how I went from peanut butter to jelly in four years), Richard Nixon's selling of a used car to Edward Kennedy, the logic of Enoch Powell, the monarchical style of President Kekkonen of Finland or the oilyness of Jim Griffiths or Tony Blair. Whether these jokes are true or fair is besides the point. What is crucial is that they represent a very varied pattern of mockery of the politicians. The only two politicians to exercise power at the very top in the countries of the English-speaking world in recent years who have been the butt of East European type jokes about stupidity were Gerald Ford and Sir Alec Douglas-Home, both of them able and by no means unpopular politicians.

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Harold Wilson versus Sir Alec Douglas-Home — a case of smart alec versus dull Alec. (British 1964) R.A. Butler introducing the former Lord Home at a meeting: "We are very lucky to have Sir Alec Douglas-Home here with us this evening. He will be talking about foreign policy, a subject he knows something about" (British 1960s) The j o k e s about the alleged stupidity of Gerald Ford were even collected and published as The Jerry Ford Joke-Book edited by Max Brodnick: Only last week Mr. Ford was riding a White House escalator when it broke down and he was stuck there for three hours. (Brodnick 1975) Irked by Ronald Reagan's Hollywood sophistication, Mr. Ford has signed a contract to star in one film comedy. However, he isn't thrilled by the title — Mr. Clumsy goes to Hollywood. (Brodnick 1975) Ford and Douglas-Home were intelligent and respected politicians and it was perfectly possible for anyone to criticize them as part of the normal d e m o cratic political debate. The only thing these two men had in common with the despots of Eastern Europe is that they had not been elected to the office they held. Gerald Ford was the only American president never to have been elected as either president or vice-president. He was the accidental president w h o c a m e to that position as a result of the unprecedented resignation of both President Nixon and Vice-President Agnew. W h e n in office he had the kind of minor banana-skin physical accidents that happen to everyone and also made embarrassing verbal slips of a kind since repeated by Carter and Reagan. However, only in Ford's case were these seized upon and turned into j o k e s so that he became the president who "stumbled into office and has gone on stumbling ever since". Sir Alec Douglas-Home was Lord Home, a hereditary peer holding office in Harold Macmillan's government. It had long been felt in Britain that it would be undemocratic for a peer to be prime minister and indeed this was one of the factors that prevented Lord Curzon and Lord Halifax f r o m attaining that office. Lord H o m e got around this convention by resigning his peerage and being elected to the House of C o m m o n s in a specially arranged by-election for a safe Conservative seat. He was then eligible to b e c o m e prime minister.

9 0 Humour for the future

The election of Sir Alec Douglas-Home to Parliament created a vacancy in the House of Lords — and another in the House of Commons. (British 1964)

The penalty both men paid for their unorthodox routes to office that circumvented the usual process of democratic competition was that they became the butts of jokes about stupidity. It is more difficult for people to make jokes about the stupidity of political leaders whom they have elected for, like Barrabas, they are the people's choice, though a second-string politician like Quayle coming in on someone else's coat-tails may be joked about. After every election in a democratic country bumper stickers proclaim "Don't blame me, I voted X" (i.e., for the losers). It is this process of competition and choice that is the basis of political legitimacy in a democracy. Those who lack it are labelled "stupid" whether they are or not. If we extend this argument to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union then it is clear that the entire political class was seen as illegitimate, because they had not been chosen by the people, they had not won office in open competition and were thus a "stupid" group. By implication the joke-tellers shared the concepts of democratic legitimacy applied in the West and not those of "democratic centralism" as implied in a contemporary joke: At the Central Committee Plenum: After his unanimous election as General Secretary, Andropov announces: "When you have voted, you may lower your arms and come away from the wall." (Sturman 1984: 213)

Only when East European politicians came to be chosen in open competition and the people gained the fundamental political right "to turn the rascals out" did jokes about stupid politicians wither away. The implicit political message of the old East European jokes is that this is the future many of the joketellers wanted and were determined to have. The politicians were by no means the only group in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union who were the butts of jokes about stupidity. Party hacks, official heroes, and especially militiamen were also ridiculed in this way. Two Czech militiamen were on duty in Wenceslas Square in Prague. A foreigner came up to them and asked them in German how to get to the main railway station but he received no reply. The militiamen simply shrugged their shoulders so he tried in English. Again no reply. In French — still nothing; in Russian — not even then. Finally the foreigner also shrugged his shoulders and went away.

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"You know, I think it would be a good idea to learn a foreign language," said one of the militiamen. "Whatever for?" asked the other. "Just look how many languages that chap spoke and it didn't help him one bit." (Czech 1981) A Polish militiaman took his car into the garage to have it serviced. "There's something wrong with the indicator lights," he told the mechanic. The mechanic got into the car and turned them on. "How are they now?" he asked. "They're working. They're not working. They're working. They're not working...," replied the militiamen. (Polish 1981) The jokes about stupid militiamen were not simply an expression of resentment at the behaviour of the day-to-day enforcers of state power, for there were after all other much more powerful and sinister agencies of state control in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union who were the subject of different kinds of jokes. The key to the jokes about stupid militiamen lay rather in their mode of recruitment. The role of policeman in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union was not a respected one and those who were in a position to choose other careers did so. In consequence, the militia was forced to recruit unskilled rustics who lacked a trade or an educational qualification and for whom joining the militia was their only means of obtaining a permit to live and work in a city (Conquest 1968: 31-33, Conquest 1980: 98). 2 Police officers of a similar breed in other countries such as Italy or South Africa under apartheid or in nineteenth-century American cities are or were the butts of similar jokes about carabinieri, van der Merwe and dumb Irish cops. The key element in each case was the political appointment of the unskilled, uneducated and unsophisticated to positions of crude power. In Italy it was the clients of the entrenched politicians of the poor and backward South, in South Africa it was Afrikaner Red-necks (as distinct from rooineks) who supported the National Party and in America it was the nominees of Tammany Hall who filled the police force. Thus the unfortunate militiamen of the former Soviet Union or its Eastern European dependencies were doubly illegitimate, for not only were the rules they had to enforce often seen as illegitimate, but so, in the eyes of the citizenry, was the mode of their appointment. Political appointees who have not had to compete in the marketplace, the examination hall or even through the ballot box are always likely to be regarded as stupid, for in the eyes of the joke-tellers they lack merit. They are not professionals. This point has been neatly made by Fox Butterfield ( 1982: 289-290) in his description of the Chinese telling political jokes:

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These cadres are viewed by the more sophisticated natives of Peking and Shanghai as urban Americans would view hillbillies from Kentucky or Tennessee. Our friends the Wangs liked to tell jokes about the typical cadre: "In a village the county authorities had announced they were going to form the militia and issue rifles," Li began one of his favorites stories. "It was a big event in a place where nothing ever happens and the peasants got very excited. But then days and weeks passed, and the county authorities were having trouble reaching a decision. Finally, after two years, a jeep came down to the village. An important-looking cadre got out and declared there would be a big meeting about forming the militia. At the meeting, he got up and began speaking slowly, Ί-am-the-county-partysecretary,' and with those words the audience burst into thunderous applause. It was a great honor to be visited by such a high cadre. But then the speaker added, 'That is, I was sent by the county party secretary.'" Li told the story employing the thick dialect of Hunan province, where Mao and many other cadres came from: "'We have decided, about the guns, that one gun for each person,' and again there was a chorus of applause, 'is absolutely impossible'. 'We have reached the conclusion that one gun for every two people,' and there was still clapping, 'is not right'. 'So I want to announce the final decision of the county Party committee is, one gun for every three people,' which set off more applause. 'But they are wooden guns,' the cadre concluded." The point of the jokes is not the mere snobbish rejection of crude peasant manners and speech, though that in itself can be the basis of jokes but (a) the fact that the cadres/militiamen, etc. are stupid in the sense that they lack the skills and knowledge necessary for their job, (b) the way in which political rectitude is seen as a sufficient qualification for resolving technical issues and (c) the inverse snobbery that sees proletarian or peasant ancestry as a qualification in itself, in much the same way as an aristocratic lineage would have been in a traditional society. In those open societies where tradition is still an important social force both peasants and aristocrats are the butts of jokes about stupidity. The sons of peasants who come to town are derided as stupid rustics, ignorant bumpkins, dumb yokels, and slow-witted hill-billies, hoosiers and red-necks, because their traditional skills and attainments are not relevant to the changing and cosmopolitan city where they are seeking employment. Aristocrats are equally the butt of jokes about stupidity because their claim to status is not a meritocratic one, not one based on success through

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competition. Hence the English jokes about upper-class twits, the American jokes about tongue-tied English aristocrats,3 the Austrian and German jokes about Graf Bobby 4 and their Hungarian equivalents, which still survive long after the demise of the Hapsburg social order. The aristocratic preoccupation with social origins rather than the abilities of the individual has its Communist counterpart and the fate of the individuals held up for esteem by the system is to be the butt of jokes about how stupid they are. The Russian official hero Chapaev who was lauded for his humble origins was the butt of jokes about stupidity for the same reason as aristocrats in other societies. The fearless hero of the Civil War, Vasiliy Ivanovitch Chapaev and his loyal orderly Pyetka were sky-diving. "We're only 100 meters from the ground," said Pyetka, excitedly. "Its time to pull the ripcord, Vasiliy Ivanovitch!" "Its still kind of early," Chapaev answered calmly. "Its only fifty meters now," screamed Pyetka. "Pull the ring Vasiliy Ivanovitch!" "Calm down, Pyetka," said Chapaev. "There's still time before we hit." "Only three meters remaining!" cried Pyetka. "Pull!" "Its not worth it," answered Chapaev. "From this height I can land without a parachute ... !" (Draitser 1978: 50) Why is an aristocrat like Euclid's definition of a point? He has position but no parts and no magnitude? (British nineteenth century) Why are the upper classes like turnips? The best part of them lies under the ground. (British 1960s) Why are the upper classes the cream of the country? They are rich and thick. (British 1960s) The implicit message of the jokes is a meritocratic one that stresses mobility through competition, legitimacy and skill, as against arbitrary sponsorship on irrelevant social or political grounds. There were also many jokes that spell out this message directly: Two comrades met in the street. "Heavens, you've changed!" said one. "You've lost so much weight." "Well you see I got married and my wife can't cook," replied the other. "Why don't you send her on a state cookery course?" asked the former. "That's exactly what I did just after we got married six months ago."

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"Well?" "The course has only just reached the revolution of 1905." (Russian 1981 ; see also Larsen 1980: 95) It was finally decided to introduce striptease into the Soviet Union, and since this was thought to be an extremely avant-garde concept, it was decided only to employ women who had been members of the Party for at least 20 years. One day Brezhnev himself came along to watch the imported novelty. To ensure absolute ideological correctness, a girl who had been a Party member since 1917 was the main star. Brezhnev watched her act for a while and when with palsied hand she removed the last veil, he said in a bored voice: "I can't understand why those westerners are so enthusiastic about striptease." (Russian 1980)

Politics is of necessity an irrational activity. It cannot be reduced to a technically rational system of administration (see chapters 1 , 2 and 10 in Robertson 1982). There is no way of deciding that a person is qualified (or unqualified) to be a politician in the sense that a surgeon, a mathematician, an electrician or a pilot has to be and they do not require the paper qualifications demanded of the would-be bureaucrat. Politicians are experts in doing nothing in particular and they often do it very well. They are the ultimate fixers and politics is the point at which the final arbitrary bargains of interests, values and resources must be struck. There are no right answers, only possible ones, and the only qualification for being a politician is being a politician. The qualified, the specialists, the bureaucratic office-holders retire at an arbitrary fixed age, beyond which they are quite unfairly held to be too old and incompetent through age, but the politician who has the ultimate responsibility for running the state can go on to become the Grand Old Man (Gladstone) or his rival "Der alte Jude — das ist der Mann" (Disraeli). Old politicians only fade away at a very advanced age indeed as we can see from the careers of Adenauer (der Alte) and Hindenburg, de Gaulle and de Gasperi, Kekkonen and Reagen, Tito, Franco and Mao, Clémenceau and Churchill, Khomeini and Morarji, Pétain and Perón. Le roi est demi-mort. Vive le roi. Very old politicians represent in their own persons the political bargains of yesterday, survival and continuity, a link with safer or more successful times (Davies 1982b: 271-289). But before Gorbachev, there was no gerontocracy like Soviet gerontocracy — not respected as the G.O.M. or der Alte had been, but mocked as a dubious oligarchy of senile survivors: What did Chernenko inherit from Brezhnev? Senility. (Sturman 1984: 214)

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Why is it that Brezhnev travelled abroad but Andropov doesn't? Brezhnev was supplied from a battery but Andropov is plugged into the mains. (Bulgarian 1980s) Political life is of necessity irrational and the legitimacy of politicians does not depend on any specialized expertise or knowledge. This is fair enough — but there is a corollary, viz., that politics should be limited in scope and the range of politicians' power restricted by constitution or convention. It is when the politicians step far outside their true sphere and try to settle technical, economic or social issues that require expertise or are best left to the forces of "spontaneous order" that they gain a reputation for stupidity. Such a reputation has stuck to the apocryphal politicians of the Indiana State Legislature who came within two crucial votes of declaring that the value of the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter was, in the area of their jurisdiction, to be 3.2 exactly (Grant 1982: 34; see also Morgan and Langford 1981 ; Pile 1979). Had they got to the point of trying to enforce such a law, the politicians would have been the irrational fraction of Indiana. The point is not that politicians are stupid or grossly fallible, for the world contains a multitude of scientists, businessmen, academics and plumbers who are one or the other or both. It is rather that politicians alone possess the final power to enforce their decisions and it is this combination of power without expertise that makes their stupidity more dangerous and more risible than that of other people. This is particularly the case in totalitarian societies where they have a monopoly of political power, where they may be filled with a sense of their own ideological righteousness and where there are no clear limits to what is political, so that they are able to extend the range of their arbitrary decisions into areas that need autonomy. Political attempts to decree the findings of pure science or the nature of mathematical relationships, or to denounce bourgeois science, Jewish physics or Machism really are stupid. The wisdom of scientists is fallible and provisional, but that is its virtue, and the worst thing one can say about influential scientists who try to use their position to enforce their views and to exclude dissent is that they are behaving like politicians. Scientific paradigms are not enforceable or even dogma. The jokes about the politicization of science in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe mainly related to the stupid impositions of an arbitrary ideological cage on scientific findings, though Polanyi noted on his various visits to scientific institutions in the USSR that attempts to plan the advance of science were themselves the subject of "contemptuous jokes" (Polanyi 1940). The Lysenko affair (LangdonDavies 1949; Beckmann 1968: 78; Popovsky 1980) in particular gave rise to

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such jokes, the main butt of them being the unfortunate horticulturalist Michurin who allegedly had produced wonderful hybrid proletarian fruit that defied "bourgeois" Mendelian genetics. Do you know how Michurin died? He broke his neck when he fell off one of his strawberries? (Beckmann 1980: 67; Kolasky 1972: 110) Do you know how Michurin died? He crossed his legs and could no longer urinate. (Beckmann 1980: 67) Who invented barbed wire? Michurin. He crossed earthworms with hedgehogs. (Beckmann 1980: 67; Kolasky 1972: 111)

Professor Beckmann, a Czech electrical engineer, who was a connoisseur of jokes about stupid politicized, politically correct science, also recorded a number of true incidents about the exercise of political power to supress rational criticism in the physical sciences: For example in Ostrava, an industrial town in East Moravia, a worker had proposed a machine that in essence was to throw rocks in the air and the rocks would then do work coming down. The chief engineer tried to explain the principle of the conservation of energy to him, but to no avail. The worker turned to the party, the engineer was fired and the proposal wandered all over the country, one expert handing it to another like a hot potato. (Beckmann 1969: 123)

The aspect of political control that impinged most directly on the common people in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was the supression of the marketplace, the lack of private ownership of the means of production, and the attempt to replace the price mechanism by central planning. The results of this were lines and shortages, and a black market in Western goods and currency, which alone were recognized as having value. The black market, moonlighting, speculation and corruption were all attempts by individuals to create a spontaneous order in the face of the chaos left by planning (Hirszowicz 1980:130-148; Davies 1978: 383-392). The jokes about the state of economic life told in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union also implicitly recognized the failure of socialist planning, and the necessity for a system of market prices and a meaningful currency.

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A hundred people were standing in line for food in Warsaw when Jaruselski drove past in his car. He stopped. "What are people waiting for?" he asked. "We are waiting for meat. There is no meat," they replied. Jaruselski said: "It is dreadful that you should have to stand like this. I must do something about it." An hour later a truck drove up and unloaded a hundred chairs. (Told by a Russian émigré in Washington D.C. 1980s) A Soviet economist visited France and told the French economic Minister, "Your economy is in a terrible state. I have never seen such poverty." "What do you mean," replied the Frenchman. "The shops are full of all kinds of goods and produce." "But," replied the Russian, "No one can afford to buy them. During the whole of my visit to France I haven't seen one single line." (French 1980s) There are three classes in the classless society of Poland. Those who have dollars, those who have zloty, and those who have neither. (Polish taxi driver quoted in Time, September 1980) The use of Marxist jargon and special pleading to excuse chronic economic failure was equally subject to ridicule in jokes: Soviet economist: The reason why Canada and the United States supply the Soviet Union with so much grain is due to the catastrophic over-production of capitalism. (Russian 1980s) When will the Cubans know that they have achieved the same level of socialist development as the Soviet Union? When they start importing sugar. (Kolasky 1972: 132) The free market, science and jokes are all forms of spontaneous order created by the autonomous actions of individuals and groups. In a competitive system prices and production depend on the hidden hand not the clenched fist. Discovery, invention, innovation cannot be predicted let alone planned with any accuracy except in limited artas over short periods of time. Jokes are not produced by ministries of humour and their invention and circulation are inevitably the result of millions of spontaneous individual initiatives. They are but the sum of people's uncoordinated humorous responses to widely shared predicaments. There is an order to the jokes told in a society, albeit one that is often difficult to pin down, but it is not an order designed by any one. There was no director of the fictitious Radio Armenia 5 (also called Radio Erivan)

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but the Armenian broadcasts had a recognizable style; there were no central transmitters but there was a c o m m o n wavelength. N o complex industrial society is based only on spontaneous order. There always exists also a planned and corporate order, a state that is not going to wither away, a degree of necessary and beneficial central control and intervention, a role for politics. The fallacy on which Marxist states were and are based is the idea that the equally necessary forms of spontaneous social order (which require the autonomy of individuals, groups, and institutions) can and should be m a d e subordinate to political authority and directives. It is singularly appropriate that j o k e s should be one of the means by which people express their mockery of the manifest failures of such a system, a mockery which reveals popular insight into its central, tyrannical yet self-defeating, oppressive yet risible weakness, namely the attempt to supress spontaneous order and to deny autonomy. T h e absurd promise of Marxism is that it can enable man to determine his own future. An understanding of the forces of spontaneous order teaches us that long-term future patterns of demand, of scientific discovery, of technological innovation and of supplies of raw materials are unknown and unk n o w a b l e and that political attempts to control that future are futile. At best we can simply try and avoid tomorrow's total disasters, but we don't even k n o w which of these is most threatening or what new ones will arise. Joketellers are no better at telling the future than anyone else and there is no more esoteric wisdom to be found in jokes than in the dimensions of the pyramids. There was nonetheless an impressive implicit political common-sense in the j o k e s of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. They were the j o k e s of people who had seen the future and it didn't work, who had recognized the stupidity of a politicized society, who had no illusions about either the realities of day to day socialism or its Utopian promises for the future: "In twenty years," proclaimed the Soviet economist, "our socialist society will be so advanced that everyone will have their own private helicopter." "But why would anyone need one?" asked a puzzled listener. "Well," said the economist, "supposing you lived in Moscow and one day you heard that potatoes were available in Kiev — look how quickly you could get there." (Russian 1980s) The three stages of socialism: Early socialism where goods are readily available and there are no ration cards. Advanced socialism where there are few goods but plenty of ration cards with which to obtain them.

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Full communism where there are neither ration cards nor any goods left in the shops. (Russian 1980s; see also Isnard 1977: 79) A Muscovite inherited millions of dollars from America. The government offered to do him any favour he wants in return for the money. He asks to run the biggest food shop in Moscow for three days and to have all the supplies he needed. He then put up notices all over Moscow saying, "all the food you want free." There were huge crowds, total chaos, fifty shop assistants were killed, the buildings were demolished and all the food in Russia eaten up. The members of the Politbureau asked him, "Why did you do it?" "I'm an old man. I'd have never lived to see what Communism will be like. But now I've seen it!" (Told by Alexander Shtromas, 1981 ).6

There was, however, a promise for the future implicit in the people's (not the People's) humour of the East. Their jokes displayed an insight into the failures of the social and political order that indicated a sophisticated implicit politics and a willingness to enter the uncertain world of spontaneous order. It was a humour for a future very different from their recent past. It was a humour of autonomy, based on limited but valued autonomy, and a wish for much greater autonomy. In the humour of their total disillusionment there was thus a hope for the future. Every joke was a tiny counterrevolution. Yet the dreams of the joke-tellers involved a withering away of their jokes. In a free society there is less work for humour to do and the future of humour is play — they had only their jokes to lose. In the 1980s when I went to Bulgaria, the Czech lands, Slovakia and Hungary to study jokes under socialism the subject peoples of the Soviet Empire often felt trapped in a long dark tunnel with no end and no light in sight. Some indeed knew only the intermediate stage between socialism and communism known as alcoholism (see p. 102). Yet many others saw hope in the very deadliness, indeed decadence, of the system, which was by now displaying the symptoms of decay that their ancestors had mocked in czarist Russia, and in the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. In the Czech lands new Gorbachev was but Old Prochazka and that particular Johnny Walker7 was clearly growing weaker. In the outposts of empire there was still no freedom of speech 8 but there was freedom of conversation and in bars,9 cafes and private homes jokes predicted the end of Soviet socialism: A citizen of Moscow went into a restaurant and ordered: "Borsht, veal cutlets, rhubarb pie, a cup of coffee .... oh and a copy of Pravda please."

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"Certainly," said the waiter, "we have all that you have ordered but not Pravda. That newspaper ceased publication when the old Communist; regime collapsed." The waiter duly brought the borsht, the customer ate it with relish and said: "And now bring me the veal cutlets and don't forget my rhubarb pie, coffee and my copy of Pravda. " The waiter said patiently, "I'm sorry but I can't bring you a copy of Pravda. It doesn't exist any more. It died with the Communists." The cutlets in turn were brought and eaten. "Now said the customer, please bring me my rhubarb pie and then my coffee and the copy of Pravda. " "The rhubarb pie is no problem," said the waiter, "and there's plenty of coffee but there is no longer any Pravda — like the old Communist government, it's finished, done away with, no more." The customer consumed his pie and called the waiter over to his table. "That was excellent," he said, "and now I'm ready for my coffee and the copy of Pravda. " The waiter exploded: "How many times do I have to tell you, there is no Pravda. There is no Communist government. We've got rid of all that!" "Yes, I know," said the customer, "I just wanted to hear you say it again." (Told by Alexander Shtromas 1981)

Chapter 7 Ethnic jokes about alcohol: A study of the humour of ambivalence

Alcohol has long been the dominant legal drug of the industrial societies of Europe, North America and Australia and a major source of both pleasure and disaster. In consequence attitudes towards it are varied, unstable and contradictory (which in turn intensifies the problems it causes), with a minority who extravagantly praise its euphoriant effects, a minority of staunch teetotallers who would like to ban it and an uncertain majority who are beguiled by alcohol yet recognize that it is also a betrayer. Under circumstances of such uncertainty and ambivalence jokes about alcohol flourish. By contrast very few jokes about drinking are told about groups such as orthodox Jews whose members consume alcohol in a controlled and moderate way according to a stable and generally observed set of rules. Jokes about alcohol are most common under circumstances of moral uncertainty and disagreement about whether and how alcohol should be consumed. Such jokes are especially likely to be told about members of ethnic groups whose peculiar, visible and distinctive patterns of drinking reveal an even greater degree of ambivalence towards, and uncertainty and disagreement about alcohol than is usual in other western societies. Those who have achieved a precarious balance in their attitude to alcohol tell ethnic jokes about their unbalanced neighbours and the unbalanced tell jokes about themselves that celebrate or wryly concede the extremes of unbalance displayed by many of their members. Jokes are ambiguous comic utterances that can be taken in many ways and so they flourish in relation to an activity whose moral status is itself uncertain and varied. The purpose of this chaper is to explore this phenomenon in detail and to explain why certain particular jokes about alcohol are told about specific ethnic groups. Ethnic jokes about alcohol are related to the central opposition between work and non-work that has given rise to the popular ethnic jokes about the "stupid" and the "canny". The ethnic jokes about stupidity which have been pinned on the Poles in America, on the Irish in Britain, on the Belgians in France and the Netherlands, on the Sikhs in India and Pakistan, on the Newfies in Canada, on the Tasmaniane in Australia, are found literally throughout the world as are corresponding jokes about the allegedly canny, that is crafty and

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stingy Scots, Jews, Armenians, Auvergnats, Cardis, Paisas, Regiomontanos, Laihians, Gabrovonians, Gujaratis, etc. (see pp. 2-3). Behind this pair of related but opposed jokes lies the contrast between the values of skill, competence, shrewdness and frugality demanded by the purposive and organized economic activity we call work and the carefree, sociable hedonism associated with its antithesis, leisure (Davies 1990). The ethnic jokes about stupidity are often pinned on groups whose members are or were peasant rustics or unskilled labourers on building sites or in heavy industry, i.e. people whose economic position does not demand a high level of competence, foresight or ability to adapt to changes in technical or market conditions whereas the "canny peoples" though manifestly successful in entrepreneurship or the accumulation of wealth are the butt of jokes that allege they have lost out in other ways. Within the modern industrial societies of Europe, North America and Australia the existence and widespread use of the drug alcohol further sharpens the contradiction between work and leisure that is such a significant feature of modern industrial society. In most of these societies alcohol has long been the main permitted drug to which people turn when they seek fun, excitement, conviviality and a release from the anxieties, tensions, worries and inhibitions of everyday life. Alcohol is a key element in the culture of pleasure and hedonism that is one side of life in the advanced industrial societies. It has often in the past also been referred to more bluntly as a crude means of escape from tedium and squalor as "the quickest road out of Manchester" (see Dingle 1976:132), or the title deeds to Glasgow. This dreary and desperate aspect of drinking figured prominently in many of the jokes of the former communist countries of Eastern European where "the transitional stage between advanced socialism and full communism is (was) called alcoholism". 1 Alcohol also often has a highly detrimental effect on the kinds of work performance on which industrial societies are based. Alcohol can quickly impair the workings of a person's mind and powers of co-ordination and concentration to the point where he or she is unfit to drive a vehicle, operate a machine or perform complex intellectual tasks. If someone becomes frequently and seriously inebriated, this will disrupt the regular and disciplined working habits that are a necessary part of a rational organization based on modem industrial techniques. Unless the consumption of alcohol is confined to limited amounts, consumed only on particular occasions set aside for that purpose, alcohol acts as an unpredictable, disruptive force, quite incompatible with the smooth running of any form of modern industrial or administrative organization. Individuals who go on drinking sprees and who then fail to turn up at work or turn up drunk, useless, helpless or, worst of all, belligerent, undermine all the ba-

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sic values and virtues of the working world. The less spectacular, half-soaked, addicted drinkers, whose performance at work is consistently impaired, are just as great a problem. Diligence, prudence, rationality, competence, reliability, perseverance, duty and thrift are all soluble in alcohol (see Bacon 1962: 78-93). The contradiction between these two aspects and views of alcohol has often led to social and political conflicts in industrial and industrializing societies. Historically the pre-industrial tolerance of periodic binges, the alcoholic celebration of festivals by peasants, artisans and land-owners alike, that had long existed in many European societies, was bound at some point to come into conflict with the skills, disciplines and values necessary for the new forms of work of an industrial society. Although in the long run conviviality at work and drunken and "hangover" absence from work did tend to decline, the adjustment of the old drinking habits to the new circumstances was not an easy, automatic or linear process 2 , but a source of uncertainty and tension — and of jokes. Temperance societies were formed in America, and in many parts of northern Europe which sought to restrict the sale and consumption of alcohol or even to ban it altogether. Legal controls were introduced in many countries and in the United States and parts of Canada and Scandinavia there were attempts to impose total prohibition. Disagreements about the control of alcohol set class against class (the middle classes and the respectable working class against the lower-class roughs, the raffish rich, and dissolute aristocrats), rural areas against cities, women against men, religious denomination against religious denomination (particularly Protestants against Catholics) and, in the United States, ethnic group against ethnic group (old stock Americans against more recent immigrants). 3 In most western societies alcohol is no longer a source of major political controversy but attitudes to alcohol often remain ambivalent and contradictory with "two directly opposed value systems in relation to the use of alcohol operating in the culture at the same time" (O'Connor 1977: 6; see also Meyerson 1940). Jokes about alcohol, including ethnic jokes, are common in most cultures 4 but there seems to be a distinctive pattern of jokes in Scandinavia, the British Isles, the United States and Australia where ambivalent attitudes to alcohol are particularly marked. The inconsistent view taken in these cultures has led to a fairly high incidence of problem drinking, but it is also the case that a majority of the citizens of these societies adhere to a balanced view that regards moderate drinking on suitable occasions as the ideal to be aimed at and there exist many jokes that mock extreme behaviour in either

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direction. Within these "ambivalent" cultures there are innumerable jokes, both ethnic and non-ethnic, about drunkards and alcoholics on the one hand and rigid teetotalers and temperance fanatics on the other. There is plenty of material for such jokes and a strong incentive to tell them, for the uneasy moderation observed by the majority often represents not a golden mean but an ambivalent amalgam of incompatible views of alcohol. In these uncertain cultures both sides of the contradiction between alcohol as a source of conviviality, a euphoriant escape from a hard rational and material world, and alcohol as the underminer of work, rationality and steadiness, are recognized and indeed emphasized. For this reason the advocates of temperance have always been unsure how best to employ humour. On the one hand they have compiled collections of comic anecdotes about drinkers for use by temperance orators (see Duncan [n.d.], Landon 1900: 461-485), on the other they fear that jokes about drunkenness tend to make it appear a mere comic misdemeanour rather than a sin (Ford 1959:2). The temperance advocates' dilemma illustrates yet again that jokes are of necessity ambiguous and cannot be treated as mere disguised versions of serious statements. We may infer that joke tellers have a common perception of how things are from the relatively consistent content of the jokes they tell about the inebriated, but their feelings about the real situation behind the joke, and in consequence the use they make of such jokes, will differ from one individual to another and from one context to another. Jokes are as usual ambiguous. Jokes about the inebriated can be interpreted as a warning to people not to neglect the values of the rational world by allowing a potentially destructive drug to undermine their reason and self-control, but they can also be seen as jokes about the benefits of alcohol, as a means of escaping from an oppressively rational and work-obsessed world. The international popularity of Andy Capp, the feckless, hard-drinking, work-shy, lower-class hero of the cartoon strip, is one instance of this. The success of this cartoon strip, rooted so firmly and idiosyncratically in the industrial North East of England, in other quite different societies throughout Europe and North America demonstrates its very wide appeal. The comic drunkard (who is not responsible for what he says) is often a spokesman for ideas that subvert not merely authority but the entire world of work and even rationality itself. The "drunk" is an especially useful figure for Swedish comedians 5 to imitate, for in this guise alone can they safely mock the cold, hard, authoritarian, politically correct "rationality" of official Sweden. In many countries there are also jokes at the expense of supposedly joyless total abstainers and wowsers who are portrayed as taking the world of work and self-control too seriously and depriving themselves

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and others of an accepted source of enjoyment and conviviality. Many humorists have indeed explicitly sought a balance and mocked both drunkard and teetotaler together (e.g. Gilbert 1919: 176-181 and Milne 1940: 13-15; see also Green 1976: 149-158). In the case of jokes about the traits of "stupidity" and "canniness" it has been argued that joke-tellers "export" these unwelcome qualities by pinning them onto other ethnic groups about whom "stupid" and "canny" ethnic jokes are told (Davies 1982). It would be a neat extension of this argument if in fact the ethnic jokes about excessive drinking and bigoted abstinence, which reflect another facet of the cultural contradiction between the two dominant secular ethics of industrial society, viz. the work ethic and hedonism, could simply be added on to this analysis of "stupid" and "canny" ethnic minorities. If this were the case, the ethnic minorities who are the butts of jokes about stupidity, such as the Poles or the Irish, would also be the ones saddled with the jokes about excessive drinking, while those about whom "canny" jokes were told, such as the Scots or the Jews, would be the butts of jokes about excessive restraint and control. There is some truth in this suggestion but the actual relationships between ethnicity, culture, socio-economic position and patterns of alcohol use is such as to introduce many complications. Nonetheless there is enough of a correlation between the comic dichotomies, stupid versus canny and inebriated versus abstinent, to make it a reasonable starting point for disussing ethnic jokes about alcohol. Ethnic jokes about stupidity are usually told about a people who are basically very similar to the joke tellers themselves and tend to be rooted in the relative position of the joke-tellers and the butts of their jokes — the latter often live on the geographical, cultural or economic periphery of the joketellers' societies and/or are peasant or lower-class immigrants and their descendants (Davies 1982 and 1990). Ethnic jokes about drinking are similar in that the joke-tellers tell them about peoples seen as culturally similar to themselves. It is the Irish who are the butt of American or Australian ethnic jokes about alcohol, rather than culturally distant aboriginal groups, even though, in some areas at least, the aboriginal peoples may get publically and visibly drunk more often and more completely. Nonetheless the key factor that has led to the Irish, the Finns, the Australians and the Scots being the butts of ethnic jokes about excessive drinking is their tendency to occasional, but public, visible and ethnically distinctive inebriation. It is, though, necessary to go behind the popular common-sense explanations of these events and to

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enquire why they occur. The answers to this question should also help to illuminate certain details of the jokes themselves. It is not the size of an ethnic group's consumption of alcohol or even the incidence of pathological drinking that leads to that group becoming the butt of ethnic jokes about alcoholic excess, but rather public inebriation to the point of loss of self-control. There are, for instance, relatively few ethnic jokes about French drinking despite the existence of a severe alcohol problem in France, a society whose attitude towards alcohol has been termed "overpermissive" (see Jellinek 1962: 386-387 and O'Connor 1977: 6-7). Problem drinkers in France drink heavily but steadily in small quantities, sometimes in public, sometimes at home, and suffer from "l'alcoolisme sans ivresse" (alcoholism without drunkenness). Such people are addicts and often in poor health but their alcoholic behaviour is not particularly visible nor such as to give rise to jokes. The contrast between this situation and that of the Finns who are the butts of Swedish ethnic jokes about drinkers can be seen from Jellinek's (1962: 383) analysis of cultural differences in the meaning of alcoholism: In Finland, for example, alcoholic drinks are sold mainly in urban areas and the violence displayed by Finnish workers when they come to town from some isolated camps and have a few drinks — nothing that could be called a "drinking spree" — causes such damage and is so dramatic that to the Finnish nation this type of drinking and this form of damage constitutes alcoholism. As Jellinek indicates the distinctive Finnish combination of drink and violence is strongly disapproved of by most Finns, and indeed the Finnish government has tried extremely hard to clamp down on this kind of alcoholic excess which is seen as deviant and dangerous. The rules that surround the purchase and consumption of alcohol in Finland are more elaborate and restrictive than in most other countries. It is possible that the rules about alcohol and even the official obsession with it make the situation worse rather than better but that is not the point at issue. What is crucial is that there exists in Finland an occasional but distinctively visible (the author has seen it and so have the joke-tellers) and dramatic form of deviant behaviour that corresponds closely to the Swedish comic image of the Finns as heavy and dangerous drinkers summed up in the phrase "knife, brandy, and sisu [courage]". Essentially the same argument applies to ethnic jokes about Australians which depict them as violent and rumbustious when drunk. In Australia in the days of the "six o'clock swill" the bars in some Australian states closed at

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six p.m; their customers rushed in after work to fill themselves up with grog and shortly after were spewed back out onto the streets angry, drunk and dissatisfied. Drunken Australian brawls are not limited to Australia itself but occur when large parties of young male Australians meet up abroad. The kind of behaviour that reinforces the British (and indeed American, Canadian and New Zealand) comic image of Australians and leads to ethnic jokes may be inferred from the extra-ordinary rules introduced by the Flight Stewards Association of Australia on the Australian airline Qantas in the early 1980s, impounding all duty-free liquor to prevent "in-flight violence" by drunken Australians on their planes (Regulations dated 30th November 1980 publically posted at Heathrow Airport, London, and other airports where Qantas operated). Visible public inebriation is the main reason why ethnic jokes about hard drinking get pinned on a particular ethnic group. It is also the main subject of the jokes, most of which involve some kind of loss of self-control — merriment, anger, violence, depression or paralysis depending on how much has been drunk and the effect it has on members of that group. The stages of drunkenness are comically summed up by the organic chemist's mock alcohol sugars, jocose, morose, bellicose, lachrymose and comatose, which correspond roughly to the medieval stages of the drunken "humours", lion drunk (choleric) ape drunk (sanguine), mutton drunk (phlegmatic) and swine drunk (melancholic) (Coghill 1960: 523). Drunken comportment is to a considerable extent learned behaviour and the point at which an individual loses control, and what he or sometimes she does at that point, may vary a great deal between ethnic groups with different cultural traditions.6 Many ethnic jokes about drinking are at the expense of some "other" group's style of inebriation: A Swede and a Finn got together to have a drinking night. All they had was Schnapps and cucumbers. After having sat there drinking for three hours, the Swede looked up at the Finn and said "Skol" [cheers]. Then the Finn said, "Are we here to talk or are we here to drink?" (University of California at Berkeley Folklore Archive Swedish file, collected by Fred Bruderlin 1965)

The one ethnic group that has been the butt of more ethnic jokes about heavy drinking than almost any other is the Irish. In Australia, Britain and formerly in America the Irish have also been the butts of jokes about stupidity and it will be useful at this point to discuss the link between the two kinds of jokes and the way they are related to ethnicity and social class. In Britain and

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alcohol

Australia jokes about the allegedly hard-drinking, convivial, happy-go-lucky but quarrelsome Irish simply get added to the familiar and very common jokes about Irish "stupidity", to give a composite comic picture of a group that is portrayed as having defiantly rejected the restraining claims of the rational world of work, skill, thrift and foresight. British and Australian ethnic jokes about the Irish often show an Irishman doing something foolish while drunk, or making some comically irrational observation about drink and drinkers. "Ah," said the Irishman, "it's not gettin' drunk that's the trouble. It's the waking to all the horrors of sobriety." (Frost 1933: 180) Irish immigrants Patrick and Michael were staggering home one night after a convivial session at a Mawbanna pub. Taking a short cut across a farm, they passed a well. Pat fell in. Mike ran to the farmhouse to get a rope. With great difficulty he began hauling Pat up. Pat had almost reached the top when Mike called out, "Hold tight me brave boyo, while I shpit on me hands." (Best Australian Jokes 1971: 10)

Essentially similar ethnic jokes about drinking are told about the Irish in the United States despite the fact that they have long been largely replaced as the butt of ethnic jokes about stupidity by more recent groups of immigrants, notably the Poles (see Davies 1990). American ethnic jokes about hard-drinking and inebriation have remained firmly attached to the Irish-Americans and there are very few jokes about drunken Poles. In William Clements' (1973) extensive collection of ethnic jokes about the Poles their alleged love of beer is categorized with their food preferences under "appetite" but there is no section on inebriation. A rough content analysis of five modern American ethnic joke-books supports this view.7

Table 2. Ethnic jokes about stupidity and alcohol American ethnic jokes Total About drinking About stupidity

about the Irish

about the Poles

578 167 (28,8%) 153 (26,5%)

666 9 (1,4%) 455 (68,3%)

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The Irish lag way behind the Poles as butts of American jokes about stupidity but are easily the leading group to be made the butt of jokes about hard drinking of all kinds. The absence of American jokes about drunken Poles indicates that contrary to Dundes (1971: 199) suggestion ethnic jokes about excessive drinking are not necessarily part of a general tendency to mock lower class ethnic groups with jokes about stupidity, crassness, vulgarity, etc. In the world of American jokes inebriation is not, or at least is no longer classed as, a specifically lower-class comic attribute. The few American ethnic jokes about Polish drinking that are told merely indicate a lower-class lack of refinement in much the same way as the corresponding jokes about food or dress (see Dundes 1971: 200-201). Beer is a cheap, coarse, lower-class drink that goes with cheap, coarse, lower-class food and guzzling beer is a crass, coarse lower-class habit. It is now one ascribed to the Poles but in the late nineteenth and earlier part of the twentieth century Americans told very similar jokes about Germans. "Do you consider lager beer intoxicating?" "Veil ash for dat, I gant say. I trink feefty to sixty classes a tay end it tosh not hurt me, but I don't know how it would be if a man vash to make a hog of

hisself!" (Thousand Witty Sayings [n.d.]: 169) What is a Polish cocktail? A mushroom in a glass of beer. (Clements 1973: 13) What is a Pole vault? A refrigerator full of beer. (Clements 1973: 14) The idea for self-opening beer-cans was suggested by watching Polacks tear the tops off theirs. (Clements 1973:14)

The evidence from the American Polish jokes suggests that the relationship between stupidity and inebriation in British and Australian ethnic jokes about the Irish or in Swedish jokes about the Finns may be a largely contingent one, despite the implicit link between the two themes suggested earlier. The same peoples happen in these cases both to occupy a social position that leads to jokes about stupidity and are visibly hard drinkers. As a result of upward mobility and assimilation the Irish-Americans have largely vacated the classbased comic position that had led to their being the butts of jokes about stupidity, but this change in their social standing did not affect their position as the main butts of American jokes about inebriation. The reasons for this seem

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to be two-fold. First, some of the links between hard-drinking with public inebriation on the one hand and ethnicity on the other are independent of social class. For a long time the Irish-Americans did not fully discard their traditional pattern of heavy drinking despite their changing position in the American class-system (see Greeley 1980: 241; Sowell 1981: 42). Indeed, initially the particular route upwards taken by the Irish-American, may have tended to preserve existing patterns of hard-drinking (see Stivers 1976: 118225), while altering the general style of their occasional inebriation in ways that made it more acceptable to other Americans, even though it still remained a subject for ethnic jokes. Secondly the Irish-Americans are said by Stivers (1976: 169-173) to have seen visible hard-drinking as a means of preserving and projecting a distinctive national identity in the face of pressures to assimilate. I am doubtful whether this could have been a significant reason for the Irish-Americans markedly slow shift towards general American norms of drinking, but it could well mean that the Irish in America were less concerned to conceal inebriation and its effects and, when it did occur, more likely to make it an occasion for proclamations of ethnic identity. There is abundant evidence to show that Irish-Americans displayed a much higher incidence of pathological drinking than other American ethnic groups well into the mid-twentieth century, long after mass immigration from Ireland had ceased and upward mobility and social acceptance were assured. American observers noted that Irish Americans had the highest rates for any ethnic group of rejection from the armed forces for chronic alcoholism, of admission to hospital for alcoholic psychosis and other alcoholic disorders and of rates of arrest and conviction for inebriety (see Glad 1947: 407-409). The last of these is the visible manifestation of hard-drinking most likely to be seen by others and the existence of the other data indicates that these rates of arrest and conviction were not merely a product of selective reporting and recording. Even when allowance was made for differences in the socio-economic position and living standards of the various ethnic groups, the IrishAmericans still came out way ahead of the Blacks, Italians, Scandinavians, English, Germans, and Jews on most of these indices (see Glad 1947: 408 and Wechsler et.al. 1973: 274-275, 282). Hard drinking then was an ethnic and not just a class trait and as such it proved resistant to the changing median class position of the Irish-Americans. Indeed their predominance among harddrinkers was so marked that it was regarded as a sociological problem calling for an explanation (see Pittman and Snyder 1962: 154-156). The behaviour of the Irish settled in England and Wales and of their children born in those countries proved very similar to the pattern observed in America (see

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Littlewood and Lipsedge 1982: 8 and 94; O'Connor 1977: 151 -155 and Wilson 1980:14-17). Problems with drinking can, of course, remain hidden, a source of private tragedy not public celebration, but in the particular case of the Irish and especially where there are large Irish communities, there has often been visible and noisy ethnic public inebriation on a scale which is commented on by their neighbours. By contrast the Poles in America seem to have been much less likely to strike their fellow citizens as hard drinkers (see Stivers 1976: 12) despite their reputation for drunkenness in their own country and in France ("Ivre comme un Polonais"). The roots of Irish hard drinking in America and Britain can be seen in attitudes to alcohol in Ireland itself and in the ways these changed on the arrival of Irish emigrants in their new countries. Prior to the nineteenth century hard-drinking seems to have been common in much of northern Europe including Britain and Ireland, but Bartley (1954: 195) says of the period 17601800 that "even in that hard-drinking age there can be no doubt that the Irishman went beyond his neighbours in exceeding the limits of sobriety". This fact was reflected in the comic portrayal of the Irish on stage where the "Irish addiction to strong drink ... (was) an outstanding characteristic" (Bartley 1954: 195). During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries several social changes occurred which made the gap between British and Irish drinking patterns even greater. In Britain, as in America, industrialization and the rationalisation of work on the one hand and the temperance movements associated with the Protestant churches on the other, gradually reduced the amount of hard-drinking and public drunkenness (see O'Connor 1977:56-63). Most of Ireland remained rural and the Roman Catholic church's attitude to temperance was itself divided and ambivalent (Stivers 1976: 95-96). The strength and impact of the temperance movement among Irish Catholics both at home and in the Irish diaspora (Dunne 1981; Ford 1959; Hayler 1911: 48-61) tends to be almost unknown to outsiders, and even among the Irish themselves it is commonly thought that the temperance movement is essentially Protestant in nature (Ford 1959: 9; Hayler 1911: 48), probably because of the much more visible and vociferous endorsement of temperance by Protestant organizations bent on a crusade to save the whole world from alcohol. Similarly the Irish tend to be seen as permissive and enthusiastic drinkers when in fact they merely exhibit an exaggerated version of the same ambivalence that characterizes the joke-tellers' own societies (O'Connor 1977; Stivers 1976, 97; Wilson 1980: 14-17). Restraint is much less visible than excess unless it is very aggressive restraint. The Irish Roman Catholic priest is in general much more tolerant and permissive towards alcohol (see Bales 1962:

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163-166) than the Protestant minister and is able to drink alcohol in public situations, whereas his Protestant counterparts, even if they are not teetotalers, are likely to feel inhibited from doing so and also may inhibit others from drinking by their very presence. The Anglican/Episcopalian clergyman occupies an intermediate position in theology, attitudes to alcohol and popular humour. The Irish priest does occasionally appear in ethnic jokes about drinking as a censorious figure admonishing a drunkard, but much less often than Protestant ministers. The Protestant minister sometimes appears in ethnic jokes about drinking as a secret drinker whose secret is known or is suddently revealed, but the Irish priest is usually portrayed as the bibulous, convivial representative of an organization that is tolerant towards alcohol: O'Hanlihan travelled up and down a train putting his head in every compartment and asking for a priest. He appeared quite upset and when he came back for a second time, a Methodist minister said: "We are all brothers in the Lord. Although I am a Methodist Minister, if you will take me to your friend who is ill or distressed, I will comfort him as well I may." "It's meself that's after being distressed," said the Irishman. "What can I do for you, brother?" "Nothing. I gotta have a priest. I need a bottle-opener." (Wilde 1976: 40; also in Newman 1966: 13; for the 18th century version about Anglican parsons see Howe 1892b: 132; Lewis 1979: 38-39) Pat's Dream Faith it's myself had a quare dhrame now. I dreamt I was in Rome and that I called upon his riverence the Pope. I had hardly knocked at the door when his Holiness himself opened it. "Ah Pat," says he, "it is you that are come to see me?" "Faith, your honour and its nobody else." "Come upstairs with me," he cried. And sure there was the hondsomest room as ever you capped eyes on. "Be sated now," said his riverence "and what will you be taking?" I was bothered for the moment, but I just said, "A drop o' the cratur;" when he turns to me and says, "Shall it be hot or cowld?" "Hot" says I and away went his Holiness to fetch the hot water and before he came back I awoke. Arrah what a fool I was, I didn't have it cold. (Cole 1887: 217; also in Wilde 1977: 62) The mildness and ineffectiveness of clerical disapproval permitted traditional Irish drinking patterns to persist but the factors that led to their strengthening and institutionalization in the nineteenth century were economic and demographic. Towards the end of the eighteenth century the Irish peasantry had

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been able to marry at a young age, because they had discovered that it was possible to support a family from the produce of a very small patch of ground if it was sown exclusively with potatoes. With the encouragement of their landlords, many of whom were absentees and interested only in their rents, they married young and divided and sub-divided their tiny farms. The population in consequence grew very rapidly (Stivers 1976: 52). Those Irish farmers who saw the dangers implicit in this situation or wished for a higher standard of living, sought instead to leave their farms to one son only and to enlarge their holdings. This practice became much more frequent as a result of the shock effect of the famines of the 1840s when the potato crop failed altogether. From this time onwards the Irish came to see their only hope of attaining a reasonable and secure standard of living as dependent on the consolidation of land holdings into larger units which could not be sub-divided under any circumstances (Stivers 1976: 52-54). Only one son was allowed to inherit the farm on his father's death or retirement and he was not permitted to marry until he had come into his inheritance. The other sons had either to remain unmarried or to emigrate. These measures brought about a remarkable rise in the age of marriage in Ireland and a large proportion of the population never married at all ( Stivers 1976: 57). The stern sexual puritanism of the Irish Roman Catholic Church saw to it that there was very little pre-marital sexual intercourse or illegitimacy and the Irish birth-rate became, for a time at least, one of the lowest in Europe despite the absence of contraception and abortion. The result of these events was to create in Ireland a large bachelor subculture of unmarried men in their twenties and thirties and even forties and fifties, some waiting to inherit the farm so that they could marry, some knowing that they would never marry at all (Stivers 1976: 77-79). They were free of the chief restraints that prevent most men from giving themselves up to regular alcoholic adventures. They had no family responsibilities and little opportunity or desire for economic betterment. Family life was impossible, illicit sex was forbidden and the main form of recreation available was a night out carousing with the lads. In many societies there is a tension between the demands of family life and those of various all-male groups of friends and comrades, and members of clubs and gangs from which women are excluded. However, in Ireland the demographic situation vastly strengthened the position of the all-male drinking group vis-a-vis the family. Even after they had married, men (who, after all, had served a very long apprenticeship in the bachelor drinking group) would continue to go out drinking with the boys (Stivers 1976: 77-78), a fact which created tensions within the Irish family.

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The love of hard-drinking was continually reinforced by tales that glorified the irresponsible freedom and adventure loving, happy-go-lucky attitude of the bachelor culture (Stivers 1976: 88). When Irish men emigrated to Britain or America the disruptive effect of migration on existing ties would have further eroded the restraining influence of marriage and family (Stivers 1976: 104). Such a situation is likely to produce not only hard drinking but the boisterous, reckless and convivial style of inebriation of men who have, for the time being at least, avoided the shackles of marriage and family: Mclnnery celebrated the New Year's Eve so well he woke up the next day in hospital. His friend Sharley came to visit him. "What happened last night?" asked Mclnnery. "You had quite a load on," answered Sharley. "You walked over to the window and climbed out on the sill and announced you were going to fly all over the borough of Manhatten." "My God man,"shouted Mclnnery "why didn't you stop me?" "Tell you the truth," replied Sharley, "last night, I really thought you could do it." (Wilde 1974: 60-61)

A further economic factor that reinforced the sexual isolation of the male Irish emigrant was the irregular work on distant and transient construction sites that unskilled Irish immigrants were forced to take on in both Britain and America. Unmarried men in large groups doing tough jobs in remote places where there are few women, whether in the Finnish lumber camps, the Australian outback or as Irish labourers building canals, railroads and highways, in Britain or America tend to be hard-drinkers. 8 When paid off at the end of a job, they tend to head for the cities and to go on a drunken spree like sailors on shore leave. Ethnic jokes about the Irish portray the all male drinking group, and indeed alcohol itself, as having a strong hold on the Irish drinker. It is not a mere casual assembly of leisure companions but a group commanding its members loyally and strongly influencing their behaviour. Fogarty began to drop in at Barney's bar regularly and his order was always the same — two martinis. After several weeks of this, Barney asked him why he didn't order a double instead. "Its a sentimental thing," said Fogarty, "a very dear friend of mine died a few weeks ago and before his death he asked that when I drink I have one for him too."

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A week later Fogarty came in and ordered one martini. "What about your dead buddy? Why only one martini today?" "This is my buddy's drink," came the reply. "I'm on the wagon." (Wilde 1979: 56)

Naturally problems arise if a man from this kind of bachelor sub-culture marries and tries to go on living the same kind of life. The wife is likely to resent the calls on her husband's time, money and loyalty made by the drinking groups to which he continues to belong. The clash between the demands and responsibilities of family life and the comradeship, conviviality and wild exploits of the husband's male drinking cronies is a favourite theme of jokes in many cultures, another facet of the basic clash between duty and pleasure. Conflicts between inebriated husbands and nagging wives are also a universal source of jokes. It is hardly surprising, given the intense contradictory pulls of bachelor drinking and family duty that clashes between husband and wife over drink should figure so strongly in ethnic jokes about the Irish: "Did you hear the news?" asked Reardon of his pal at the saloon. "Harrigan drank so much, his wife left him!" "Waiter! Give me six boiler-makers!" (Wilde 1979: 56) "Have a drink, quick, before me wife comes in, Cassidy!" said Casey. "What would she do if she caught ye?" enquired Cassidy. "Break every bone in me body!" explained Casey, adding "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, Cassidy!" (Harvey 1904: 176) Mrs. Murphy was spring-cleaning when a lady called and said: "Mrs. Murphy will you give me something for the Home for Inebriates." "Come back this evening", said Mrs. Murphy. "Ye can have Murphy." (Ferguson 1933: 179)

A particularly good example of this genre of jokes (it also exists as an ethnic joke about other peoples perceived as hard drinkers) was told to Sarah Burgess (University of California at Berkeley Folklore Archive, Irish file 1979) in San Francisco by an Irish-American retired railroad executive, who put on a brogue "for the duration of the joke". Paddy was walking home from a bar very late one night, more than a little tipsy. So, he loses his way home, and goes off on a detour through the graveyard. As he staggers through the graveyard, he falls into an open grave, and as

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he's climbing out, he looks up and sees that the gravestone has his name on it. Even through his drunken stupor, he's absolutely horrified. He hears a voice that says, "Paddy, it's time for you to come with me, Paddy, it's time for you to come with me... Paddy, it's time for you to come with me." So, Paddy looks up and sees a man with a mustache and a pitchfork in his hand, and says, "What do you mean? I'm not coming with you, I'm going home as fast as me legs can take me." But the man repeats, "Paddy you're coming with me." Paddy says, "You're mad, I'm not going anywhere with you." The man says, "Don't you know who I am — I'm the divil!" And Paddy holds out his hand and says "Oh me god, it's nice to meet you. I've been married to your sister for 40 years." T h e Irish-American raconteur's c o m m e n t on his own j o k e is an interesting one, f o r he added that he believed the j o k e portrays "the typical Irishman who is always drunk, locked in an unhappy marriage to which he is true due to his religion." The way he has fitted these different elements together is significant, regardless of the overall accuracy (or lack of it) of his description. All-male drinking groups exist in many societies and there is often tension between these exclusively masculine groups and the network of family and kinship to which their members and their members' womenfolk also belong. T h e balance of influence between these two institutions will differ f r o m society to society depending on the relative power of each. W h e r e family and kinship are the predominant force in m e n ' s lives, as is the case in Italian or Jewish communities, then men tend to drink moderately, with their meals and often at home (Glatt 1973:267; Lolli 1963:191-193; Lucia 1963:306,313-314, 320-326). W h e r e historically men and women have been segregated f r o m each other for long periods of time, either due to delayed marriage as in Ireland or due to differential migration as in Australia (Conway 1974: 29), or due to occupational and geographic isolation, then powerful all-male groups tend to develop whose central values are "male solidarity and equality" and the "superiority of men over w o m e n " . The drinking of alcohol together by the group, often to excess, is the way in which these values are reinforced. M e n of all strata symbolise their equality and solidarity by drinking together and by standing drinks for one another on a mutual basis (Oxley 1977: 79 and Sargent 1979: 24-31). In this way ties are built u p between the members of the group which c o m e s to form a cohesive though shallow brotherhood. T h e strength of these groups is shown by the way they have persisted and have continued to exclude women even after the initial demographic reason for their existence is long past (Conway 1974: 32, 141). They began as a substi-

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tute for the family and remain as a rival to it. As a characteristic ethnic joke about Australians puts it: An Aussie loves his beer, his mates and his wife — and in that order. (British 1970s; see also O'Grady 1965: 97) In both Ireland and Australia there are many jokes of this kind which stress the superiority of alcohol to women and which make a man's ability to drink and to brawl more important criteria of masculinity than his appeal to or success with women. An Irishman has been defined as somebody who would trample over twelve naked women to reach a bottle of Guinness. (MacHale 1977b: 5) Definition of an Irish queer — a fellow who prefers women to drink. (MacHale 1977b: 7) In the Wild West they like their womenfolk weak and their liquor strong. In the frozen North they like their women strong and their drink heated up. In New Brunswick they like their liquor straight and their women wavy. In Australia they like their women only when they've got to the state when they can't see any more liquor. (Cagney 1979c: 25) A bluff Australian tradesman walked in unexpectedly and found his regular girl friend on the couch with an Italian cook from the short-order cafe along the street. There was a heated argument and the Italian said "Angela, she no longer like-a you. She my girl now. She like lover with Latin blood in his veins. I got-a Latin blood in-a my veins." The Aussie said, "Not for long you ain't, Casanova. I'm gonna spill most of it on the floor." (Cagney 1979c: 80) Gaffney staggered into a bar crying. "What happened?" asked Brady the bartender. "I did a horrible thing," sniffed the drunk. "Just a few hours ago I sold my wife to someone for a bottle of scotch." "That is awful" said Brady. "Now she's gone and you want her back, right?" "Right," said Gaffney still crying. "You're sorry you sold her because you realized too late that you love her, right?" "Oh no", said the Irishman, "I want her back because I'm thirsty again." (Wilde 1978: 110)

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Ireland: As the laureate of the drinkers said, each man kills the thing he loves — and with that, he opened another fifth of Irish whiskey. (Adams 1975:143) A wayward son of the Emerald Isle left his bed and board which he and Margaret his wife had occupied for a long while, and spent his time around rum shops where he was always on hand to count himself "in", whenever anybody should "stand treat". Margaret was dissatisfied with this state of things and endeavoured to get her husband home again. We shall see how she succeeded: "Now Patrick, me honey, will ye come back?" "No Margaret, I won't come back." "An' won't ye come back for the love of the children?" "Not for the love of the children, Margaret." "Will ye come for the love of meself." "Niver at all. Way wid ye!" "An' Patrick, won't the love of the church bring ye back." "The church to the divil and then I won't come back." Margaret thought she would try one other inducement. Taking a pint bottle of whiskey from her pocket and holding up to her truant husband, she said, "Will ye come for the drap o'whiskey?" "Ah, me darling", answered Pat, unable to withstand such a temptation, "it's yerself that will always bring me home again — ye has sich a winning way wid ye!" Margaret declares that Patrick was "reclaimed" by moral suasion! (Merry [n.d.]: 124) According to Stivers (1976: 170-180), as the Irish in America became more successful and assimilated the negative image of them as violent drunks changed to a more positive comic portrait of the Irishman as a happy drunk. He relates this shift to changing American attitudes towards their citizens of Irish origin and ancestry as they came to appear less alien and threatening, particularly with the arrival of new and unfamiliar immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. He also advances the argument that the later, more genial image of Irish drinking, precisely because it was so acceptable to IrishAmericans as a positive badge of identity, led to the perpetuation of their problems with alcohol: As a sacrament in the religion of Irish-American nationalism it (hard-drinking) differentiated the Irish from other ethnic groups. It became a spiritual value symbolizing Irish group identity. It implied that the more one drank the more Irish one became. (Stivers 1976: 180)

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Stivers has illustrated his thesis with a vivid analysis of the celebration of Saint Patrick's Day in America: ... everyone wearing something green, maudlin Irish-American songs on the radio and green beer. In America Saint Patrick's Day also became a celebration of drinking... What Saint Patrick's Day signifies is the mutual acceptance of the Irish caricature, the stage/professional Irishman by the Irish and other Americans. This day is symbolic of the bond of acceptance: "Everyone's got a little Irish in them, I'll drink to that." But while most Irish-Americans play out their stage/professional Irish drinking role only on Saint Patrick's Day, some manage to live out this caricature permanently as happy drunks. (Stivers 1976: 170) It is doubtful whether Stivers' model does in fact help to explain the persistence of hard-drinking within the Irish-American community long after the traumatic experience of the initial generations (Greeley 1980: 241; Sowell 1981). Indeed, there will soon be very little left to explain, for Irish drinking patterns like those of the descendants of other immigrants in America will have moved towards that unstable average that passes for a norm. However, this thesis does help to explain the persistence ofjokes about Irish inebriation in America and the pleasure Irish-Americans take in telling them. What now keeps the jokes alive is not so much the reality or the extent of Irish-American drinking but its extraordinary visibility, for even in a world where all groups shared essentially the same drinking patterns, but only one of them combined drinking in public with a proclamation of ethnicity, then that group would be the one to feature in ethnic jokes about alcohol. In 19871 went to Savannah for the Saint Patrick's Day celebrations which are one of the largest in America, even though Georgia was not historically one of the main centres for Irish-American immigrants. At several large private and semi-public parties I attended, given by and for hospitable IrishAmericans, there was no excessive drinking or rowdiness but outside the streets milled with noisy disgusting and puking drunks, most of whom could have had no connection with Ireland at all. Nonetheless they wore green hair (see also Linkletter 1967: 92), caps, tee-shirts, and badges proclaiming their temporary affiliation with Irish drunkenness — "I'm Irish, buy me a drink", "Three beers for the Irish", "Irish whiskey makes me friskey", "Fuck me I'm Irish". 9 It was not the Irish who were drunk, it was the drunks who were "Irish", but their behaviour helped to keep an old ethnic joke alive and well just as effectively as if they had been genuine Hibernians. The jokes are equally kept

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alive on an everyday basis by businesses that seek to exploit the memory and myth of Irish drinking and conviviality such as the saloons festooned with painted shamrocks called Paddy's Bar or The Angry Irishman. Even if Stivers is right in saying that Irish-Americans have accepted the comic image of Irish drinking as part of their own identity, it does not follow that they need to act out the jokes about themselves in order to assert their identity; it is quite enough to tell them. The members of most ethnic groups are quite capable of using jokes, without being trapped by them. Mr. Dooley saw the point long ago: In me day I never knew a great statesman that dhrank, or if he did he niver landed anny job betther thin clerk in th' weather office. But as Hogan says Shakespere says, they pretended a vice if they had it not ... His [the IrishAmerican politician's] aim was to create an impressyon that he was a gay fellow, a jovyal toss pot, that thought nawthin iv putting a gallon i ν paint into him durin' an avenin's intertainment. They had to exercise diplomacy, d'ye mind, to keep their repytations goin'. Whin Higgins was runnin' f'r sheriff he always ordhered gin an' I always give him wather. Ye undherstand don't ye? Ye know what gin looks like? Well wather looks like gin. (Dunne 1942: 114)

Everyone's got a bit of politician in them. I'll appear to drink to that. If we examine the jokes about the drinking patterns of the two groups most commonly the subjects of "canny" jokes, namely the Scots and the Jews, we find a marked contrast between the two groups. There are very few jokes about Jewish drinking habits and an enormous number about those of the Scots. Both the absence of jokes about Jews and the peculiar flavour of jokes about Scottish drinking require an explanation. In the case of the Jews there is very little to tell jokes about. The Jews are in general moderate drinkers who have built alcohol into their way of life in a careful and controlled fashion such that there are definite social rules about when, where and how much alcohol is consumed. Attitudes "to the use of alcohol tend to be favourable, but there are strong and consistent sanctions against intoxication or drunkenness or other forms of deviant drinking" (O'Connor 1977: 6.) Traditional Jews have long had a stable and uncontroversial set of basic rules about drinking which exclude both drunkenness and militant teetotalism, i.e. both of the extremes that stem from the ambivalence about alcohol of the wider society (Glad 1947: 265-269). Traditional Jewish drinking patterns are thus genuinely close to the "golden mean" appropriate to modern industrial societies (Glad 1947: 408-410). Moderation is not the

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stuff of which ethnic jokes are made and there are very few jokes about drunken Jews (Spalding 1976: 180-181), and practically none about Jews who are anti-alcohol. It is the Australians not the Jews who are renowned for getting shikker. For outsiders there is nothing visible or remarkable on which to base ethnic jokes and within the Jewish tradition, unlike those of the ambivalent societies, inebriation is unacceptable rather than comic, though it has been reported that Jews have a particular liking for "ethnic" jokes about non-Jews being the worse for drink (Wolff et.al. 1934: 357). The few jokes about drunken Jews that exist are rather forced and artificial and fall into Raskin's (1985: 205-209) category of pseudo-ethnic jokes. There is no Jewish style of being drunk as there is for, say, the Finns, the Irish or the Australians. The increasing numbers of individual Jews who adopt the mores of the wider society and occasionally get drunk (Glatt 1973:268; Rosten 1983: 283-284) have no Jewish model of drunken comportment to follow — they can only become shikker as a goy. Most Jewish jokes and comic references to drink refer to inebriated gentiles and particularly those whose violent and even anti-Semitic tendencies are inflamed by alcohol, as in the song "Shikker iz a Goy [because he is a Goy!]" 10 . The Chinese in America, another group with rules of moderate drinking, also see drink problems as something only outsiders have, as in their mocking saying: "Caucasians drink because they can't cook" (University of California at Berkeley Folklore Archive. Chinese-American file. Collected by Karen Wong 1960s). Just as there are few jokes about the drinking habits of ethnic groups who are the butt of jokes about stupidity, but who happen to be relatively moderate drinkers, so too there are few jokes about the "canny" sobriety of the Jews. There is some slight evidence that anti-Semites add sobriety to the list of negative traits that they ascribe to the Jews (Snyder 1962: 211), presumably because they see it as one more means by which the Jews can take advantage of others and one more proof of their belief that the Jews remain apart and aloof in order to gain power over others. Anti-Semites have long since shown that they are capable of turning the most innocent and even laudable forms of behaviour into yet more evidence of the Jewish "threat". A few jokes about canny Jewish sobriety do occur in societies where such beliefs are or have been widespread, but these jokes are in general part of that aspect of the "canny" ethnic script which the Jews share with hard drinking groups such as the Scots who are not the victims of this kind of hostile ideology: A rabbi and an Irish Roman Catholic priest out driving ran into each other. The rabbi climbed out of the wreckage of his car and helped the shaken priest

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to the side of the road. "You must have had a nasty shock", he said, offering a flask of brandy to the priest. The Irishman gratefully took a large swig and paused for breath. "Go on, have another", said the rabbi. "But what about you", said the priest. "Don't you want a drink?" "No", replied the rabbi, "not until after the police have been." (British 1970s; see also Kilgariff 1974: 54; for the same joke with the Scots replacing the Jews see Thomas [n.d.]: 11)

American jokes contrasting Jewish moderation and Irish conviviality can be linked to a suggestion made by Glad (1947: 458-459) about the relationship between differences in basic Irish and Jewish values and their markedly different rates of inebriation: ... the Irish ideal boy is more happy-go-lucky than the Jewish ideal boy who is serious-minded. These suggest that general values in the Irish group conform to the "drinking values". The same may be said of the Jewish group. It seems possible that the attitudes towards drinking upon which emphasis is placed in this study are merely auxiliary attitudes linked to more central values in the cultures considered; that is the affectivity purposes of drinking among the Irish may be an expression of a general cultural valuation of proximate goals, such as friendliness, sociability, good-naturedness as more important than more ultimate goals of understanding, recognition and achievement.

If Glad's view of the contrast between the Milesian and the Smilesian virtues is correct, it would account for differences in the patterns of drinking and in the routes of upward mobility taken by the two groups and the ethnic jokes that stem from this. The initial success of the Irish in America was in politics where the Irish personal qualities and virtues listed above are at a premium, rather than in entrepreneurship or scholarship which require the pursuit of "more ultimate goals". Acccording to Glad (1947:448-449,461 ) the purposes of drinking for Irish-Americans (at least in the late 1940s) were excitement and conviviality, both of which are visible and feature strongly in ethnic jokes about them. Conviviality and excitement also tend to lead to drinking in excess, since they are relatively boundless qualities. How much excitement and conviviality is enough? These qualities, known in Ireland as "crack", are a source of enjoyment, which may account for the gradual growth of an essentially benign humorous image of Irish-American drinking postulated by Stivers. However, they are qualities incompatible with a canny calculating outlook and this may help to account for the persistence and popularity in America of

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jokes about the alleged irrationality of the Irish long after they had become visibly successful through politics. Only the subsequent success of the IrishAmericans in other fields has undermined the social bases of these jokes and it would be interesting to know the extent to which this second stage of IrishAmerican upward mobility has been accompanied by changes in both their "general" and their "drinking" values. By contrast, Jewish drinking has been described as instrumental, as a means to the attainment of goals remote from the effects of alcohol per se. Such a view of alcohol is likely to lead to moderation and self-control and indicates a cultural emphasis on the "canny" virtues so vital to entrepreneurial success. The case of the Scots is a particularly interesting one because they are the subject of ethnic jokes both about canniness and about hard-drinking and drunkenness, both about sober, hard-headed self-control and about drunken loss of self-control. There is a contradiction between these opposed comic images but it is one rooted in a real contradiction within Scottish culture and indeed the jokes dwell on this contradiction and its various manifestations. In contrast to the moderation of the Jews, the Scots have a culture which is exceedingly ambivalent about alcohol and the result is a combination of excess in both directions, with gross and visible public drunkenness on the one hand and strident denunciations of the evils of drink on the other. Jokes about the Scots refer both to over-enthusiastic whisky drinkers and to hard-faced Calvinist teetotalers, particularly clergymen who see drink as an invention of the devil. Some of the most characteristic ethnic jokes about the Scots involve confrontations between members of these two opposed, yet equally Scottish, groups, while yet other jokes refer to Scots who have a foot in both camps and who have become secret drinkers, hypocritical drinkers or periodically lapsed teetotalers. Similar divisions existed among the Welsh who were traditionally divided between "chapel people" and "tavern people", and yet who also included a number of chapel-goers known secretly to enter the pub (saloon) by the back-door if they became afflicted by a thirst after righteousness. All of these groups figure in jokes about Welsh drinking and there are similar jokes about New England Yankees. The Scots have a long tradition of heavy drinking and historical accounts of Scottish life depict people of all classes regularly and routinely drinking to excess. The triumph of a particularly severe form of Calvinism at the time of the Reformation, though it made the Scots a remarkably sober people in many other respects, does not seem to have moderated their weakness for dram drinking even among the clergy, nor their willingness literally to drink one another under the table." Only in the nineteenth century did industrialization

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and Victorian respectability produce a move towards temperance and abstinence (Geikie 1904: 317-318). Many of the advocates of temperance, whose cast of mind was anyway shaped by a dour and relentless Calvinism, felt that the only way to defeat the squalor produced by the continuation of the traditional pattern of hard-drinking in the new urban industrial Scotland was to impose an unyielding narrow teetotalism on themselves and everyone else. They had a fair degree of success in some sections of the middle-classes and the respectable working class, but other Scots remained hard-drinkers and were frequently, publicly and visibly drunk. Those Scots who had been brought up in teetotal families also had problems with alcohol, for drink remained a strong temptation in an ambivalent culture and they had never learned how to drink or any rules about drinking other than total abstinence. For people brought up in a teetotal sub-culture, whether Scots, Welsh, Ulster, or Mormon, the initial drink really can be the first step down the road to alcoholic self-destruction. Many ethnic jokes about Scottish drinking emanate from Scotland itself, and they are both a means of exploring a distinctively Scottish problem and a way of asserting Scottish identity, but outsiders consume Scotch jokes as eagerly as Scotch whisky. In this respect Scottish jokes about drinking are like those enjoyed by Irish-Americans, though it would be interesting to know whether insiders and outsiders differ in their mode of appreciation of such humour and if so how much. In the case of the Scots it is quite clear that the jokes about drinking are the result of observed behaviour and are but an incidental means of proclaiming a national identity. The drinking patterns of the Scots are also visible to others, a fact which renders ethnic jokes about them plausible and comprehensible. As Kessel and Walton (1960: 54-55) have noted: "gross public drunkenness, people lying paralytic in the streets, is now a rare sight in England, although it can still be seen in parts of Scotland." Visitors to Scotland are naturally taken aback by the visibly greater incidence of public drunkenness there and the curious way in which it co-exists with strong moral disapproval of drinking. Also when Scots emigrate they take their drinking patterns with them. Excessive drinking among the Scots has not excited quite as much comment or interest as that of the Irish-Americans, but studies of alcohol problems among the Scots living both in Scotland and outside show that they provide a quite disproportionate number of problem drinkers. 12 In the past, the Scottish commemorations of Rabbie Burns when "Freedom and whisky gang togither", and celebrations of St. Andrew's Day (St. Andrew the disciple who discovered the wee lad with the loaves and the fishes is the patron saint of Scotland) and

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Hogmanay (New Year), abroad as well as at home, were often occasions when high ethnic visibility was combined with hard-drinking and drunkenness. This made Scottish dram drinkers the butt of foreign "jokists" as early and as far afield as Calcutta in 1881 (Robert Ford 1901: 158-161). The people most aware of Scottish drunkenness have long been their neighbours the English, who see not only the distinctive celebrations of Scottish immigrants and their descendants but also the wild and visible behaviour that accompanies sports contests between the two countries and particularly football matches. Hooliganism has become a general problem at English football grounds, but the Scottish fans tend to get drunk as well. The author once tried to drive through London on the day of the football match between Scotland and England, when the entire city seemed to be clogged with reeling, turbulent, tartan-scarved, bonnet-wearing drunken Scottish fans. The press and television used to give a lot of coverage to the antics of these Scottish crowds, not because they were biased against the Scots nor because anything important happened, but because their visits were a visible spectacle, a four-day orgy leaving its trail of havoc from Glasgow Central Station to Wembley Stadium. One consequence of this formerly biennial Scottish invasion of London was that a number of Scottish football fans were tried for minor offences committed while drunk. The English press naturally tended to report those ethnic incidents which were most likely to amuse their readers, such as the case of a Scotsman in a kilt prosecuted for indecent exposure while drunk. Scottish hard-drinking at football matches itself became a subject for ethnic jokes: At a football match in Scotland, members of the crowd began hurling empty beer cans onto the pitch. Every time a can whizzed overhead a man near the front ducked. "Don't worry," said his neighbour," it'll only hit you if it's got your name on it". "That's just it", replied the fearful one — "My name's McEwan [McEwan is the name of a popular brand of canned beer in Scotland]." (British 1970s; see also Hodes 1978: 5)

The people of England and Wales also know that the Scots can impose tough prohibitions on the use of alcohol including a ban on drinking at sporting events, and coach-loads of English and Welsh supporters have been stopped by the Scottish police on their way to sports fixtures in Scotland and their supplies of alcohol confiscated. Visitors to Scotland soon become aware of the existence of local legal restrictions on drinking and of the moral disapproval

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that underlies them as well as of the high rate of drunkenness. The tension in Scotland between inebriation and teetotalism is a visible one and every so often there are widely reported angry altercations between Scots who hold divergent views on the alcohol problems. The only prohibitionist party candidate ever to be elected to the British parliament had a Scottish constituency; Mr. Scrymgeour defeated Winston Churchill, the previous holder of the seat. Thus the inhabitants of other societies that are ambivalent about alcohol have come to use the even greater ambivalence of the Scots as the basis of ethnic jokes about exaggerated versions of their own failings. Many of the jokes come from Scotland itself, but there is a ready market for them not only in lands with Scottish settlers and their descendants but even in countries with little direct experience of Scotland and the Scots.13 Out of the tension between Scottish hard-drinking and teetotalism, between wild conviviality and Calvinist attempts to dedicate life exclusively to serious things, four types of ethnic joke about the Scots and alcohol have emerged. The first of these consists of jokes about enthusiastic dram drinkers, that have much in common with those widely told about the Irish: A Scot with a bottle of whisky in his pocket was in a railway collision in New York. As he crawled from the wrecked compartment, he felt something wet on his trousers and exclaimed: "My God! I hope it's blood." (Ferguson 1933: 42; also in Hodes 1978:41) As the night advanced, one after another slipped in below the table until there was only one left. "Bob I'm slippin' !" Voice from below: "Weel, Jock if yer slippin', bring the bottle wi' ye!" (Ferguson 1933: 42)

There are also distinctive categories of ethnic jokes about the Scots that reflect the Scots' attempts to add sobriety to the "work" virtues of rationality, thrift, diligence and perseverance. These jokes refer to: a) the conflict between the teetotal and the convivial, b) the lapses of would-be teetotallers, and c) secret drinkers, and especially those who get found out. In the classic Scottish jokes of this type the ministers of the Scottish Presbyterian churches play an important role. Jokes often depict either the minister or an elder of the kirk attempting to admonish a lapsed or habitual drinker or else being himself revealed to be a secret tippler. Ethnic jokes of this type are

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also told about other Protestant groups who value work and abstinence, such as the Welsh or the N e w England Yankees. (a) Ethnic jokes about teetotallers and their struggle with the convivial: "Ah Donald", said the Minister, "I hear they've gone dry in your brother's village". "Dry", remarked Donald. "Dry! why, man, they're parched. I've just received a letter from Sandy and, believe me, the stamp was stuck on wi' a pin'." (Ferguson 1933: 30) Tammas (to friend who has joined the teetotal): "There's nae doot, Jeems, ye're a much improved man, — but I've lost a freend!" (Ferguson 1933: 46) A Perthshire blacksmith whom I knew intimately was once remonstrated with by the Free Church minister who lived nearby about his frequent and excessive indulgences. "Was ye ever drunk, Sir?" inquired the smith. "No, Donald", said the minister, "I am glad to say, I never was". "I thocht as muckle", said the smith, "for man if ye was once rieht drunk, ye was never like to be sober a' your days again." (Ford 1901: 126-127) "It's an awful thing that drink," exclaimed a clergyman when the barber, who was visibly affected, had drawn blood from his face for the third time. "Ay", replied the tonsorial artist, with a wicked leer in his eye, "it maks the skin tender." (Ford 1901: 127) "You are reeling, Janet," remarked a country parson, meeting one of his parishioners carrying more sail than ballast, as a preliminary to lecturing her on the evils of her conduct. "Troth, an' I canna aye be spinnin', sir," retorted she, casting anchor in the middle of the road, and leering blandly up into the face of her interrogator. "You do not seem to catch my meaning clearly, Janet," continued the divine. "Do you know where drunkards go?" "Indeed, they generally gang whaur they get the whisky cheapest and best, sir." "Yes, Janet, but there is another place where they go. They go where there is weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth." "Humph!" sneered the case-hardened old sinner. "They can gnash teeth that have teeth to gnash. I hav'na had but a'e stump for this forty year." (Ford 1901: 127-128)

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(b) Ethnic jokes about lapsed teetotallers and lapses from temperance: A Highland schoolmaster having become too fond of the national drink, a deputation from his townsfolk called to remonstrate, while a select committee awaited the result at the inn. Hours passed in suspense. At last on the still night air came the sound of horses feet and bacchanalian song. A vehicle drew up at the door and the landlord hastened out. "Preserve us a' !" he exclaimed in dismay, "it's the dipitation !" (Robey 1920: 55) The minister spent spent six months trying to make John the gardener a teetotaler. It was a hard struggle. One evening the minister rushed up to John and seized him by the hands. "John, the victory is in sight. We are going to win. John, it was the happiest day in my life when I saw you at our prayermeeting last night." "By heavens, minister, is that where I was?" (Ferguson 1933: 24) The Minister (reproachfully): "Ah James! I'm sorry to see you like this! I thought you were a steadfast teetotaller". James: "Sho I am, sir. But I'm no a bigoted one!" (Ferguson 1933: 29) Scotch Sunday Drunk: A very unmanageable condition of spiritual ecstasy. (Levinson 1963: 205)

(c) Ethnic jokes about secret drinkers: Scene: Licensed Grocer's shop. Enter Mrs. Johnston. Mrs. J.: "Gie's a pund o' yer ham." Lard: "What kind wad ye like?" Mrs. J.: "Oh, just the kind that Mrs. Thompson gets." Lard: "A' rieht! Whaur's yer bottle?" (Ferguson 1933: 5; also in Robey 1920: 59) A young countryman went a considerable distance to pay a visit to his uncle and aunt and cousins, who were reputed a family of strict teetotallers. During his first meal at his kinsman's table, the young man commented on the absence of spirituous liquors. "We are a' temperance folk here, ye ken," interrupted the old man. "No spirituous liquors are allowed to enter this house." After dinner the old man went upstairs to take his customary "forty winks," the girls started off to Sunday school, and the boys lounged away to smoke in

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the stable. As soon as Aunt Betty found herself alone in the kitchen she put her initial finger to her lips, to enjoin silence on the part of her youthful nephew, and going to a dark nook in the pantry she drew therefrom a little black bottle, and filling a glass held it out to him and said, "Here, John, tak' a taste o' that. Our gudeman's sic a strict teetotaller that I durna lat him ken that I keep a wee drap in the hoose —just for medicine. So dinna mention it." A few minutes later the old man cried from the stairhead, "Are you there, John?" The nephew went upstairs, when the head of the house took him into his own bedroom, where he promptly produced a gallon-jar of whisky from an old portmanteau under the bed, and, pouring out a hearty dram, said — "Teetotallin' doesna prevent me frae keepin' a wee drap o' the 'rale peat reek' in case o' illness, or that; so here, lad, put that in your cheek; but (confidentally) not a word aboot it to your auntie, or the laddies." Strolling out of doors soon after this second surprise, and entering the stable, the cousins beckoned their relative into the barn, where, after fumbling among the straw for a few seconds, they handed him a black bottle, with the encouraging words — "Tak' a sook o' that, cousin, ye'll find it's gude; but not a word to the auld fouks, mind ye, for twa mair infatuated teetotallers were never born?" (Ford 1901: 134-135) Jokes involving the secret drinking of a minister, elder or deacon of a Protestant church have of course long been popular even where there is no ethnic component (e.g. Cobb 1925: 70-71 ; The New Joe Miller 1801: 186) and the Protestant minister of religion as a secret drinker who gets caught out appears in Scottish jokes, much as the Roman Catholic priest sleeping with his young housekeeper is a figure of fun in jokes from Bavaria, Austria and Central Europe (Ranke 1972). That a drinking minister can be as much a comic scandal as a randy celibate indicates the force of Scottish teetotalism and the role of the Protestant churches in enforcing it. The lapses of moral mentors are always good for a joke. Jokes about secret drinkers among Scottish ministers are also distinctively ethnic for the most significant mark of the difference between the Scots and their more numerous English neighbours is religion. The established church in Scotland is Presbyterian and its ministers have often disapproved strongly of alcohol, in contrast to the more relaxed attitude of the English clergy of the episcopalian Church of England. Indeed the Very Reverend John Gillespie ( 1904: 204-205), a former Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, has ruefully related how fiercely he was

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once condemned by his fellows for drinking whisky and, worse still, for joking about the fact in a speech. Accordingly, it is easy to see why the ministers in the jokes are shown as keeping their love of whisky a dark secret: Stationmaster rings up manse in Dumbartonshire. The minister anwers the phone. Stationmaster: "There's a box for you here, minister." Minister: "Yes, John, that's all right. It's a few hymn books from Princes Street, Edinburgh." Stationmaster: "Ay, weel ye'd better hurry up, yer hymn books are leakin." (Ferguson 1933: 30, 121; also in Hodes 1978: 37)

The ethnic jokes about covert drinking in Scotland have their counterparts in Wales where the politics of alcohol has been mainly concerned with whether public houses (bars) should be allowed to open on Sundays. The national identity of the Welsh in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth became closely tied to a militant and puritanical form of Nonconformist Protestantism. As in Scotland this led to an extreme Sabbatarianism. Practically all secular activities were banned on the Welsh Sunday, a distinctive institution that set the Welsh apart from their English and Irish neighbours. In particular, all bars, saloons and public houses were closed by law on Sundays, a rule that long persisted in some of the more traditional and least Anglicized parts of the country (Davies 1992). Then there was this Welsh couple who were always arguing about religion. She was Presbyterian and he was Sunday Opening. (See Kilgarriff 1974: 49)

In practice the Welsh drank in clubs that were exempt from the law and also drank quietly and illicitly behind closed doors in public houses that officially were shut. National pride and religious morality were satisfied by the fact that the public houses of Wales, unlike those of sinful England, were closed. So long as appearances were maintained, the Welsh did not seem to care very much about what happened in reality. The situation was a highly visible one to English visitors who felt frustrated because they did not know how to work the system, though if they had Welsh friends, they were often introduced to the subtle delights of evading rules that everyone pretends to uphold. The witty English mathematician Lancelot Hogben (1967: 9) in a work written entirely in monosyllables, noted that "one Law in Wales is quite out of step with what you or I may well think of when we think of crime as such. In

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Wales you can buy no Strong Drink on the Lord's Day. So the ones who live near the edge of Wales may have to walk miles and the ones who live near the coast have to slip in by the Back Door when no one can see them." Another English humorist William Hardcastle (1972:270) added that "to be smuggled into the back entrance of a Welsh pub on a Sunday morning is as thrilling in its way as brushing against the underworld in the seedier quarters of Marseilles." (The fictitious) George F.Babbitt, who survived Prohibition in Zenith City with the help of the local boot-leggers, would no doubt have agreed with this sentiment (see Lewis [1922] 1974: 88-90). Solid joys and liquid pleasures none but Zion's children know. English satirists, though, still remained baffled by the sheer span of Welsh and Scottish ambivalence about alcohol. The English were bemused by Wales which they saw as a society in which preachers could declare that "Any thought that gets young people nearer to drink, is a thought from Hell" (Hardcastle 1971: 270. See also Bradbury 1960: 58), and yet where an English woman who had formerly been a publican in West Wales could write of "the drinking habits of Wales, the alcoholic landlords, the record convictions for drunkenness, the all day drinking in most towns (legal) followed by the popular all night sessions (illegal but accepted)", and of "men pretending to a massive respectability while believing anything goes in drink preferably after hours and behind locked doors" (Cook 1979). A situation like this is of course a gift to the inventors and tellers of ethnic jokes and anecdotes about the allegedly devious Welsh: A widowed licensee in a North Wales resort when fined £20 for selling liquor out of licensed hours, produced a diary and, counting up dates, said to the magistrate: "Well, yiss, sirr, I will pay the fine whateffer, if only you will perhaps give a little time say in which to pay the whool fine." The magistrate replied: "That's all very well, Mrs. Jones; but what do you mean by a little time?" Again glancing at the calendar, Mrs. Jones made a statement. "Well sirr", she said, "look you, it's Thurrsday today, isn't it? Well, then, our honour, sirr, I will pay you five pounds coming Monday and the other fifteen pounds Monday week. Will that do?" The magistrate agreed that such an arrangement would suit the court, provided she gave an assurance as to how she could positively pay up. Unabashed, with a smile as broad as Cardigan Bay, Mrs. Jones declared: "Oh, judge anwyl bach, sirr! Tha's as easy as easy, look you. Cos the university football match is played here on Saturday coming, and the Temperance Conference is here all next week." (Miles 1926: 9)

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An English lawyer who used to take her holidays in Cardiganshire was sitting in a Welsh pub one Sunday, drinking with the landlady when an English tourist came in through the front door and demanded a drink. "I'm sorry, sir, we are closed on Sundays," said the lady behind the bar as she continued to pull pints for her Welsh customers. After the visitor had left she turned to her English guest and said: "Now if he had come round the back like a Christian, I'd have been willing to serve him." (English 1980s but refers to 1966)

The gradual secularization of life both in Scotland and Wales and in the countries where ethnic jokes about the Scots and Welsh are told have rendered jokes about the clashes between the drinkers and the clergy somewhat oldfashioned, though similar or parallel basic themes still underpin many later ethnic jokes about the Welsh and the Scots: "Hey, Jimmy, ish thish Alcoholics Annonymush?" "It is indeed. D o you wish to join?" "Naw — tae resign!" (Hodes 1978: 92)

Another facet of the contradiction between the Scots' love of drink and their reputation as a canny group has, however, remained ever popular — the Scots alleged unwillingness to pay for their own drinks or for other people's, and the cunning measures they take to obtain free or cheap drinks, to avoid buying drinks for others and to guard their own stock of alcohol in a world of potential free-loaders. Scotch means tight but Scottish means tighter. Jokes about the canny attitude of the Scots towards alcohol possess an extra twist relative to other jokes about these alleged Scottish traits, derived from the fact that alcohol is in many western societies a drug associated with conviviality and hospitality and is exchanged as a gift within a group or between households. As such it differs from say, shoes, dishwashers, shirts, tranquillizers or orange-juice which will be bought by individuals or families for their own particular use and enjoyment. Alcohol is a shared good and people are not supposed to make the same rational individual calculations about the costs and benefits of alcohol consumed in a group context that they apply to other purchases and forms of enjoyment. The exchange of alcohol within a group based on the purchasing of rounds of drinks, with each man having his "shout" in turn, holds the group together and gives it an identity. For the drinkers, their willingness to relax the usual individualistic rules concerning consumption and payment is an indication of the importance they attach to their membership of the group and a means of asserting their temporary social equality within it (Sargent 1979). The canny behaviour of the alcohol

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craving comic Scotsman of the jokes breaks the rule that alcohol is exchanged and is not made the subject of strict calculation. Many of these jokes belong to the twentieth-century phase of conventionalized ethnic jokes about the Scots. The joke-tellers have seen the comic possibilities of combining the comic convention that the Scots are canny with the equally well-known convention that the Scots like whisky to produce a joke focussed on the conflict between thirst and thrift that exploits both at once. Englishman: "What is the difference between a Scotsman and a coco-nut?" Scotsman: "I don't know". Englishman: "You can get a drink out of a coconut" [see also Frost 1933: 22]. Scotsman: "Ha, ha, ha. Very funny. Now would you like something to drink?" Englishman: "That's very kind of you. Yes I would." Scotsman: "Go and find yourself a coco-nut." (British 1970s) How much whisky can a Scotsman drink? Any given quantity. (Copeland and Copeland 1939: 714) A few of Sandy's pals conspired together to force him to stand a drink. There were four of them, so they agreed to stand drinks all round in succession, leaving Sandy to do the same, but just as the fourth round was being drunk, the steward entered the room. "Is Sandy Macpherson here?" he enquired. "That's me," said Sandy. "Yer wife's wantin' ye." "That's feenished it, boys," said Sandy. "We've had a grand time — guid nicht." (Ferguson 1933: 180) Pat was taken up for being drunk. "Who gave you the whisky, Pat?" "Please sir, it was a Scotsman who gave me this big drink." "You are fined fifty dollars for perjury!" said the Judge. (Ferguson 1933: 130; also in Copeland and Copeland 1939: 723) McTavish was so tired of hearing jokes about mean Scots in a New York saloon that he stood drinks all round. He took a heart attack when he learned they had imagined he was an Irishman. (Hodes 1978: 75) Four men in a crowded bar were standing rounds of drinks. The Aberdonian's turn came five minutes before closing time. He want up to the crowded bar and shouted to the barman: "Four pints of beer, you ugly bastard." (HHGBA. Collected 1968)

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Jokes, alcohol and ethnicity: A summary 1. Jokes about the consumption of alcohol are extremely common in all western industrial societies, for these societies share a common ambivalent attitude to alcohol, which is both an important source of pleasure as a recreational drug and the cause of many severe social problems. Jokes about alcohol mock both the excess that leads to drunkenness and the opposite "excess" of an unstable and intolerant teetotalism. The jokes are often pinned on ethnic groups whose alcohol problems are more severe than those of the joke-tellers but the members of the groups who are the butt of the jokes are (i) even more ambivalent about alcohol and therefore more prone to joke about it themselves, (ii) aware of the peculiar role alcohol plays in their own society and of the greater probability (relative to neighbouring societies) of their members departing from moderation. Often such departures are regarded as a part of their own national identity and since such behaviour is not clearly and universally abhorred (in the way that, say, murder, blackmail, or cruelty are), the members of groups that are the butts of the jokes will be happy to tell jokes aboout their own group that interpret our shared moral uncertainty and ambivalence about alcohol in a way that is almost boastful. 2. Ethnic jokes about excessive drinking have been pinned on groups such as the Irish, the Scots, the Finns and the Australians who get publicly and visibly drunk more often or more spectacularly than their neighbours. 3. Ethnic jokes about excessive drinking often reveal the importance of the all-male drinking group and the conflicts between this group and the wives and families of its members. These drinking groups have proved extremely strong in societies where men are, or have been, isolated (Finland, Australia) or insulated (Ireland) from women. 4. Groups who drink moderately (Jews, Chinese, Italian-Americans) are rarely the subject of jokes about alcohol. Ethnic jokes about peoples from societies which have in the past had strong temperance movements linked to the Protestant Churches (Scotland, Wales, parts of the United States) tend to focus on the cultural clash between hard-drinkers and teetotallers. The latter are depicted as bigoted, likely to lapse or even as secret drinkers. In Protestant societies the tippling minister is a comic figure comparable to the unchaste Roman Catholic priest of Central Europe or Italy.

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5. The drinking patterns of a group also often incorporate other comic attributes conventionally ascribed to that group, such as stupidity or canniness to provide highly distinctive ethnic jokes often told about that group alone.

Concluding thoughts about alcohol Jokes about alcohol are common in western societies because it is both the main accepted legal euphoriant drug of these societies and a source of problems because it undermines the qualities upon which the modern world of work (and indeed urban life generally) depends. As such it both symbolizes and accentuates the clash that exists in modern societies between the calculad ve values of work, production and achievement and the opposed hedonistic values of consumption, leisure and conviviality. The links, however, are not always simple and straightforward, as can be seen from a detailed study of the jokes about the Scots and the Irish which incorporate other comic traits conventionally attributed to these peoples. Alcohol as a drug is both prized and feared and attitudes towards it are uncertain and ambivalent, a situation which provides ample material for jokes. Jokes about alcohol including ethnic jokes mock the excess that leads to drunkenness and the opposite "excess" of an unstable and intolerant teetotalism. The essentially ambiguous nature of jokes in general including jokes about alcohol, though, means that such jokes can be used to celebrate as well as to criticize alcoholic excess and ethnic identities linked to such excess. In consequence those who take a moral stand against alcohol are often uneasy, lest what they see as disgusting behaviour be regarded as merely amusing, a venal fault to be indulged in and laughed away (Ford 1959). The ethnic jokes about alcohol unlike, say, those that ascribe dirtiness to a particular ethnic group (Davies 1990) are very much rooted in direct observation of the real world. Many of the members of the ethnic groups parodied in the jokes really do or did in the past tend to regard alcohol, and to behave in relation to alcohol, in the ways described in the jokes. The jokes are often ludicrous exaggerations but they are based on social realities that are or were highly visible to the casual observer and which have been confirmed by careful studies of alcohol and ethnicity carried out by social scientists. There may well exist a number of serious stereotypes about ethnic styles of drinking that correspond to the ethnic scripts of the jokes but it is unnecessary to invoke these to explain the jokes. It would also be irrelevant to do so, since jokes are

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an end in themselves, whereas serious stereotypes are only of interest if they are used as a guide to purposeful action. The confusion of comic script (Raskin 1985: 180) and serious stereotype has long bedevilled the study of ethnic humour and it makes more sense to explain them separately. It may well be that in some cases a corresponding serious stereotype exists and is employed in ways that, though rational, are unfair to particular individuals, as in the past when Cumberland employers in Carlisle refused to engage Scotsmen because of their reputation for heavy drinking. However, this does not directly concern the humour scholar, for comic ethnic scripts can exist in the absence of serious stereotypes and vice versa. Should the analyses of ethnic scripts presented here also explain the nature and existence of particular stereotypes that is merely an incidental bonus and in general the link between the two phenomena remains problematic.

Chapter 8 "Nasty" legends, "sick" humour and ethnic jokes about stupidity

Nasty modern legends, sick humour and ethnic jokes have many themes in common but two in particular stand out, namely the consumption of objectionable foods and disasters involving modern technology.

Objectionable food Western societies with a Christian tradition lack a comprehensive set of food taboos (see Acts 10: 9-16; 11: 1-11; 1st Corinthians 10: 25-26). No system may be discerned in, and little significance attached to, the odd assortment of foods which Westerners view as disgusting and inedible, or at least uneatable and undrinkable, such as fried wood-lice, rat sandwiches, genuine hedgehogflavoured crisps, bovine urine, bear's paw, snake soup, curried spiders and a variety of harmless synthetic food additives used as flavouring, colouring or preservatives and known only as a mysterious magical cipher of letters and numbers. The only coherent pattern that can be found is that relating to the taboo against cannibalism and its curious extension to cover pet animals. The most common humorous references to cannibalism occur in cartoons, where one familiar theme is the missionary or explorer in a cooking pot surrounded by fat dark strangers in grass skirts and with bones through their noses. However, there are also many corresponding ethnic jokes' in circulation, which are usually pinned on distant exotic peoples from Africa or the islands of the Pacific: President Nyerere of Tanzania was flying to the United Nations on a mumbojumbo jet. He scanned the lunch menu and said "I don't like any of this. Bring me the passenger list." (British 1980s; see also Abrahams 1961: 246) Question: What is the African counterpart of a vegetarian? Answer: A humanitarian. (American 1980s)

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There's a great export trade from Golder's Green [Crematorium], They send ashes out to the Congo as instant people. You just add water. (Newall 1985: 143) Foreign news, Uganda. At the state luncheon to welcome the German delegation today, General Amin ate a hamburger, two frankfurters and a young man from Heidelburg. (Vincent 1977: 28) In nasty urban legends, by contrast, the cannibalism is accidental and unwitting and involves, not distant and exotic people, but local individuals similar to the teller and his or her audience, often the familiar but anonymous "friend of a friend". The persons taking part in the contemporary legendary tale are deceived, because the food of human origin that they consume is formless and thus unrecognizable — the usual versions being cremation ashes and person-sausage. 2 "A mix up in the mail" is a characteristic example: Grandmother had gone out to spend Christmas with her cousins who lived in the Far East. She had not seen them for several years and was very excited about the trip. They had always been very kind to her and each Christmas used to send a present of ajar of special spices to go in the Christmas cake her daughter made. About two weeks before Christmas, a small airmail parcel arrived from the Far East. It had been posted on 1 December and contained what appeared to be the special spices for the Christmas cake. There was no note with it nor, surprisingly, any Christmas card. Not wanting to delay any longer, the daughter got on with the baking and produced a magnificent cake for the Christmas festivities. It was the day after Boxing Day that a letter arrived from the cousins in the Far East. Also dated I December, it expressed how sorry they were to have to break the news of grandmother's death — the excitement had been too much for her. They also wrote that, because of all the arrangements that had had to be made for the cremation, they would not have time to send over the special spices for the cake this year. However, they had airmailed grandmother's ashes home and they should arrive shortly. (Smith 1984: 106) Tales such as this are often told as if true (indeed the narrator and/or audience may believe them to be true and it is just possible that they are rooted in an actual incident, though this cannot usually be demonstrated). They are very similar to sick jokes that everyone regards as amusing fiction. A skilled joketeller who wanted to use the legend, "A mix up in the mail" as a sick joke

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would alter it very little, as it already has the basic structure and ingredients of a joke. He would begin telling the story poker-faced, as if describing a real event that had happened to a "friend of a friend", and would maintain the listeners' attention by skillfully adding plausible, though this time deliberately mendacious, details. Once the audience was in a suitable state of belief, or at least suspended disbelief, then it would be time for him suddenly to unleash the punch-line that revealed the comic shock-horror information that "people just like us" unwittingly ate their own grandma! At thi's point, the joke-teller could relax his serious visage in delight at the mixture of consternation and hilarity produced in the listeners. It is easy to see why this "charming story of family life has circulated, both in the form of a joke and a legend for many years" (Smith 1986: 106). The fact that it has circulated in both forms indicates that jokes and legends are overlapping sets. The area of overlap contains a large number of items that are recounted mainly in order to amuse. Whether we class a particular telling of a tale as a joke or as a legend presumably depends on the rather arbitrary and subjective question of what is in the mind of the raconteur at the time and how his audience perceive and classify his account. If he is knowingly purveying an amusing piece of fiction, albeit one that is initially plausible and which connects with the listeners' own experience and values, then it is a joke. Presumably legends begin at the point where there is some small degree of real belief in the truth of the entire narrative, including the final shocking and comic denouement. Even so, it is difficult to draw a clear line between jokes and amusing legends, and often quite impossible to do so on the basis simply of a particular written or recorded text. A related group of ethnic jokes and nasty legends/jokes involves the eating of animals such as dogs, cats or horses that are kept as household pets or as working partners. Such animals are in some respects treated almost like human beings. They are given individual, although on the whole appropriately canine, feline or equine, names such as Rover, Rags, Cymro, Tiddles, Felix, Paisley, Chitty-Whiskers, Hervey, Rosinante, Silver Blaze, which often reflect their owner's view that they are valued individuals and not mere replaceable surrogates. Cat owners have been known to pay a $ 1000 vet's bill or a hefty feline medical insurance premium for a used cat whose historic cost, replacement cost, resale and scrap value were all well under $5 and may even have been negative. Because of their peculiar position in the homes and affections of human beings, to eat pets would be, in the eyes of "petishists" at least, almost a minor form of cannibalism. Perhaps in consequence, there are

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many ethnic jokes about distant peoples (usually from the Orient such as Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese but also Australian aborigines, who are said to relish a meal of "putjikata" (Greenway 1976)) alleged to be pet-eaters. 3 Q.: What do you call a Vietnamese with a dog? Α.: A vegetarian. Q.: What do you call a Vietnamese with two dogs ? Α.: A rancher. (American 1980s) Provincial tourist (to kellner who offers him sausages): "I say old feller, any 'osses died about 'ere lately! Chevals morts, you know!" (Mr. Punch on the Continong 1908: 111) Yakob Smirnoff: "After I left Russia for the United States I went shopping for food in a Los Angeles super-market. There were lots of tins of dog food. There were none in Russia. There dogs are food. In America there is such variety of dogs — poodles, chihuahuas, pekinese — but they all taste the same." (British Television, 22nd August 1984) These ethnic jokes about distant foreigners eating pets occur alongside jokes and nasty legends about pet-loving peoples eating cats or dogs (often their very own), either unknowingly in a restaurant run by members of an ethnic group with a different pattern of squeamishness, or from sheer hunger in wartime: One evening several friends went out to a local Chinese restaurant for a celebratory meal. Half way through the meal one of the party suddenly started to cough and choke. Thoroughly alarmed they rushed her to hospital and she had to undergo minor surgery to remove a small bone stuck in her throat. The surgeon who removed the bone was somewhat perplexed as he did not recognize the type of bone found. He therefore sent it off for analysis. The report came back saying that it was a rat bone. The public health department immediately visited the restaurant to inspect the kitchens and in the fridge they found numerous tins of cat food, half an Alsatian dog and several rats all waiting to be served up. (Smith 1984: 54) During the siege of Paris in the Franco-German war when everybody was starving, one aristocratic family had their pet dog served for dinner. The master of the house, when the meal was ended, surveyed the platter through teardimmed eyes and spoke sadly: "How Fido would have enjoyed those bones." (Jokes for All Occasions 1922: 50, see alsol95) 4

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Both of these tales can be treated as either joke or legend, depending on the view taken of them by the tellers. Either way, they lack practical importance, for only very peculiar and eccentric individuals are going to act on the information they contain — for example, by refusing to eat in all restaurants run by members of ethnic minorities who feature in such stories. The crucial point is not whether the members of the community in which the tale circulates are or are not prejudiced against any of the minorities who run restaurants, but that legends of this type are not going to trigger off a pogrom against the alien restauranteurs: the themes that they embody do not occupy a central or important position in the tellers' dominant patterns of thought and action. These tales are for amusement only, and the listeners can afford to laugh at them because they play with, rather than seriously embody, the breaking of food conventions. The contrast to this occurs in communities where the holy or defiling qualities of an animal — with all the implications this has for what may or may not be eaten — are central to the definition of a religious or ethnic identity. When the author lived in Bombay, a cafe where he occasionally took his meals displayed a large and prominent notice in the front window saying "No beef served here". One of the reasons for the owners placing it there was to avoid having his café wrecked by irate and pious Hindus in the course of a communal disturbance. In Gujarat, the rumour (which may or may not have been true) that the Muslims had chosen to kill a cow (rather than, say, a goat or a sheep) as part of the celebration of their 'Id festival has been known to trigger a violent conflict between the Hindu and Muslim religious communities, in which a large number of people have lost their lives. The combination of the proximity of the two groups, and the intense moral outrage caused if the members of one group should flout the food taboos or related sensibilities of the other, means that the telling of a "nasty legend" on this theme is likely to be inflammatory rather than amusing. The nearest parallel in Europe would be the murderous anti-Semitic pogroms set off by mendacious and often malicious accounts of Jews carrying out the ritual murder of a Christian child or stealing, profaning and mutilating the Host. I stress these extreme cases in order to indicate the relatively trivial practical implications of the individual legends and jokes that I have quoted. In consequence, it is difficult to see why anyone should find it necessary to deny the existence of cannibalism or the possibility that those in charge of "ethnic" restaurants should have served meals containing animals regarded as unsuitable for food by the indigenous population. Cannibalism, though rare, is well documented and ethnic minority restauranteurs have indeed sometimes been

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convicted of serving various items of food which are deemed "unfit for consumption" (Daily Mail 3 Sept 1988: 3). Neither of these phenomena constitutes, or is seen as constituting, any real threat to those who enjoy jokes and legends about them, and there is no reason to suppose that such tales cause, or in any significant sense express, hostility towards the various ethnic groups who figure in them. The real significance of these stories lies in what they reveal of the joke-tellers' view of themselves and what they see as essentially alien patterns of eating (which have an especially strong potential to shock when foisted on people like themselves).

Disasters involving modern technology Legends and jokes that deal with modern technology going wrong need to be approached with a similar degree of caution. The prevalence and popularity of disaster jokes, particularly among young people, is neither evidence of their extreme callousness nor of the use of jokes as cartharsis, i.e. as a means of coming to terms with the pain of tragedy. There is no independent supporting evidence for either of these views. Neither is there any justification for reducing these forms of humorous communication to serious ones, or for assuming that they can be assimilated to patterns of serious behaviour — such as grief, mourning and recovery — that are also associated with sudden loss or tragedy. Such jokes are best seen as related to the reporting of these events in the mass media rather than directly to the events themselves (see Oring 1987). Television in particular, but also radio and the press, have created a possibility that did not exist in the past. Millions of people are able to see or hear a disaster (often as it occurs) from a safe distance and in the tranquility of their own homes. They are exhorted by reporters and commentators to respond to a tragedy in the same way as the eye-witnesses, victims and their families themselves do. Also, as Elliott Oring (1987) has shrewdly pointed out, the insistent demands for shared sympathy and sorrow, and the harrowing pictures or accounts of the disaster, are incongruously sandwiched between trivial, banal and light-hearted items such as advertisements, quiz-shows, mundane soap operas, page three trips down mammary lane, sport and gossip. Incongruity of this type is the very stuff of which humour is made, as shown by the old joke about the Scotsman sending a telegram to his brother that read: "Wife killed in motor accident. Come at once." The clerk looked at the form and said, "You can have another four words for the same money."

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The Scotsman thought for a moment and added, "Rangers two, Celtic one." It is not surprising, then, that media disasters produce sick jokes, usually of a question and answer kind: Q.: Where do Piper Alpha oil-rig workers take their holidays? Α.: Burnham on sea. (British 1980s) Q.: What is the weather forecast for Chernobyl? Α.: 8000 degrees and cloudy. (American 1980s) Q.: What's black and goes to school? Α.: A coal-tip. (British 1960s) Q.: Have you heard that they are going to rename King's Cross underground station? Α.: They're going to call it Black Friars. (British 1980s) Q.: What's worse than glass in baby food? Α.: Astronauts in tuna. (Oring 1987) Q: Why is the Herald of Free Enterprise like sex? A: Roll on, roll off and it's full of dead seamen. (British 1980s)

The case of sick jokes that grow out of the paradox of real disasters viewed from a safe and uninvolved distance is paralleled by that of nasty legends (imaginary, though plausible, disasters that are alleged to have overtaken the "friend of a friend"). Such legends are almost part of that chain of events experienced by individuals known personally to us, which make up the ordinary everyday world. A reliance on such people as regular and trustworthy sources of information, combined with an ignorance of how and why sophisticated modern machines and artifacts work, gives the legends their plausibility. Many of the tales collected by Paul Smith come in this category and he notes that "our dependence on technology and its consequent dangers are encapsulated in tales such as 'The Auto-pilot' and 'Dangers of the microwave oven'" (1984: 10). I once heard of an elderly lady who used to breed pedigree cats and exhibit them at shows. She specialised in Persian cats and their long hair always made it a difficult task to clean and groom them for showing. In order to cut down the effort involved, the old lady had evolved the practice of first washing the

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cat, towelling it dry and then, finally, giving it a very brief warming in her electric oven. One Christmas her cooker developed a fault and so her son, by way of a Christmas present, bought her a brand new microwave oven. On the day of the next cat show, not understanding the basic difference in the technology between an ordinary electric cooker and a microwave oven, the old lady industriously washed her prize-winning Persian cat and popped it into the oven for a few seconds. There really was no miaow, nor any noise at all from the cat, for the poor creature exploded the instant the oven was switched on. (Smith 1984: 65; Brunvand 1981: 62) The flight ran several times a week taking holiday-makers to various resorts in the Mediterranean. On each flight, to reassure the passengers all was well, the captain would put the jet on to auto-pilot and he and all the crew would come aft into the cabin to greet the passengers. Unfortunately, on this particular flight the security door between the cabin and the flight deck jammed and left the captain and crew stuck in the cabin. From that moment, in spite of their efforts to open the door, the fate of the passengers and crew was sealed. (Smith 1984: 63)

When hearing or reading the latter tale, it always puzzles me how anyone would ever know what had happened, given that the radio microphone is in the cockpit, that any written account is unlikely to survive the crash and that the flight recorder will offer no explanations of the cause of the mysterious accident. It is not that I wish to attack a good tale with pedantic objections, but simply that I cannot understand why it is ever seen as an even faintly plausible legend, rather than an amusingly shocking acknowledged fiction. Paul Smith (1984: 63) comments on it that: this well-known tale echoes the joke regarding the fully automatic computercontrolled pilotless plane which, when in flight, welcomes the passengers on board and assures them nothing can possibly go wrong ... go wrong ... go wrong ...

Once again, there is shown to be an overlap between, on the one hand "nasty legends", which are half-believed, are told about people like the tellers themselves, have a narrative structure and are shocking and, on the other hand, "jokes", which are known to be inventions, often ascribed to members of other classes, ethnic groups and nations and have a narrative or a riddle-like structure: both are built around a sudden switch between two opposed scripts and are comic, at least in intention. This should not surprise us, for some

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modern legends are highly polished inventions intended to amuse as well as shock, and some jokes are true anecdotes that have been merely reshaped and restyled in order to maximize their comic effect, an effect that may well rely on a sudden revelation that is funny because it shocks, as well as surprises, the audience. Ethnic jokes often depict the members of another (but usually familiar and neighbouring) group as causing a disaster through their stupid ignorance of the nature of technical devices. 5 They are often set in submarines (Steeman 1977: 95), planes or space-rockets; that is, artificial capsules in which human beings can only survive if they obey a new set of technically determined rules that are not part of the traditional taken-for-granted world of walking, jumping and swimming. The foolish ethnic ignoramus of the joke naturally gets it wrong: Q: Why are people from Aarhus not allowed to become sailors in submarines? A: Because they like to sleep with the windows open. (Yearhouse 1979) Q: How can you tell a Belgian in a submarine? A: He's the one with a parachute on his back. (Isnard 1979: 109) A qualified Belgian pilot was explaining to a new trainee how to fly the plane at night: "You see that red light on the left wing?" "Yes." "You see that green light on the right wing?" "Well night flying is very easy. You just fly between the two lights." (Van der Boute and Hen Train 1978: 19) A Sop astronaut went to Russia for training. He came back with very red hands. When asked why, he said, "the Russian pilot kept slapping my hand and saying, 'Don't touch that! Don't touch that!'" (Bulgarian 1980s) Q: How do you tell an Aer Lingus Pilot? A: By the three gold rings on his wellies. (British 1970s)

These ethnic jokes which export stupidity to another group, like the nasty legends and the sick jokes cited earlier are often seen as expressing, as Holbek states: Our own feeling of inadequacy in coping with modern life: technology, social organization, etc .... [such jokes] express a widespread but not admissible

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anxiety caused by the rapid development of our society. The anxiety is temporarily relieved by making jokes about dupes too stupid to adapt to progress. (Holbek 1975: 33) It is doubtful whether such anxiety is either widespread (except in a rather m o r e superficial sense than Holbek implies) or inadmissible. Most people have other more immediate worries than technical change, though a minority find such anxieties sufficiently admissible to demonstrate in public against nuclear power stations, airports, chemicals believed to be carcinogens (Efron 1984) and synthetic food additives, even though such preservatives help to ward off cancer by acting as anti-oxidants and mopping up dangerous free radicals. These anxieties are not merely admissible but fashionable especially a m o n g dangerous free radicals. At another level, it is easy to show that many individuals can feel uneasy at the extent to which they are dependent on machines that they do not understand and on the competence of specialists the nature of whose expertise is beyond their comprehension. The disasters of the past, such as famine, plague and pestilence, though far greater, were in the main allied to what the insurance companies in their wisdom call "Acts of God". Today's well publicized disasters that end u p as jokes are often the result of human error in the construction or management of a complex machine or system. B o b Ward's (1982) collection of j o k e s about, and on-the-spot observations of, those involved in the pioneering, and thus hazardous, journeys into space shows that those directly involved and at risk were very conscious of their dependence on the technical skills and knowledge of others — and that they j o k e d about it. W h e n Gus Grissom was asked what he thought would be the most critical part of the Apollo space mission, he replied jokingly, yet not altogether jokingly, "the part between lift off and splash d o w n " (Ward 1982: 141). In a similar vein, John Glenn commented, "I looked around m e and suddenly realized everything had been built by the lowest bidder" (Helitzer 1987: 31). Much of the joking by the astronauts and the engineers alike took on an ethnic form, as in the j o k e s about a fictitious, pusillanimous Puerto Rican astronaut called Jose Jimenez, which were said by the real astronauts to relieve pre-launch jitters (Ward, 1982: 39-44). Other ethnic j o k e s were told about the German, and sometimes World War II origins, of many of the leading rocketry experts, including the man they termed the "pad fuehrer" (Ward, 1 9 8 2 : 2 2 , 7 2 , 9 1 ). The director of the National Space Administration's Marshall Centre, w h o was f r o m West Tennesee, would say of dubious or inadequate scientific data:

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That's like the East Tennesee [hill-billy country] method of weighing hogs. You place a log across a fence, put the pig on one end of the log, then pile rocks on the other end until the two loads balance. At that point you guess how much the rocks weigh. (Ward 1982: 82)

It is these observations of jokes told in a specific context that give substance to the otherwise speculative view that joking about technical disasters is linked to the unease which we are all at some time likely to feel about our dependence on new artifacts designed and constructed by teams of specialists, most of whose expertise is unfamiliar to us. Joking about potential disasters, however, is not quite such a new phenomenon as Holbek implies, for both the jokes and the apprehensions began with the steam-powered technology of the nineteenth century (though, admittedly, this may have arrived a little later in Denmark than elsewhere). In the early nineteenth century those who feared the physical, as well as economic, railway juggernaut declared that the human frame could not survive these new and "unnatural" speeds. Later, when trains were first introduced into Spain, peasants would trespass casually on to the track and be run down by the engine, to the anger of their families, who would blame the driver, because they could not understand that the momentum of a heavy, fast-moving train was such that it could not stop quickly enough to avoid a pedestrian. (Spencer 1969: 88). Today the steam engine and the railways are regarded as slow and comic ("British Snail", "Steam Radio") and small and nostalgic ("Ivor the Engine", "Little Snoring", "The Fat Controller"), but when first introduced they represented a more decisive technical and economic change than anything that has happened since (Russell 1988: 15, 24). In the 1840s the Rev. Sydney Smith became concerned with the risk of passengers being burned to death in a railway accident while locked in their carriages, and wrote a series of letters criticizing the directors of the Great Western Railway, which expressed a general concern rather than merely personal fear and anxiety (Bell 1980: 204-205). As a noted humorist, Sydney Smith could not resist illustrating serious arguments with comic images, and considered a scene in which: the directors gazed with satisfaction on a burnt train-load of captive passengers including a stewed Duke... two Bishops done in, their own Gravy ... Two Scotchmen dead, but raw, sulphuric acid perceptible. (Bell 1980: 205)

Elsewhere he declared that "A burnt bishop" might console himself that "his death will produce unspeakable benefit to the public. Even Sodor and Man

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will be better than nothing" (Bell 1980: 671). The mass-media, represented at that time by the press, thrived on the sale of accounts of accidents which mingled sympathy and ghoulishness (Spice and Spice 1987). It is not surprising then that there are many jokes about anxious travellers, unduly nervous about the prospect of an accident: (Railway) Bookstall Keeper: "Book, ma'am? Yes ma'am. Here's a popular work by an eminent surgeon, just published, 'Broken legs and how to mend them': or, would you like the last number of The Railway Operator?" (Mr. Punch's Railway Book 1908: 95) 6 Shrewd Clerk (with an eye to his percentage), "Take an accident insurance ticket, sir?" Passenger (nervously), "Wha' for?!" Clerk, "Well, sir nothing has gone wrong 'twixt this and London for the last fourteen months; and by the haverages, the next smash is hoverdue exactly six weeks and three days! !" Old gent forks out with alacrity. (Mr. Punch !y Railway Book 1908:45; Ferguson 1933:251) Nervous Party: "The train seems to be travelling at a fearful pace, ma'am." Elderly Female: "Yus ain't it? My Bill's a-drivin of the ingin, an' 'e can make 'er go when 'e's got a drop o drink in 'im!" (Mr. Punch's Railway Book 1908: 29; Ferguson 1933: 233)

These jokes (like legends about ghostly trains that rush towards a real express) once again play with fear and danger, with anxiety and aggression. The jokes do not express any of these qualities but simply use them as counters in a verbal game that is an end in itself, a form of paratelic amusement. Babies do not like being frightened or attacked, but they chuckle with delight at games of peek-a-boo or tickling, which they know are merely mock aggression and pretend frights. In this case at least, wisdom does come from the mouths of babes and sucklings. The same point is true in relation to ethnic jokes about railway accidents, in which disaster strikes allegedly slow-witted "dumb Svenskas" in Minnesota or "Paddies" in Scotland: ... the Swede farm-hand in Minnesota who on the witness stand was called upon by the attorney for the railroad to furnish details touching on the tragic death of a companion. "Aye tell you," he answered. "Me and Ole bane walkin' on railroad track.

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Train come by and Aye yump off track. By and by, when train is gone, Aye don't see Ole any more, so Aye walk on and pretty soon Aye see one of Ole's arms on one side of track and one of Ole's legs on other side of track and then pretty soon Aye see Ole's head but Ole's body is not there, so Aye stop and Aye say to myself, 'By Yupiter, something must a' happened to Ole!'" (Cobb 1923: 27, Lang [n.d.]: 48-49) 7 Up in Minnesota a railroad train killed a cow belonging to a Scandinavian homesteader. The tragedy, having been reported at headquarters, a claim-agent was sent to the spot to make a settlement of damages ... "Mr. Swanson," he said with a winning smile, "the company wants to be fair with you in this matter. We deeply regret that your cow has met her death on our tracks. But, on the other side Mr. Swanson, from our side there are certain things to be considered. In the first place, that cow had no business straying on our right of way and you, as her owner, should not have permitted her to do so. Moreover, it is possible that her presence there might have caused a derailment of the locomotive which struck her and a serious wreck perhaps involving loss of human life. Now, such being the case, and it being conceded that the cow was, in effect, a trespasser on our property, what do you think, as man to man, would be a fair basis of settlement as between you and the railroad company?" For a space Mr. Swanson pondered on the argument. Then, speaking slowly and weighing his words, he delivered himself of an ultimatum: "I bane poor Swede farmer," he said. "I shall give you two dollars." (Cobb 1923: 104-105; Copeland and Copeland 1939: 757) T h e nursery r h y m e "Paddy on the R a i l w a y " is essentially similar: Paddy on the railway picking up stones. Along came a railway train and broke Paddy's bones. "Hey," said Paddy, "that's not fair." "Well," said the driver, "you shouldn't've been there." (British traditional; see also Montgomerie and Montgomerie 1948: 12) T h e idea that those w h o find such tales and r h y m e s amusing would be overj o y e d at the sight of a real Ole or Paddy being m o w n d o w n by the train is absurd. T h e j o k e s simply draw on, and c o m b i n e , t w o well-established genres of h u m o u r namely: playing with images of accident, death and disaster; and the stupidity (and corresponding lack of technical and commercial a c u m e n ) of a familiar neighbour or ethnic minority. It is difficult to establish detailed comparisons between the j o k e s and legends of the railway era and those of today because we lack a representative

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recorded sample of the material in oral circulation in the past. However, the general similarities between them show that the derivation of amusement from mock horror-tales about technical disasters and from the anxieties the latest forms of technical innovation produce is only modern in the sense that it could only occur after the industrial revolution.

Conclusions In the legends, sick jokes and ethnic jokes, both about food and about disasters, certain patterns seem to be discernible — namely: 1. They all play with things that shock — cannibalism, "peticide" (especially "canicide" and "felicide"), aggression, the threat or the reality of death and destruction. However, they are not usually tendentious: that is, they do not have a purposed tendency. On the contrary, they are a pleasing switch to a paratelic mode of behaviour that is an end in itself and which constitutes a welcome relief from the telic tedium of much of our everyday existence in which all our activities are but a means to some other serious end. 2. Legends are tales whose capacity to shock depends on the casual way they drop a horrid surprise into the everyday world of the audience. They are told about people who resemble those who tell and listen to the story, and their plausibility depends on yet another such person — the "friend of a friend". 3. Outsiders are brought in to provide a plausible explanation for a bizarre episode in a legend, or alternatively as the key to a joke whose punch-line is going to switch a plausible narrative into palpable farce. The mechanism that does this is a conventional comic script in which qualities that the joke-teller and audience would reject as foolish (for example, stupidity) or repellent (for example, cannibalism) are pinned in a humorous way either upon neighbours (who are made to look like a foolish version of the joke-tellers themselves) or upon a distant people (who can be safely portrayed as behaving in a peculiar and shocking manner).

Chapter 9 Making fun of work: Humour as sociology in the humorous writings of H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells' early comedies such as Kipps, The History of Mr Polly, and Bealby1 make fun of work as Wells had known it. It is a measure of his genius that he was able to transmute the underlying bitterness of his own experience into his skilled comic accounts of Kipps and Mr. Polly working as draper's assistants, of the little shopkeeper of Fishbourne, and of Bealby's rebellion against domestic service. In Wells' comedies, the rationalizing forces of the market place, of competition, of organization — which have marked the service sector of retailing as much as any other branch of a modern economy — are mocked and ridiculed for having shaped the unsatisfactory working lives of Kipps, Mr. Polly, and their colleagues. Indeed, The History of Mr Polly is Wells' comic masterpiece, and the adventures of Mr. Polly debunk work as effectively as those of The Good Soldier Svejk (Hasek 1974) debunk warfare. The success of Wells' comedies of work raises two sets of questions. First, how does he depict work, and in particular work as experienced by a particular sector of the lower-middle class in the early years of the twentieth century, and how does he set about arousing the insightful laughter of his readers, not just at individuals, but at an entire social process? Second, how can Wells' levity be related to that of later literary mockers of and scoffers at the pieties of work, and how can the underlying gravity of Wells' comedy be linked to the subsequent evolution of the sociology of work? In all complex industrial societies, the work of individuals is coordinated and constrained by the forces of the market-place, the. interplay of supply and demand, and the edicts, instructions, and regulations of bureaucratic organizations. These are the essential mechanisms of any rational large economic system — rational in the narrow sense of economizing, of endlessly squeezing more out of less to produce greater economic efficiency (see Bell 1979: 10-11; Herzberg 1966: 1-4; Kumar 1978: 83-88,227-228). The culture of most modern societies is only partly in harmony with these processes, for these societies have cultures that also tend to stress the values of hedonism, individual self-expression, and self-realization and which lead individuals to experience the forces of rationalization as oppressive (see Bell 1979: 14-18, 53-54, 69-74). It is this cultural contradiction that lies at the heart of Wells'

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comedies of the life of the English lower-middle class in the early twentieth century. Wells wrote about what he knew, but his was a happy choice for it was the members of this class who were most likely to embody the contradiction between the values of work, thrift, and efficiency and those of individual self-realization and yet whose constrained and precarious economic circumstances left them with little room for manoeuvre. Wells' comic heroes are lower-middle class misfits whose vague and inchoate but nonetheless real wish for self-expression is in conflict both with the constraints of their economic position and with the limiting, economizing creed of work held up to them as an ideal even by other members of their own class. Their case is not that of peasants shrugging off the exhortations of a distant landlord, or of factory workers bitterly resentful of the Stakhanovite hectoring of the commissar, but of people uneasily aware of the discordant views within their own group and even within their own minds: He [Mr. Polly] could not grasp what was wrong with him. He made enormous efforts to diagnose his case. Was he really just a "lazy slacker" who ought to "buck up"?... He made some perfectly sincere efforts to "buck up" and "shove" ruthlessly. But that was infernal, impossible. He had to admit himself miserable with all the misery of a social misfit. (Wells 1928: 434)

Wells used the position of lower-middle-class misfits such as Kipps or Mr. Polly as a pivot for his comic attack on the organization and mythology of work of his time. It is a mark of Wells' comic talent that he could build comedy out of the twin threats of failure in a market economy — unemployment and bankruptcy — and use them to ridicule the myths of enterprise. Unemployment for Mr. Polly meant loneliness, frustration, anxiety, and humiliation as he sought to sell himself to a new employer. Yet even as Mr. Polly was squeezed by economic circumstances and tried to squeeze himself even further to fit those circumstances, a part of him, the marvellous phrasemaking Mr. Polly, remained free to subvert through humour the forces pressing in on him. In this way, Wells was able to show Mr. Polly in comic conflict not merely with other individuals but with the harsh impersonal constraints of his social and economic world. Given his powerless and precarious situation, Mr. Polly did not dare to assail his competitors and opponents directly to produce one of Wells' characteristically ludicrous fights between individuals that accelerate into farce and sometimes tragedy. Nonetheless, Mr. Polly's unspoken phrases entangled them as thoroughly as their economic pressures entangled Mr. Polly. In the back of his mind, competitors were labelled "Smart

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Juniors" full of "Smart Juniosity," devotees of the "Shoveacious Cult," and he termed his own outward demeanour "Obsequies Deference." Behind this servile pose, the irrepressible phrase-making part of Mr. Polly's brain sought to encapsulate the very employer he needed to impress: "Chubby chops? Chubby Charmer? . . . Chump chops! How about chump chops?" said the phrase-maker with an air of inspiration. (Wells 1928: 428)

Phrases were for Mr. Polly, as in a later generation hidden grimaces were for Kingsley Amis' (1953) "Lucky Jim" Dixon, a secret defence against and defiance of a world outside his control (see Parrinder 1970: 81). Wells was equally successful in his humorous undermining of an uneasily held business ethic in the revealing scene where the shopkeepers of Fishbourne are gathered after the fire started by Mr. Polly had demolished their premises. In theory their shops are a source of livelihood, ambition, identity, and opportunity; in practice an irksome road to inevitable bankruptcy: "It's cleared me out of a lot of old stock," said Mr. Wintershed; "that's one good thing." The remark was felt to be in rather questionable taste, and still more so was his next comment. "Rusper's a bit sick it didn't reach 'im. " Every one looked uncomfortable, and no one was willing to point the reason why Rusper should be a bit sick. (Wells 1928: 563)

The committing of arson by small shopkeepers seeking to defraud the insurance company has long been a subject of ambiguous ethnic jokes (Davies 1986), but Mr. Polly alone knew the truth about his own arson. The humour of the other traders' uneasiness lies in the gap between their wish to uphold the conventional view that they were victims snatched from their callings by fire and their own strong but private and unstable sense of having escaped from a commercial trap. These are the ways in which Wells gets the reader to laugh at the grim and cheerless face of failure in the rational world of the market-place. His comedies are built on the crushed fate of men who have been "whittled down" (Wells 1969: 70) and are now "crawling along a drain pipe until (they) die" (Wells 1928: 543), "going down a Vorterex" (Wells 1928: 493), caught in "the hard old economic world, that enacts work, that limits range, that discourages phrasing and dispels laughter" (Wells 1928: 493).

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It is perhaps not surprising in the circumstances that many of Wells' comic assaults are directed against small entrepreneurs who had succeeded, or those keen white-collar workers w h o had allowed the copper of the currency to penetrate their souls. Perhaps Wells' best attack on the reduction of work to a "system" is the portrait of that muddled exponent of a kind of proto-Taylorism, Kipps' employer Mr. Shalford. As a satire on the successful, rationalizing entrepreneur, it is something of a cheat, for there are more of the slogans than the substance of efficiency about Mr. Shalford. Mr. Shalford may have considered himself "the Napoleon of haberdashers" (Wells 1969: 71), but it was by m e a n s of fraudulent bankruptcy and marriage for money that he had risen in his chosen trade. Mr. Shalford's tour of his store with Kipps in tow and his exposition of his "system" governed by minute rules and heavy penalties, where assistants slave like machines (but only when watched) is a mockery of efficiency rather than the real thing, though this naturally adds to the hum o u r of Wells' observations. Mr. Shalford's comically oppressive system is easily shown by Wells to b e a mere mixture of petty cheeseparing and bunkum. This makes for endless f u n at his expense, but it does mean that Wells (here at least) evaded the problem of the residual but very real oppressiveness of a genuinely efficient system run by a more intelligent, numerate, rational and innovating Shalford. Were Shalford stripped of his vanity, pettiness, muddle and other all too human weaknesses, he would be a less comic but possibly an even more threatening figure, and Wells would have to distinguish much more clearly than he does between the pains of inefficiency and the pains of efficiency. Shalford and his system are a sham; increased entropy disguised as constructive momentum, "by order" mistaken for order: Once a year came stock-taking... Then the splendours of Mr. Shalford's being shone with oppressive brilliance. "System!" he would say, "System. Come! 'ussel" and issue sharp, confusing, contradictory orders very quickly. (Wells 1928: 53) S o m e of the successful small businessmen in Wells' comedies show a more genuine gift for rational economy and entrepreneurship than Mr. Shalford. O n e such figure is the aggressive Mr. Benshaw, the hoe-wielding small-holder in Bealby w h o plays such a m a j o r part in the Battle of Crayminster, another of Wells' ludicrous fights between and among, or at least involving the respectable. Mr. Benshaw is a stock comic figure w h o is placed there only so that Wells can satirize a social type, albeit with great success:

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155

Mr. Benshaw was considering very deeply the financial side of a furious black fence that he had at last decided should pen in the school children from further depredations. It should be of splintery tarred deal, and high, with well-pointed tops studded with sharp nails, and he believed that by making the path only two feet wide, a real saving of ground for cultivation might be made and a very considerable discomfort for the public arranged, to compensate for his initial expense. The thought of a narrow lane which would in winter be characterized by an excessive sliminess and from which there would be no lateral escape was pleasing to a mind by no means absolutely restricted to considerations of pounds, shillings and pence. In his hand after his custom he carried a hoe, on the handle of which feet were marked so that it was available not only for destroying the casual weed but also for purposes of measurement. (Wells 1928: 818-819) M u c h of W e l l s ' c o m i c portrait of Mr. B e n s h a w c o n s i s t s m e r e l y of the standard e s t a b l i s h e d ingredients of old satires of hard j o y l e s s t r a d e s m e n in the g r i p of t h e P r o t e s t a n t ethic a n d its utilitarian s u c c e s s o r s . It is the stuff of w h i c h ethnic j o k e s about canny, calculating Scotsmen, Gabrovonians, R e g i o m o n t a n o s o r N e w E n g l a n d Y a n k e e s are m a d e (see D a v i e s 1982, 1987a, 1988, 1990). N o n e t h e l e s s W e l l s m o v e s w i t h skill b e t w e e n B e n s h a w ' s real e c o n o m i c a c h i e v e m e n t s , his j o y l e s s personal existence, and his a g g r e s s i v e a n g e r against t h o s e w h o i m p i n g e on his d o m a i n o r the literal f r u i t s of his labour. B e n s h a w is a b o v e all a m e a s u r i n g , calculating, e c o n o m i z i n g m a n , w h o s e h o e is a g a u g e as well as a tool and a w e a p o n , and w h o s e ideal r e v e n g e is to c r a m p his unruly n e i g h b o u r s into a n a r r o w path of "considerable d i s c o m f o r t " f r o m which " t h e r e w o u l d be n o lateral e s c a p e " . B e n s h a w ' s ideal of a c o m p l e t e l y f e n c e d in c o u n t r y s i d e is, of course, the antithesis of Mr. P o l l y ' s r e s e n t m e n t of a w o r l d w h e r e all r o a d s s e e m to b e " b o r d e r e d by i n f l e x i b l e palings o r iron f e n c e s o r severely d i s c i p l i n e d h e d g e s " (Wells 1928: 4 6 1 ) . T h e i d e a that a strong c o m m i t m e n t to the c a l c u l a t i v e rationality of w o r k d r i v e s out t h e c a p a c i t y f o r the c a r e l e s s e n j o y m e n t e v e n of leisure hours is o n e of W e l l s ' f a v o u r i t e t h e m e s . In Mr Polly e v e n the elderly g o l f e r s of W i m b l e d o n " s m i t e h u n t e d little w h i t e balls with the utmost bitterness and dexterity" (Wells 1 9 2 8 : 4 6 1 ). It is this notion, too, that underlies Wells' use of the well-established c o m i c national script of eager, earnest, hustling A m e r i c a n tourists in E u r o p e , a l w a y s p u r s u i n g h a p p i n e s s but n e v e r quite c a t c h i n g u p with it. W h e n M r . Polly w o r k e d in C a n t e r b u r y , h e w a s suitably i m p r e s s e d by the A m e r i c a n tourists' d e t e r m i n e d , methodical, hurried attempt to " d o " C h a u c e r and M a r l o w e in an a f t e r n o o n , to g r a s p only the " B r o a d E l e m e n t a l C a n t e r b u r y P r a h p o s i t i o n " stripped of its " s i d e - s h o w s " and " s e c o n d - r a t e stunts." T h i s attempt to m e a s u r e

156 Making fun of work: H. G. Wells

leisure as if it were work, in a sort of Baedeker productivity drive, Mr. Polly termed "Cultured Rapacacity and Voracious Return to the Heritage" (see Wells 1928:431 ). One of Wells' best portraits of a member of the lower-middle-class held fast in a niche is that of Mr. Polly's cousin Harold Johnson, who to his regret was not a small businessman but a railway ticket clerk on a fixed salary. Johnson's life is ruled by grey, distasteful figures and by an obsessive hatred of waste that far exceeds his wish for profit. Like Mr. Benshaw, Johnson is a gardener with a real but also symbolic liking for narrow, waste-free paths. By contrast, Mr. Polly's most vivid, affectionate and human memory of his recently deceased father was of an angry and violent confrontation with just such a physical constriction, as his father struggled to lug a jammed sofa up a narrow winding staircase: A weakly wilful being, struggling to get obdurate things round impossible corners — in that symbol Mr. Polly could recognise himself and all the trouble of humanity. (Wells 1928: 438)

Johnson has no such passions, he has become a mere projection of the routine methodical world of the ideal typical petty bureaucrat, much as the thriving tradesman whom Johnson urges Mr. Polly to emulate — "Rymer, Pork Butcher and Provision Merchant, The World Famed Easewood Sausage" — has become a "distinguished comestible" (Wells 1928: 444). To use Max Weber's (1948: 228) phrase, the bureaucratic Johnson "is chained to his activity by his entire material and ideal existence ... a single cog in an ever-moving mechanism which prescribes to him an essentially fixed route of march." In these various ways Wells' comedies repeatedly caricature the rationalizing work ethic and its deleterious effects on successful and failed alike. However, the cage-like nature of work in Wells' comedies is also indicated by his portrayal of various antitheses to it. The simplest of these is escape, the brief escape of a holiday or temporary affluent unemployment; the flight of Bealby, the final release of Kipps through chance inheritance, and of Mr. Polly by successful arson and bungled suicide. Holidays are unwork, days free from routine and regularity, compulsion and the clock. Holidays shine out "like diamonds among pebbles" (Wells 1928: 407), in contrast to a life dominated by work that has "the hue of one perpetual dismal Monday morning" — "no adventure, no glory, no change, no freedom" (Wells 1928: 55) in which even food becomes "the rope of meal-times" (Wells 1928: 52). For Mr. Polly, "Holidays were his life, and the rest merely adulterated living" (Wells

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1928:459). The contrast is particularly well drawn by Wells at the point where Mr. Polly realizes that his father's insurance money cannot last forever and he is d o o m e d to return to the dismal life of a small draper. Mr. Polly knows that the time has c o m e to "get off his bike": The happy dream in which he had been living of long, warm days of open roads of limitless, unchecked hours, of infinite time to look about him, vanished like a thing enchanted. He was suddenly back in the hard old economic world that enacts work, that limits range, that discourages phrasing and dispels laughter. He saw Wood Street [where unemployed shop assistants sought work] and its fearful suspenses yawning beneath his feet. (Wells 1928: 493) For Mr. Polly and Kipps alike, there is a key turning point in their relationship with work — the big escape where they simply walk away from it. In The Wealth of Mr Waddy, Kipps on inheriting the fortune of the late Mr. Waddy sees the money above all as the end of work: The Emporium was over forever. Forever!.... HOLIDAYS! HOLIDAYS! All the year was to be one long Holiday now, the Sundays OF HIS FUTURE, THE EARLY CLOSING AFTERNOONS had spread out and touched one another. (Wells 1969: 114) Mr. Polly as a successful arsonist and failed suicide likewise learns that when a man has once broken through the paper walls of everyday circumstances, those insubstantial walls that hold so many of us securely prisoned from the cradle to the grave, he has made a discovery. If your world does not please you, you can change it. He could, for example, "clear out." It became a wonderful and alluring phrase to him — "Clear out!" (Wells 1928: 566-567) For the next month, Mr. Polly becomes a wanderer and, instead of working, leads a healthy o u t d o o r life, seeking out the interesting in a timeless, unbusinesslike way. However, it is significant that Wells does not allow his heroes to take to a permanent life of idle wandering and squandering. 2 Bealby eventually crawls back hungry, frightened and repentant to the tasks of a steward's room boy at Shonts; Kipps loses most of his first fortune and ends up running a small bookshop in Hythe; and Mr. Polly becomes odd-job man at the Potwell Inn. Only Bealby, though, is really defeated — both Kipps and Mr. Polly enjoy curiously unrealistic happy endings, back once again in the uncertain world

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of the small businessman. These unreal endings immediately pose the question: why should our heroes feel more content or fulfilled running a bookshop in Hythe or a pub in Potwell than a draper's shop in Fishbourne? The answer is partly an economic one. Neither Kipps' bookshop nor the Potwell Inn are under financial pressure. Kipps is sufficiently well off not to have to worry about the solvency of his bookshop thanks to his lucky investment in Chitterlow's distant theatrical speculations. Wells tells the reader even less about the finances of the Potwell Inn, but one may infer from the final note of fluvial security that closes Mr. Polly's history, as it does that of Kipps, that there is no fear of the Potwell Inn's ever-plumpening landlady losing her shape or her licence. Somehow the fictitious Potwell Inn is immune from the kind of memorable slide into debt and disaster that had overwhelmed Wells' own maternal grandfather, George Neal, who had kept the Fountains Inn in Chichester and the New Inn at Midhurst with an equal lack of success (West 1984: 161-162). For unexplained reasons, the Potwell Inn, like Kipps' bookshop in Hythe, is exempt from the harsh economic generalizations that Wells put in the mouth of a "gifted if unpleasant contemporary" about the slow inevitable slide into bankruptcy and ruin of the small retailer (Wells 1928: 524-526). Because Kipps' wealth frees him from the economic anxieties and pressures of a small trader with little capital, he is able to survive the collapse of his sponsor (and in effect partner), the Associated Booksellers' Trading Union, and float alone buoyed up by his liquidity. Kipps is depicted as a man able to relax and potter about his shop chatting idly to non-customers disguised as potential customers about matters unrelated to his business. For Mr. Polly, work at the Potwell Inn was larger, more active, more varied than it ever had been in the cramped little shop in Fishbourne. Although his tasks at the Inn are listed rather than described, the list conveys an impressive disregard for specialization or the division of labour. Mr. Polly runs a small ferry, hires out boats, drowns cats, and looks after poultry, ducks, garden, picnickers and an orchard as well as the Inn itself. In addition to these images of ideal work as an activity both relaxed and varied, Wells also briefly shows his readers the joys and perils of work as self-expression. The events that led to the dismissal of Mr. Polly's close friend Parsons from the Port Burdock Bazaar can be seen as a comment on this aspect of a man's working life. Parsons' manic excitement when dressing a shop window, and his principled but unwise defence of his creation against higher authority led to one of Wells' characteristically ineffective lower-middle class brawls that accelerate from farce to social rather than physical tragedy.

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In this way, Wells was able to give comic expression to the inevitable conflict between individual self-expression and the workings of a hierarchical organization designed for more mundane ends. Parsons' fight with his employer Mr. Garvace (and Mr. Garvace's minions) ends in disaster as the frustrated artist, when ordered out of what Parsons sees as "his" window, smites the "sacred" "autocratic" bald head that symbolizes Mr Garvace's authority with a thin cylinder of rolled huckaback (see Wells 1928: 413-419). Parsons is sacked and Mr. Polly also subsequently leaves the tedium of work for the anxious humiliation of unemployment. The fundamental contradiction of the modem world between the "economizing," rationalizing pressures of a hierarchical organization and the limitless anomic individual drive for self-realization (embodied in Mr. Garvace and Parsons respectively) can have no easy or peaceful resolution. It is no wonder that Mr. Polly puzzled about the incident for years afterwards, trying to decide who had been in the right. Wells' insights into "work and its discontents" (Bell [ 1956] 1960:222-262) may be found today in studies of work satisfaction and dissatisfaction by industrial sociologists and social psychologists. The importance of factors such as variety, job rotation, autonomy and creativity in improving levels of work satisfaction are repeatedly observed (Cooker 1973: 387-413; Porter et.al 1975: 277-298), though it has proved extremely difficult to establish exact relationships between the objective aspects of a task and the subjective assessment of that task by the person performing it. Also the expectations that individuals bring to their work are very varied and modify the degree to which a particular task is found to be rewarding or frustrating. The widely held view first propounded by Maslow ( 1943: 370-396, 1970) that as societies become wealthier and more secure, so that in consequence the individual's most basic physiological needs and requirements for safety and security are met, "higher order needs" for autonomy or self-actualization emerge is intuitively plausible but has not been empirically validated. There have been many studies to test Maslow's hypothesis, but the results of these have been contradictory (see Kokkilaet.al. 1972:5-9; Porter et.al. 1975: 35-47; Hirszowicz 1981: 71-97). There seems to be some truth in Maslow's thesis, but it is difficult to know how much — and much of its popularity is due to the congruence between Maslow's progressive humanist values and those of even the most number-crunching of social psychologists. It can be plausibly argued that the insights into the nature of work to be found in Wells' comedies are supported by the later findings of the social psychologists and sociologists — but only with caution, for such people are likely to share many of Wells' values and will shape and interpret their findings accordingly. Also

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I have of necessity tended to select those aspects of Wells' treatment of work that can be viewed within conventional sociological and social psychological frameworks. To cite the findings of the practitioners of the latter in support of my interpretation of Wells is dangerously close to becoming a circular argument. One of the most striking of the social psychologists' findings is the insatiable character of the "need" for "self-actualization or growth", "in the sense that the more it is satisfied the more important it becomes" (Porter et.al. 1975: 45). When this finding is placed alongside another seemingly limitless phenomenon that can be readily observed pressing hard on the working individual, namely, the economizing rationalizing drive for efficiency, productivity and results in order to produce enhanced profitability or the meeting of ever higher quantifiable bureaucratic targets, it is clear that there is ample empirical support for the view of the macrosociologists that our anomic modern societies are characterized by major, irresolvable cultural contradictions (Bell 1979, and for an earlier period Durkheim 1933). Scientific discoveries, improvements in technology, and the automation of routine tasks lessen the pressures of scarcity and remove obstacles to job enlargement; but they also create — or, more accurately, permit — new pressures for greater standardization and specialization of work roles. Those with power are able to monitor and control certain kinds of work with ever greater precision, and this has led them to attempt to grade and sieve ever less easily quantifiable human activities and achievements such as military credibility (a bigger bang for a buck), scholarship (the citation index), or even religion (Herzberg 1966: 1-5). Those without power are encouraged to assent to this through an invoking of the politics of egalitarian envy by their rulers (Schoeck 1969: 105,134,207). In the past, the central ideological demand of the egalitarians was for equality of material resources and possessions, but now it has been extended to cover non-material aspects of satisfaction from work, by the imposition of arbitrary bureaucratic rules of accountability on those whose autonomy and self-realization in their work appear higher than average (Schoeck 1969: 93,175,191,234, 308, 379). They should be, must be, made as disciplined and as bored as the rest. Alienation cannot be abolished so it must be universalized. On this point at least the view of work held by both the levellers and the bureaucratic centralizers is consistent with the ideology of their common Jacobin ancestors. There is one striking weakness in Wells' thinking that he shared with many of the reformers and radicals of his day. They assumed that the painful clashes between the individual's quasi-romantic demands for self-expression and the

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economizing constraints of the market-place could be abolished by changing the forms through which these clashes found expression. Hence their rejection of the dominant institutions of the nineteenth century: capitalism, voluntary organization, middle-class respectability and family authority in favour of the fallacies of the twentieth: socialism, enhanced central and local government power, more stringent bureaucratic controls, the politicization of the everyday world, and authoritarian levelling. Wells was in fact wiser than most, as readers can see from his satire of the Webbs as Oscar and Altora Bailey in The New Machiavelli or his quarrel with the inanely blind and authoritarian George Bernard Shaw about the true nature of Soviet Russia (West 1984: 135-142). Wells' mockery of the Baileys is worth quoting in this context for its accuracy and prescience: If [the Baileys] had the universe in hand, I know they would take down all the trees and put up stamped-tin green shades and sunlight accumulators. Altiora thought trees hopelessly irregular and sea cliffs a great mistake.... [At the Baileys'] you felt you were in a sort of signal-box with levers all about you, and the world outside there, albeit a little dark and mysterious beyond the window, running on its lines in ready obedience to these unhesitating lights, true and steady to trim termini. (Wells 1966: 165-166)

Richard Remington in The New Machiavelli can dismiss the work of Herbert Spencer, much as the narrator in Mr Polly shrugs aside Samuel Smiles, even though it is doubtful whether Wells had read either of these nineteenth century prophets of individualism and self-help with any thoroughness or understanding. 3 Indeed Remington clearly sympathizes with his father's diatribe against individual ownership: Property's the curse of life. Property! Ugh! Look at this country all cut up into silly little parallelograms .... It isn't a world we live in, Dick; it's a cascade of accidents, it's a chaos exasperated by policemen!.... the folly and muddle that come from headlong, aimless and haphazard methods. (Wells 1966: 37)

Remington himself says of the Victorian epoch: That age that bore me was indeed a world full of restricted and undisciplined people, overtaken by power, by possessions and great new freedoms, and unable to make any civilized use of them whatever. (Wells 1966: 40)

For Remington this is indeed the essential nature of late nineteenth-century

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England. Like the Wells who created him, he failed to recognize that the spontaneous order emerging from the market-place, from a system of law grounded in precedent, from the unforseeable process of discovery and invention is as structured and necessary as the planned order of corporate decision-making, statute law or the deliberate design and replication of a machine (Barry, 1982: 7-58; Polanyi 1951: 156, 185). The odd phrase "restricted and undisciplined people" Wells uses to describe his contemporaries is an attempt to slide across and evade the essential nature of the contradiction necessarily at the core of all large-scale urban societies based on modern technology. It implies that if only these people would embrace science, civilization and socialism, then in that great Wellsian Utopian ideal of order and economy, they would become more disciplined and yet, by some mysterious dialectical alchemy, also less restricted! You will want to do what they tell you to do. Members of the Progressive League unite, you have but your parallelograms to lose. Wells' choice of this regular but unpleasing shape to symbolize people who are trapped, enclosed, restricted in a confined and inefficient world that provides minimal space for maximum boundaries is a shrewd one. If only these randomly shaped and sized parallelograms could become a disciplined lattice of squares or hexagons, individuals would have more room to expand! Yet Wells is wrong both about means and about ends. Planning and Fabian socialism with their "administrative fizzle and pseudo-scientific chatter" (see Wells 1966: 166) have not in the long run improved the sprawling streets and suburbs of South London so disliked by Remington and Wells. They have merely destroyed their human scale and undermined the involved spontaneous order that Wells failed to recognize and appreciate, in order to build alien tower blocks and bloated schools, divided by areas of (in both senses) indefensible space deserted at night save for the vandals and the occasional mugger or rapist (Davies 1983). Even if the "human splendours" of Wells' "justly organized state" (see Wells 1966: 13) were possible, individuals would still be trapped in the disciplined grid it would require. Indeed human beings may well feel more free in and therefore prefer an untidy heap of parallelograms to the square cages of battery chickens or the hexagonal symmetries of the beehive. Even in a properly planned, surveyed and measured excavation, many a Mr. Polly will cry out: "Hole!... Ole!... Oh! Beastly Silly Wheeze of a hole!... Roootten Beeeastly Silly Hole!" (Wells 1928: 391, 395). Indeed, it is Wells' Edwardian holes that have survived and not his brave new worlds; the holes have proved to be greater than the sum of Wells' paths. It is not Wells' Utopian rhetoric but the frustrations of his ordinary heroes

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trapped not by introspective existential doubts but by external circumstances that remain vivid today. We laugh at their antics, and rejoice when they escape. Readers are as much moved by their unformed, clumsy but intense sense of beauty and adventure as by any detailed self-conscious account of the exotic sensations of an aesthete or explorer at the limits of human experience. Yet Wells could only have achieved all this within the framework of a comedy. In any other setting Wells' exploration of the feelings and perceptions of a Mr. Polly, a Kipps, or a Bealby trapped in the mundane world of work of the lower-middle classes would risk appearing sugary, mawkish, condescending, and emetic. Wells' greatness lies in his ability to judge exactly the degree of comic distance each situation requires — an achievement that places him alongside Cervantes, Dickens or Hasek — and not in his flawed and contradictory grand ideas. If Wells' novels were, as is often claimed, only a dustbin for ideas, it is the dustbins that have survived (as any literal-minded person would expect, for that is what dustbins are built to do). It doesn't matter that Wells' bubbling thoughts and images are inconsistent, for the business of the novelist is to explore our contradictory world, not to resolve it. Wells' comedies have also influenced and inspired other gifted writers of humour. George Orwell (1961) is often cited as a savage critic of Wells' later grand schemes, but he was also the imitator of The History of Mr Polly in Coming up for Air (Orwell [1939] 1980). Orwells' hero George Bowling actually read The History of Mr Polly (Orwell [1939] 1980: 120-121), prior to his own failed break through the "paper walls of everyday circumstance". Mr. Bowling experienced but a few days on the other side of those insubstantial walls — to find that his childhood home, Lower Binfield, had become a depressing version of Wells' Bromstead — before returning to his everyday tasks at Flying Salamander Insurance. (Mr. Polly's neighbour, little Clamp of the toyshop, was insured with Royal Salamander.) The Royal Salamander has flown, and so has the Wellsian joy and optimism of Mr. Polly's escape; George Bowling will become Winston Smith. The most important offspring of Wells' comedies though is Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt (1922), an American version of Mr Polly. Babbitt, unlike Mr. Polly, is a successful businessman, but he is rendered equally discontented by the incessant pressures of and for efficiency and productivity, and in his own way he also tries to escape. The contradictions of success can be as disturbing as those of failure and are just as rich a source of comic action, description, and comment. Sinclair Lewis (1954:158) greatly admired Wells and indeed named his eldest son after him. He called Tono-Bungay "the liveliest of novels" (Lewis [1946] 1954: 160) and found "in the early Wells, especially in Mr. Polly, such

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a sensational gaiety" (Lewis [1946] 1954: 161). It is difficult to believe that the creation of Babbitt was not influenced by the example of Mr. Polly and Uncle Ponderevo. Lewis, like Wells, wrote too much, and his later work is better forgotten, if only that we may concentrate our attention on his early comedies where he employed his "vigorous and graphic art of description to create, with wit and humour, new types of people" (Citation for 1930 Nobel prize in Lewis 1954: 3). This comment made at the time of the Nobel award to Lewis applies with equal force to the author Lewis so much admired, H. G. Wells.

Chapter 10 Conclusion

In each of the previous chapters about jokes and, to some extent, other forms of humour as well, certain common methods and principles have been applied. Perhaps the most important of these is the comparative method which has been used to seek reasons for the existence of particular types of jokes in a culture or society, by looking at other societies where similar jokes exist and, even more important, at yet further societies where they do not. In either case it is also necessary to look at other empirical data about what these societies, cultures and relative positions of jokers and the butts of their jokes have in common and also how they differ. Explanations that stem from this approach are superior to attempts to provide one-off explanations for the existence of a specific genre of jokes in one particular society. Those who fail to use this method all too often impose their own theoretical framework on the data, either directly, or by eliciting comments from the joke-tellers that favour their thesis by asking them leading questions or by selecting those aspects of the joke-tellers-answers that happen to fit. It is not possible to avoid this problem by using questionnaires because the very act of asking people a series of structured questions in a formal setting itself biases the answers in a particular direction; it encourages respondents to reduce humorous communications to their supposed serious equivalents. The problem is even worse if the group sampled consists of students', since their very role as students, especially if they are studying a subject such as psychology, sociology, anthropology or folklore tends to bias their answers in a particular way. Observation of joke-tellers in situ followed by neutral questioning does provide useful data but only in regard to those particular individuals in that particular context. It may well be illustrative of a much broader pattern but cannot be used on its own as proof that a pattern exists. Even the most gifted and skilled of observers such as Kravitz or Holbek have been apt to make mistakes on the basis of studying the jokes of one country at a time. Thus Kravitz (1977) in his study of joke-telling in London in the 1970s was able to find informants who thought that the Irish really were stupid because of the chronic and irresolveable conflict over the sovereignity of Northern Ireland between the Protestant Ulster Unionist majority and the Roman Catholic supporters of Sinn Fein and the IRA,

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a conflict which had spilled over into mainland Britain. No doubt there are some individuals who hold this view or who will express such a view, rather than any other views they may hold, if questioned in a particular way, but there is no evidence that they were opinions representative of the British people as a whole. However, the central objection to Kravitz thesis is that exactly the same jokes are told in Spain about the Leperos of Lepe or in Canada about Newfoundlanders, countries in which there are no conflicts between these peoples and the rest of the population. The same criticism may be made of Bengt Holbek's (1975) otherwise shrewd and well informed thesis about the telling of Aarhus stupidity jokes in Denmark. Holbek discovered that a key group disseminating jokes about Aarhus stupidity was composed of broadcasting staff in Copenhagen, who were resentful at the build up of a rival regional broadcasting organization in Aarhus with corresponding job-losses in Copenhagen. They adapted many German jokes about stupid Ostfrieslanders and older Danish jokes about the Molboer and helped to bring about a joke-cycle of Aarhus stupidity jokes in Denmark. The problem with Holbek's argument is that many other broadcasters and comedians have tried arbitrarily to pin jokes on particular places, such as the seaside towns of Morecambe and Torquay in England, but the jokes have never really caught on with the public. Likewise Jasper Carrot, a British comedian as well as a red vegetable, told stupidity jokes about the readers of the Sun newspaper, one of Britain's more exuberant and protuberant tabloids over a long period of time, but the jokes never went into oral circulation. The mass media do not necessarily have the power to mould popular humour, as can be seen from the popularity among the relevant publics of jokes that have never been broadcast because of censorship, such as jokes about AIDS, Brezhnev, Black Afro-Americans, Dr. Goebbels, famines, sexual assaults on youngsters by Roman Catholic priests and Christian Brothers or the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. The important question, which can only be answered from comparative data is "Why did the Aarhus jokes succeed among the generality of the Danish population?" The answer lies in the provincial and peripheral position of Aarhus in relation to Copenhagen the metropolitan centre of Denmark. Aarhus may not be as rustic as Ostfriesland but it is separated from Copenhagen and Odense by water and the people speak with a distinctive regional accent. Also it is located within a few miles of Mols, the fishing village that was the butt of the Molboer stupidity jokes in nineteenth century and early twentieth century Denmark and even Norway. This evidence, and other comparative and historical data from all six continents to the effect that in stupidity jokes the centre laughs at the periphery,

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demonstrates that the involvement of the Copenhagen broadcasters, though interesting, was merely an epiphenomenon. The strength of the comparative method as a means of demonstrating the failure of widely-held theories about ethnic humour should now be apparent; it is appropriate at this point to make fully explicit the comparative method underlying the analysis of a diversity of material in earlier chapters. The central methodological principle employed may be termed, in honour of Sherlock Holmes, "the dog that didn't bark in the night" 2 , i.e. why is it that certain jokes that could easily be invented and circulated are not? Why is it that certain possible kinds of jokes do not exist? It is not an easy test to apply, for it requires a thorough knowledge of the jokes in oral circulation in a society. In the case of past societies this is often not possible because all that is available to us is the written record. We do not have access to the full range of jokes that were told in past societies; we know only those that someone thought worth writing down and which, by chance, have survived. Even then they may only be accessible to and understood by those who know the relevant language and perhaps also something of the conventions of that society in regard to humour. In commenting on jokes that originally came from ancient Greece or the time of the Chinese dynasties of the past, I have been sharply aware of how much anyone doing comparative work is forced to depend on the translations and editorial selection of others. Under these circumstances it is very difficult to state with any great degree of certainty that a particular genre of jokes did not exist at a particular time and in a particular place in the past. With the invention of printing and the mass production of jokebooks the task of the scholar of comparative humour has become easier, but it is still the case that jokes that cannot be found in printed form may well have been in oral circulation in a particular society, but that due either to censorship by the state or to pressure from influential institutions they were prevented from appearing in print. Many grossly obscene or blasphemous jokes of the past may have disappeared altogether or else have only been preserved in some hand-written compilation put together by a tenacious antiquarian, a faithful folklorist or a dirty old man. Even today certain very popular jokes do not get into print. This is probably the reason for the apparent shortage of American jokes about blacks that led Dundes ([1971] 1987: 137) erroneously to suggest that ethnic jokes about Poles or Italians flourished in America because they took the heat off the blacks. Yet jokes about blacks are very numerous and popular in the United States, as can be seen from the content of many scholarly

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American dissertations (Katz 1979; Kimmel 1977). The absence or paucity of such jokes in print merely reflects the fact that American publishers and book retailers have been leaned on not to publish collections of jokes about blacks by powerful upper-middle-class groups in strategic positions, even though it would have been profitable to market such books. Before the 1960s there were very many American joke-books about blacks (Cobb 1923, 1925; Ernst 1927; House 1943,1944,1945), but were scholars of the future looking back at the latter part of the twentieth century to confine their attention to printed sources, they might falsely conclude that these jokes about blacks were no longer frequently told. Unpublished dissertations based on jokes in oral circulation in America contain far more jokes about blacks than do published collections of jokes but future historians who neglect to examine these scattered manuscripts might well end up supporting the mistaken thesis that the rise of the Polish joke in America was accompanied by or even caused by a collapse in popular joke-telling about Afro-Americans. Throughout the previous chapters the emphasis on the near universality of stupidity jokes has carried with it an implicit statement about jokes that do not exist and it is this that makes the entire thesis falsifiable and thus meaningful. The empirical generalization that ethnic jokes about stupidity are told about familiar groups living on the periphery of the society where they are told leads to the prediction that if ethnic stupidity jokes are discovered being told in some as yet unexamined society, then the same pattern will apply, thus confirming the view that the basis of stupidity humour lies in the seeing of some other group as being a comically distorted version of the joke-tellers themselves. The theory would be falsified if it was discovered that ethnic stupidity jokes were discovered being invented and circulated under converse circumstances, i.e. if they were told about a completely alien group or about a culturally and commercially dominant ethnic or regional group at the centre of the society. This is not a crude power-relations model for it specifies the nature of the power held by the group about whom stupidity jokes are never told, even though the joke-tellers are at liberty to do so. By contrast a group whose dominance and power is political or military in character may well be the butt of such jokes, even though it tries to repress them. Since this thesis was formulated (Davies 1982a, 1990a) many cases have been discovered that continue to confirm it but none that would overturn it. Thus, for example, when Professor W.M.S.Russell, the distinguished former President of the Folklore Society in London, told me in 1996 that he had learned that Peruvians told ethnic stupidity jokes about the Arequipeños, the people of Arequiba in Peru, I predicted (on the basis of the centre-periphery

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thesis and in particular by analogy with Colombia) that they would live on the periphery of the country, speak Spanish with a distinct accent and be conservative and very Catholic. Professor Russell checked with his Peruvian informant and reported back that these predictions were correct. In 19961 was also able to collect in situ many versions of the jokes told in Syria and particularly in the capital Damascus about the regional towns of Horns, Hama and Aleppo that were cited in Chapter two on fooltowns: A man from Horns found £500 Syrian in very new notes lying on the ground. He looked around carefully to make sure nobody was watching, took them and put £500 down in old notes instead. (Damascus 1996) A Homsiot took part in a race in which he was the only competitor. He came in second. (Damascus 1996) Why does a Homsiot put a cucumber under his pillow but not a tomato? A tomato would get squashed. (Damascus 1996) The people in Horns decided to save time by giving all their jokes numbers and shouting out the numbers. Someone shouted Number 6 and everyone laughed. Another person shouted Number 9 and everyone laughed. Somebody then shouted Number 27 and everyone laughed for a short time but one man went on and on laughing. The other Homsiots asked him why he laughed so much. He replied, "because I had never heard it before." (Damascus 1996) Why does a Homsiot sleep with one eye open and the other closed? He took half a sleeping pill. (Damascus 1996) A man from Horns and a man from Hama quarreled. The man from Horns unscrewed the man from Hama's door and ran away with it. The man from Hama chased after him. The man from Horns got tired and stopped, putting the door down in the road between them. The man from Hama caught up with him and knocked on it saying, "Open the door". The man from Horns refused to open it. Just then a man from Aleppo came along who was carrying a large jar of olive oil. He asked the man from Hama, "Why do you want him to open the door?" "Because he stole it," came the reply. He then asked the man from Horns if this was true. "Yes", said the man from Horns, "it is — so I'm not going to open the door." The man from Aleppo poured all the olive oil out of his jar onto the ground banged the empty jar and said, "Your heads are as empty as my jar." (Damascus 1996)

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These in the main highly original local jokes, which exist in both narrative and riddle form, demonstrate that the ethnic/fooltown stupidity joke is alive and flourishing in Syria and indeed these jokes are also told in the Lebanon. They are told in the capital Damascus, where two million people live, about the people on the periphery in smaller towns such as Horns, Hama and Aleppo. They are not told about complete outsiders such as the Turks, the Israelis or the Iraqis (with all of whom the Syrians have had military and/or territorial conflicts) nor are they told about warring factions in the Lebanon such as the Maronites, or the Hizbollah. None of my informants considered the people of Horns to be in any sense really stupid, indeed they said that the town was known for providing excellent high-school teachers for both Syria and Lebanon. Rather the jokes stemmed from the towns' distance from and contrast with the centre, the great cities of Damascus in Syria and Beirut in the Lebanon. The absence of any indigenous ethnic or regional pattern of jokes about stupidity in Japan is a puzzle, given that these jokes are so widespread in the rest of the world. It does not disprove the thesis that these jokes are a way in which those at the centre of a nation or culture laugh at the people of the periphery, for the thesis does not state that all peoples will tell stupidity jokes, it merely specifies about whom they will be told, if and when they are told. If the Japanese were to tell stupidity jokes about the people of Tokyo or Osaka or about Americans, Germans, Chinese or Persians, then it would create severe problems for the central thesis of this book, but in point of fact such jokes are not told about particular groups. All gaijin [foreigners i.e. non-Japanese] are "funny" to the Japanese but none are singled out as the butt of stupidity jokes, nor are such suitable regional groups as the people of Tohoku. It still remains to be explained, though, why the Japanese do not tell the kinds of jokes about the stupid and the canny that are to be found in other industrial and industrializing countries. Neither recourse to the well-worn notion of Japanese uniqueness and exceptionalism nor the observation that there is a general lack of jokes in Japan provide an entirely satisfactory explanation. The linking of the ethnic stupidity jokes and the ethnic canniness jokes to the development of industrial society in countries other than Japan itself relies on a particular joke not being told. Before the late eighteenth century there is an absence or apparent absence of ethnic jokes about the canny. Jokes about the canny Scots have not been recorded prior to the beginning of the transformation of Britain into a predominantly urban and industrial society, even though the Protestant Ethic pattern of canny behaviour had taken hold in Scotland much earlier, following the Reformation and the formation of the distinctively Calvinist Church of Scotland in the sixteenth century. As the rest

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of the world in turn became commercial, capitalist and industrial so the jokes about the canny calculating Scots spread to other countries or else local equivalents were devised, as in the case of the Paisas, Regiomontanos or Gabrovonians. Only with the development of a capitalist society in which the possession of the Protestant ethic or its local equivalent was a means of achieving financial success through the adoption of a somewhat over-controlled and joyless life-style did the ethnic jokes about the canny flourish. It is the absence of these jokes in earlier societies that is crucial to the argument that the ethnic jokes about the canny and the stupid are the product of a modern or modernizing society in which these qualities are two key opposed modes of failure. By contrast, the other prop of the theory, the observation that ethnic stupidity jokes multiplied enormously in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain and America, is weaker, for it is open to the objection that jokes of all kinds multiplied and were recorded more effectively in this period. Of all human failings stupidity is perhaps the best suited to the construction both of jokes that resolve incongruity and of jokes that end in nonsense, as can be seen from the Syrian stupidity jokes about Horns quoted above. It would be difficult to construct as many good jokes around other negatively-viewed qualities such as cowardice or impiety. Only ethnic jokes about the canny rival the stupidity ones in numbers and skill of construction and it is this that has prompted the view taken here that these jokes reflect the nature of modern society. It is difficult to assess the extent to which those who tell stupidity jokes are anxious about the technical complexity of the modern world as suggested earlier. It is easy to provide illustrations of people using appropriate jokes under conditions where the use of new technology provokes anxiety as with the jokes collected by Bob Ward (1982) from around the launching pads of the United States, when America first put human beings into space, or with the Rev. Sydney Smith's use of humour to back his campaign for greater safety on the early nineteenth century railways in Britain. However, these are only illustrations. The feelings and attitudes in this respect of the people in general who tell, listen to or enjoy ethnic stupidity jokes are largely unknown. We know the social circumstances that give rise to the jokes in aggregate but we cannot easily infer from this the subjective perceptions of particular joketellers. Similarly it seems likely that the joke-telling Damascenes from the capital of Syria feel superior to the inhabitants of the smaller provincial towns of Horns, Hama or Aleppo who are the butts of their stupidity jokes, since those at the centre are better placed than those at the periphery. However, if such a

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sense of superiority exists, it will have preceded the joke-telling; it is not a result of it and would exist whether the jokes were told or not. Perhaps it is this sense of superiority that enables the Damascenes to enjoy a brief Hobbesian burst of glory at the expense of the Homsiots when the jokes are told but that again is an empirical question that could only be answered by studying these particular joke-tellers. It is very difficult for the sociologist to bridge the gap between (a) the macro-level correlations between particular genres of jokes and corresponding configurations of the social order on the one hand and (b) the perceptions, attitudes and beliefs of individuals enjoying these jokes in specific contexts (which are likely to be very varied and changeable). Likewise my extension of the general thesis put forward concerning the genesis of jokes about the stupid and the canny to cover also disaster jokes, modern urban legends and literary texts such as the comedies of H. G. Wells has to be tentative. Whilst it is pleasing to be able to treat such diverse items within a single straightforward framework in a way that makes sense, this is no guarantee of its being right, nor do the links that I have sought to establish between this work and the findings of Max Weber or of modern industrial sociologists underwrite the truth of my argument; they merely show that my analysis of the societies in which the jokes are told is not a strange or eccentric one. The jokes I have analysed can in turn, of course, be used as empirical evidence to support, criticise or revise the theoretical, historical and comparative sociology that has been used to analyse the jokes as in Chapter 4, where the canny jokes were employed in an assessment of Weber's Protestant Ethic thesis. It is not circular to do so since (a) my suggestions concerning the general significance of the widespread popularity of ethnic jokes about canniness do not depend on the truth or falsity of Weber's thesis and (b) Weber's original study is based on an immense variety of source material, only a very tiny proportion of which consists of humorous items. Three further examples of genres of jokes that do not exist have been directly or indirectly referred to in earlier chapters. The first of these is discussed in Chapter Two where reference has been made to the crucial absence in British ethnic stupidity jokes about the Irish of the quality of dirtiness that is so prominent in American jokes about Poles and Italians. It is this absence that enables us to use the jokes as a means of analysing cultural differences between the two countries on matters as diverse as orthodontics and the disposal of the bodies of the dead (Davies 1995). A further question that then arises is whether Canadian humour, and thus by implication Canadian culture, is more similar to that of Britain (and of France and Ireland where stupidity

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j o k e s also do not deal with dirtiness) or to that of the United States, a country obsessed with rational hygiene and physical perfection. Paradoxically, such jokes do not exist in print in Canada but are c o m m o n in oral circulation, whereas they are to be found in print in Britain, though in one source only, but they have not gone into oral circulation. Had I relied only on printed joke-books for the study of Canadian jokes, I would have c o m e to the false conclusion that there were no Canadian j o k e s about dirty N e w f i e s comparable to American j o k e s about dirty Polacks and would have wrongly categorized Canadian jokes as being similar to British and French j o k e s rather than to those of the United States. Fortunately, I was able to study the Canadian folklore collections at the Memorial University of N e w f o u n d land, York University, Université Laval and the Université de Moncton, which revealed that the Canadians do tell such jokes; in addition the Québécois, like the Americans of N e w Jersey tell jokes about dirty Italians. These ethnic jokes are either censored out of existence by the Canadian publishers and editors of j o k e b o o k s or else appear in print in so highly bowdlerized a form as to be unrecognizable, as can be seen f r o m the (earlier) oral and the (later) printed versions of particular jokes cited below: Do you know why there are only two Newfie pall bearers at a funeral? There are only two handles on a garbage can. (MUNFLA file 69-F, collected by Bernice Bartlett, recorded as told by one Newfoundlander to another in Toronto before 1969) I know Henry wasn't well-liked, but why was there only two pall-bearers at his funeral? There are only two handles on a garbage-can. (Tulk 1971: 33) What is the best way to get a Newfoundlander out of a swimming pool? By throwing in a cake of soap. (MUNFLA file 69-25C, collected by Lionel Strong 1969) Dirty joke: "The best way to get my buddy out of a swimming pool is to toss in a bar of soap." (Tulk 1971: 76) Whether the Canadian joke-books were censored because of the general Canadian obsession with political correctness, or because most of the books were brought out by small publishers in Newfoundland subject to local social pressures, is difficult to say. Jokebooks published in Québec in French are

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noticeably less apologetic and evasive on the theme of dirt and the existence of these jokes shows that the Québécois have acquired an Anglophone North American obsession with rational hygiene quite alien to les vieux français de France. For our present purposes, however, the methodological moral is that it is dangerous to assume that a particular genre of jokes does not exist until the oral record has been checked. The existence of dirtiness jokes about the Irish in Peter Hornby's (1978: 23-24) collection The Official Irish Jokebook No.3 (Book 2 to follow) paradoxically confirms that they are not part of the British tradition. The absence of such jokes in Britain in oral circulation had been demonstrated earlier by McCosh (1976). Hornby tried to introduce dirtiness jokes into Britain by taking a set of American jokes about "filthy Polacks" from an American jokebook by Macklin and Erdman (1976) and substituting the word "Paddies" for "Polacks". Since the Futura paperback books of jokes about the Irish including those written by Hornby, were sold in large numbers in Britain it meant that British readers must have known that such jokes could exist. However, the British did not go on to use this as the basis for creating new jokes about the Irish on the same theme, any more than they would have considered applying East European jokes about Brezhnev, Ochab, Zhivkov or Gierek to their own politicians of various persuasions such as Heath, Thatcher, Wilson, Callaghan, Foot, Kinnock or Thorpe, even though they made fun of them extensively in other ways. In British culture filthiness is not a sub-category of stupidity the way it is in America and Canada. Similarly the analysis of the political jokes of the former socialist countries of Eastern Europe in Chapters 5 and 6 is based not only on the production and circulation of these jokes in large numbers in countries of this type but also on the absence of such jokes in the Western democratic countries. Why did the citizens of the democratic capitalist countries not invent and tell such jokes, given that many Westerners would have been aware of the existence and nature of such jokes in Eastern Europe from translations made into their own languages (see pp. 80-81, 87-98 and 198-199)? Alan Dundes ([1971] 1987: vii) has noted: In the United States we have relatively few orally transmitted political jokes. Why? Because we have a relatively free press. It's easy to hear or read editorials lambasting political figures on a daily basis; we have little need for oral political jokes. It is in countries without a free press that a multitude of political jokes can be found.

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Elsewhere Dundes ([1971] 1987:160) suggests that "hypothetically, the more repressive the regime, the more jokes there will be about that regime." The first proposition is clearly true but the second requires clarification. The richest flourishing of political jokes in Eastern Europe dates from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, a time of repression but not of terror, a time when there was no freedom of speech but some freedom of conversation. In the time of Stalin there may well have been fewer jokes because the careless use of a joke could lead to anonymous denunciation and disciplinary action (Deriabin and Gibney 1960:173). Such a denunciation concerning jokes made in private could lead not merely to the loss of political office, or of one's job or university place, as in those politically correct sections of the United States where racial or sexual jokes are taboo, but to the loss of one's freedom and even the slavery of a labour camp. By the same token jokes about Franco seem to have flourished more in the last years of the ageing Caudillo (Ferrer 1978), when considerable liberalization had taken place, than in the harsher period that followed his victory in the Spanish Civil War. The pre-eminence of East European political jokes owed more to the breadth of repression in the socialist countries than to its intensity, to the fact that the politicians and the partocrats claimed to control the entire society including its economy, morality, physical sciences, culture, art and thought — all of which were politicised — on the basis of an all-inclusive and intrusive ideology. By contrast the more limited repressive rule of an opportunist thug such as Galtieri in Argentina did not generate anything like as many jokes. The larger the ambit of a repressive polity, the more things there are to tell political jokes about. Where I am forced to disagree to some extent with Dundes' otherwise very insightful analysis of the political humour of socialism is when he writes: Political jokes in Iron Curtain countries frequently express what many individuals feel but dare not utter. Jokes are, by definition, impersonal. They provide a socially sanctioned frame that normally absolves individuals from any guilt that might otherwise result from conversational articulation of the same content. Thus jokes provide a much-needed vent for emotion. (Dundes [ 1971 ]

1987: 160) This statement is both too strong and too weak to apply to the humour of the anciens régimes of Eastern Europe. Very few people in Eastern Europe felt guilty about having negative thoughts about their political systems; these systems possessed no legitimacy, as can be seen from the speed with which they collapsed once the crude might of the Soviet armed forces was no longer

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there to prop them up. The utterances of ordinary citizens were not held in check by their consciences or even by the shame they would feel if their neighbours knew what they really felt about the system (many of their neighbours would have felt the same way) but by fear that those in power would take action against them. What was involved was an external not an internal repression of anti-socialist statements. The jokers had never internalized the ideological views of their rulers in the first place. The mechanisms by which these jokes worked can be explained entirely in terms of conscious mental processes. The joke-tellers were not in any sense tormented by their own anti-socialist notions in the way that, say, a Victorian clergyman might have been tormented by religious doubts or impure thoughts that kept him awake at night. At the same time it must be stressed that the ambiguity of humour is such that the jokes could be enjoyed not just by those who were opponents of the regime but by those who held positions of power and privilege and were beneficiaries of the regime (Deriabin and Gibney 1960: 38, 61, 141, 175, 220, 227) and by the vast alienated mass of the population who lived from one grey socialist day to the next without thinking much about politics. A great deal of humour consists of playing with the forbidden. In a society where it is forbidden or even dangerous to express political dissent, people will take a delight in telling jokes that seem to evade this prohibition, whether or not they themselves are strongly critical of the regime. Jokes are not necessarily expressions of aggression or of a wish to embrace or perpetuate the prohibited, for the joke-tellers may well simply be playing with aggression or with that which is prohibited, whether by external force as in Eastern Europe or as in many other cases by their own conscience or inhibitions. Laughter is often purposeless paratelic time off, in this case an agreeable respite from the compulsory and turgid ideological rhetoric of a socialist society (for an example of how turgid, see Panova et al. 1981). It is unlikely that the political jokes of Eastern Europe played any major part in undermining the anciens régimes nor, even if they did "provide a muchneeded vent for emotion," as Dundes suggests, did this help to stave off the final collapse. Neither the functionalist nor the conflict theories of humour have any part to play in explaining the sudden final and fatal crisis of socialism. My prediction on the basis of a study of East European political jokes made during the 1980s (some were collected in various Eastern European countries, others were acquired outside) that the regimes were unstable was based not so much on the view that the jokes provided "a genuine expression of sentiment" (Dundes [1971] 1987: 160), as on the realization that the jokes

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revealed the regimes' total lack of legitimacy. Sometimes the joke-tellers were opponents of the regime and used the jokes to illustrate a political point and sometimes they were apolitical individuals who enjoyed the jokes for their own sake. What was clear to m e was that no one felt guilty about telling them, any more than American "good old b o y s " feel remorse after a session of telling j o k e s about blacks. To tell such jokes might be imprudent or unwise but very few of the joke-tellers would have been violating any kind of inner loyalty, such that they might feel bad about their joke-telling the morning after. It is the jokes cited in Chapters 5 and 6 about the general stupidity of Eastern European politicians that revealed the lack of legitimacy of the former East European governments. Such jokes existed in Britain and America, only at the expense of a small number of particular politicians who had not been properly elected to the office they held such as Gerald Ford or Sir Alec DouglasH o m e (see pp. 88-90), or even Dan Quayle who rode in and out of office on George Bush's coat-tails. In Eastern Europe by contrast stupidity j o k e s were bestowed on anyone who held office, thus implying a lack of legitimacy for the social and political system that had put them in power. M a n y of the East European j o k e s of the 1980s were prescient in that they described revolutionary events that may have seemed unlikely at the time, but which have c o m e about in the 1990s. By contrast those sociologists and political scientists w h o perceived the old communist order as providing a stable and legitimate alternative form of industrial society to capitalism have been made to look extremely foolish. The jokers have proved to be the better predictors. Take for instance the following j o k e told to the author in Bratislava in Slovakia, when Gorbachev was still securely in charge in the Soviet Union and trying to implement glasnost and perestroïka: What is the difference between Gorbachev and Dubcek? There isn't any. But Gorbachev doesn't know it yet. [Dubcek was the would-be reforming leader of Czechoslovakia in 1968, who was over-thrown by the armies of the Soviet Union and the other Warsaw pact countries.] This j o k e came true when communist hard-liners in the Soviet Union kidnapped Gorbachev and seized key buildings in Moscow. Their coup failed but it is quite possible that the present political and economic chaos in Russia could lead to the hard-liners returning to power. The Soviet empire is in ruins but Russia itself may well revert to authoritarian rule involving communist, nationalist and anti-Semitic elements.

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A second joke that has come true is a Russian anecdote from the 1980s: Census enumerator: Where do you live? Soviet citizen: Leningrad. Census enumerator: Where were you born? Soviet Citizen: St. Petersburg Census enumerator: Where did you go to school? Soviet citizen: Petrograd. Census enumerator: Where would you like to live? Soviet citizen: St. Petersburg. In the 1980s most so-called experts on the Soviet Union would have claimed that this was impossible but Leningrad has now been renamed St. Petersburg by a free vote of its citizens. We will know that things have gone badly wrong in Russia should it revert to being called Leningrad following a decision taken in Moscow. Even the most virulently "anti-Soviet" jokes at the expense of the founding fathers of the Soviet Union, who were the heroes of its supposed civic religion, can and could be told in a way that merely played with the absurd heroic official view of these icons, though it is easier to do so with the first of the two jokes cited below than with the second: A priest went to heaven and was asked by St. Peter if there was anything he wanted before he entered heaven. "Yes", said the priest, "I'd like a conducted tour of hell." He was taken to the very worst circle of hell and there was Hitler in boiling shit up to his nose and Stalin up to his waist in the same over-heated ordure. The priest immediately protested at this, saying, "Why is that scroundrel Stalin only in shit up to his waist? He was just as bad as Hitler!" "Yes", said his guide, "but he is standing on Lenin's shoulders." (Russian 1980s) Krupskaya [Lenin's widow] was giving a talk about Lenin at a school. "Lenin was a very kind man," she said, "One day he was shaving outside his dacha [villa in the country] with an old-fashioned razor. A little boy came to watch him and asked Lenin, 'What are you doing?' 'I'm shaving, little boy', Lenin replied." "Why does that make him a kind man?" asked one of the children. "Can't you see", said Krupskaya, "he could have cut the little boy's throat, but he didn't." (Told to the author by Alexander Shtromas in the 1980s) Both of these anecdotes refer to the brutal realities of Soviet history. On the basis of census and documentary evidence Rummel (1990) has calculated

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that Lenin and his party probably murdered over three million people down to 1922 and approaching a further two million were killed in the NEP period, prior to the murder of tens of millions more during collectivization and the purges. Rummel quotes Steinberg, Lenin's Commissar of Justice as asking him in exasperation " 'Why do we bother with a Commissariat of Justice? Let's call it frankly the Commissariat for Social Extermination and be done with it.' At which Lenin's face brightened and he replied, 'We'll put... that's exactly what it should be ... but we can't say that.'" (Rummel 1990: 33). Lenin, like Hitler and Stalin, was evil. For such a man to refrain from cutting one more child's throat was indeed an act of amazing kindness. The first joke cited about Lenin is, though, much funnier than the second because it is indirect and set in fantastic surroundings. There is a degree of ambiguity about it that would have enabled even an East European lecturer in Leninism to laugh at it, if the tone and context were right. By contrast the joke about the razor is too close to being an unambiguous, serious if symbolic, statement about Lenin's democidal tendencies and about the ideology that inspired them. As Lenin himself declared "When we are reproached with cruelty, we wonder how people can forget the most elementary Marxism" (quoted Rummel 1990: 1). Quite so. The razor joke makes a very clear point but its very strength in this respect undermines its potential as a joke. Once again we can see that there is necessarily a trade off at the margin between didacticism and humour (see Davies 1994: 75). It must then be stressed that the Eastern European political jokes are primarily jokes', they were constructed with ingenuity and were an end in themselves. The humorous frame was not just an excuse for making covert criticisms of the regime but was essential to the enjoyment of these anecdotes, which had the same structure as jokes told about other subjects or jokes told in other freer countries. The skill with which political jokes, like the example below from the 1960s retold by Emil Draitser in England in 1995, were constructed indicates that they were primarily intended to amuse: Three men were having an argument about whose wife had the best ass. The first man, a Nigerian, said: "My wife has got the biggest ass in the world, no one can beat it". Then a Frenchman said, "Who cares about size? My wife has got the most shapely ass in the world and in Paris that's what counts". Finally the Russian said: "When I leave to go to work in the morning, I slap my wife's ass and it is still vibrating when I come home; but that is only because we have the shortest working day in the world."

180 Conclusion

When I asked Emil Draitser, who had been living in the Soviet Union at the time, what the standard working week had been, he replied that it had been shortened from forty-one hours to forty hours in order to provide two days off at the week-end but that the working day had actually been lengthened to compensate for this. A working week of five seven-hour days and a six-hour day on Saturday (total 41 hours) had been replaced by a week of five eighthour days (total 40 hours). The change certainly did not justify the boastful official slogans about shorter hours but it must have been quite possible for someone who was satisfied with what is, on the face of it, a modest improvement, to enjoy the joke. Indeed, it must have even been possible for someone who was a true believer in the sloganeering of the country's bosses and ideologues to find it amusing, simply because it is such a well-made joke. Good jokes cannot be reduced to what seem to be equivalent serious statements; they have an essential ambiguity all of their own. This ambiguity is apparent in the ethnic and national jokes of the communist era. Take for example the following: Hungary and the Soviet Union have signed a treaty for the navigation of the Danube. The Soviets are to be allowed to navigate it lengthways and the Hungarians cross-ways. (East European 1980s) A Soviet agronomist was boasting that his country had five wheat crops every year. "How do you manage that?" he was asked. "Easy", he replied, "One from Poland, one from Hungary, one from Czechoslovakia ..." (East European 1970s)

Viewed from the standpoint of the people of the former Soviet dependencies in Eastern Europe, such jokes can be regarded as a means of revealing the way in which these countries were exploited by the Soviet Union. The peoples of the lesser countries of the Russian empire were trapped in three cages; two of them, (as described on pp. 81-82) were the supposedly "rational" bureaucratic cage and the irrational ideological cage, but for the subject peoples there was a third, the cage of national subordination, the knowledge that a powerful foreign nation controls and exploits your native country for its own ends. However, a Russian laughing at these jokes might well understand them in the same way, but take the view that his country was a powerful nation, indeed one of the great powers, and was justified in its harsh treatment of these lesser nations. A Russian could laugh at such jokes and incorporate them into an intensely chauvinistic Weltanschauung. Even today many Rus-

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sians see it as their right to dominate other nations, as the unfortunate Chechens have learnt to their cost. The ambiguity of the political jokes of Eastern Europe can be particularly well seen in the jokes about Jews/Jewish jokes that were told there. How, for example, can the jokes below be interpreted? Two Jews who had not seen each other for some time met by chance in the streets of Warsaw. One of them asked the other how his three sons were prospering in their chosen careers. "Well", said the second Jew, "My eldest son, Moishe, has a very well-paid job in Russia helping to build socialism. He's really very successful there. And there's my second son Chaim, he's got an equally good job in Prague. He's helping to build socialism, too." "What about your third son, Isaac?" asked his friend. "He was a very able boy." "Oh, he's emigrated to Israel", he said, "He's done very well too. He has an excellent job in Tel Aviv." "And is he also helping to build socialism?" "Oh no, he wouldn't do a thing like that; not to his own country." (Told to the author by a British Pole in 1979) A Soviet Jew was applying for a position. He filled in an application form on which he included the fact that he had a brother in Israel. In the interview he was asked if he had any relatives outside the motherland and replied, "None". The interviewer pointed out that there was a discrepancy, since on the application he wrote that his brother was in Israel. The applicant replied: "Oh, he's not outside the motherland, I am outside the motherland". (Kolasky 1972: 49) It is impossible to say whether these jokes are anti-Semitic or philo-Semitic. They could be told in quite different ways to different audiences with quite different implications. The Jews of the jokes are shown as outwitting the communist bureaucracy, which may or may not be a good thing, depending on the social position and political sympathies of the joke teller. The Jews are shown as an ethnic minority whose sympathies lie with another country. This could be interpreted as support for the official anti-Zionist (and in practice often anti-Semitic) line taken by the relevant governments or as sympathy for anyone able to win against the illegitimate rule of the communist hierarchy, or as both, or as neither. The more these jokes are analysed, the more possibilities become apparent and each possibility is itself irreduceably humorous and not

182 Conclusion

in any sense a clear serious statement. Indeed, this ambiguity is one of the factors that makes the first of the jokes in particular an exceptionally well made joke. A further significant category of jokes that do not exist are the missing jokes about drunken Jews discussed in Chapter 7 (see pp. 120-121). Apart from occasional anecdotes about toping schoolmasters in the old shtetlach, there are few jokes about Jews getting drunk and none about them becoming rowdy and rumbustious as in the jokes about drunken Irishmen, Finns, Scotsmen or Australians. Historically, observant Jews only drank in moderation, with meals and usually at home with their families. Even at Purim when it is a Jew's duty to mellow himself (with wine) until he cannot tell the difference between "cursed be Haman" and "blessed be Mordecai", this would have occurred in a manner and a context limited and bounded by custom and tradition. Likewise it was customary to drink heavily on Simchat Torah at the end of Sukkot [Tabernacles] but the deliberate controlled suspension of moderation on these holidays alone merely serves to emphasise the strength of the taboos against any kind of drunkeness and loss of self control during the rest of the year. There is no Jewish equivalent of the Irish or Australian bachelor culture of hard-drinking and brawling that even continues to be strong after marriage, causing friction and even violence between husband and wife. This particular war of the sexes (which in Scotland and America led Protestant women to campaign for the total prohibition of alcohol) was not fought in Jewish households. Jewish males dutifully married Jewish wives and set an uxorious example to the notoriously shikker goyim. This constraining framework of duty and relative female power in turn gave rise (particularly in America) to a rich pattern of Jewish jokes about Jewish women, notably the JAP jokes, Jewish wife jokes and Jewish mother jokes (Davies 1990b). That such jokes stem from a uniquely Jewish set of social circumstances is shown by the absence of similar jokes about Scottish mothers, Costa Rican American Princesses or Polish wives. There is a gap where the GAP (Goyisher American Princess) jokes ought to be; this is yet another set of jokes which could be told but are not. Nonetheless, as Alan Dundes ([1985]1987: 73) has pointed out, the JAP jokes are understood and laughed at by Protestants and Catholics as well as Jews and in Britain as well as America. Here I wish to suggest that the reason for this can be understood if we oppose them to a more recent set of quasiethnic jokes popular in both countries, the British Essex girl jokes, known in the United States as Blonde girl jokes. This provides a female version of the

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two opposed sets of ethnic jokes about the canny and the stupid on which much of the previous analysis of this book has been based. The Essex/Blonde girl jokes depict the butt of the jokes as having two main qualities: stupidity and promiscuity. The stupidity jokes overlap considerably with the earlier ethnic stupidity jokes told about the Irish and the Poles respectively, but the promiscuity jokes are quite new. The implication is that the Essex/Blonde girl is not merely stupid within the world of work but also in the marriage market-place, where she is unlikely to succeed in any attempt to obtain a worthwhile marriage partner through the selective use of allure. If the Essex/Blonde girl is foolish in being stupidly unthinking and (possibly in consequence) in dispensing her sexual favours much too readily, the opposite error is portrayed in the JAP jokes and jokes about Jewish wives, who are shown as lacking in interest in sex and as using sex in a calculating and begrudging way, as a means of obtaining material goods or a combination of attention and subordination from their men-folk. The opposition between the two kinds of joke is clearly brought out by mingling them: Q: What's the difference between an Essex girl and the Grand Old Duke of York? A: He only had 10,000 men. (Don 1991: 65) Have you heard of the Jewish nymphomaniac. No matter what, she had to have a man at least once a month. (Triverton 1981: 247) Q: What do most Essex girls do for a living? A: Temporary sees. (British 1990s) While Mr. and Mrs. Blumstein were gaping at the gorilla in the cage the huge animal became sexually aroused, reached through the bars, pulled Mrs. Blumstein into the cage and began ripping off her clothes. "What should I do?" she screamed hysterically to her husband. "Do what you do with me," replied Mr. Blumstein, "Tell him you got a headache". (Raskin 1985: 218) Essex man on phone: Ello, Darlin ... it's me. Essex girl: Who? Essex man: The bloke that 'ad yer behind the pub last night. Essex girl: Er, was it the Red Lion, Rose and Crown or the Bull? (Don 1991: 34)

184 Conclusion How do you know when an American Jewish princess has an orgasm? She drops her nail file. (Eliezer 1992: 15) What is the difference between a JAP and a Puerto Rican woman? The Puerto Rican woman has real orgasms and fake jewelry. (American 1991 ) How many Essex girls does it take to screw in a light bulb? None. Essex girls only screw in (Ford) Cortinas. (The Official Essex Girl Joke Book) What is the similarity between an Essex girl and Gorbachev? They both got f****d by seven men when they were on holiday. What is the difference between an Essex girl and Gorbachev? Gorbachev knew their names. {The Official Essex Girl Joke Book) What is Jewish foreplay? Thirty minutes of grovelling. (American 1980s) Essex man in restaurant: D'yer fancy coq au vin? Essex girl: No, ta! I fink 'aving sex in the back of a transit is really tacky! (Don 1991) The possible existence of these two opposed genres of jokes about women, i.e. jokes about the over-sexed and the under-sexed, was predicted by Anton Zijderveld (1983) on the basis of my original theses (Davies 1982a) that ethnic jokes came in opposed pairs, such as stupid/canny and cowardly/militaristic. At the time it was uncertain whether or not he was right (Davies 1984: 308), because the necessary pairs of jokes did not yet exist. However, the invention of the Essex/Blonde and JAP jokes shows that the theory can be used to predict jokes that will be invented in the future. It is also significant that they are related to the much earlier stupid/canny opposed pair of jokes. Essex/Blonde promiscuity jokes and JAP/Jewish wife frigidity jokes are the equivalent of the stupid and the canny jokes in a further sense, in that they represent the two opposed modes of failure that exist in the realm of female sexual behaviour, which is both a source of pleasure for women and a way of manipulating men. The JAP or the Jewish wife as depicted in the jokes is canny in using sex and the with-holding of sex as a means of controlling the Jewish male and extorting material goods from him, but is herself losing out on pleasure, including sexual pleasure, by being a begrudger. In being a begrudger, she loses out in her own area of activity (sex and family) in the

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same way that the over-calculative persons of the ethnic j o k e s about canniness d o in theirs. By contrast, the Essex/Blonde girl is depicted as stupid in exactly the same way as the butts of the ethnic j o k e s about stupidity and like them, she has no chance of making a successful career. 3 In addition, the Essex/Blonde girl is unlikely to succeed at the more traditional female goal of using sexuality to obtain and retain a worthwhile husband. Thus the Essex/ Blonde j o k e s and the JAP/Jewish wife jokes once again represent two opposed f o r m s of failure in a modern society, this time in the sphere of female sexuality. Neither j o k e could have been told in the past when female sexual behaviour was much more tightly controlled by traditional morality. T h e title of the American Blonde Girl jokes probably refers back to a time when w o m e n used peroxide to appear the kind of d u m b blonde that peroxidegentlemen preferred. It may even be the case that the ever-available but not very bright Blonde girl of the j o k e s was originally invented by American Jewish humorists, who called her into existence as the antithesis of the JAP/ Jewish wife joke. She represents forbidden pleasure, as opposed to moral duty, the moral duty of marrying a J A P to turn her into a JAW at the moral urging of a J A M in order that the Jewish community may survive and thrive. She is the desirable but deplorable golden shikse whom Jewish joke-tellers are not allowed to marry (Davies 1990b), who has been humorously described in Richman and O ' D o n n e l l ' s (1978) comic work The Shikse's guide to Jewish men: To a Jewish man, the Shikse is: Desirable because she is non-Jewish. Inferior because she is non-Jewish. Wonderful because she is non-Jewish. Forbidden because she is wonderful. Wonderful because she is forbidden. Given the substantial size of the American Jewish community and its genius for comedy, the American Blonde Girl jokes like the JAP/Jewish wife jokes, may well have begun in this way but then escaped into the larger world of the gentiles, where they become popular because they touched on a theme central to the entire society. Jokes that had begun as a comic meditation on Jewish endogamy took on a wider meaning for a larger audience because the time was right. In Britain the Essex Girl jokes are, like many British jokes, related to a question of social class. The girls of the j o k e s lived in Essex because that is w h e r e girls of plebian origin w e r e and are recruited f o r lower level

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white-collar work in the City of London, the home of banking and finance, where the jokes first circulated. Essex Girl jokes are the female successors of Britain's still thriving "stupid Irish" joke-cycle that was linked to the recruitment of unskilled Irish labourers to work on British building sites. The other commuter counties around London such as Surrey, Kent, Berkshire and Hertfordshire were much too middle-class and their girls far too ambitious to be the subject of such jokes. It may well have been British social class endogamy that put the sex in Essex. What do you call a Surrey girl between two Essex girls? An interpreter. (The Official Essex Girl Joke Book) The implication is that a man of securely upper-middle class status working in the City of London might well have sex with an Essex girl, but he wouldn't marry one because of the difference in their social origins. The Essex Girl was much more likely to marry a Dagenham man living on the vast Dagenham municipal estate in Essex and working on the assembly line at the Dagenham factory producing Ford motor cars. Hence the jokes: Q: Why does Essex girl get on so well with Dagenham man? A: Because they spend so much time in Fords. (The Official Essex Girl Jokebook) How does an Essex girl turn off the light after sex? She slams the door of the (Ford) Cortina. (The Official Essex Girl Joke Book) It is worth noting that most of those who figure in the earlier ethnic stupidity and canniness jokes discussed in previous chapters are male. It is possible to view the Blonde and Essex Girl jokes on the one hand and the JAP and Jewish wife jokes on the other as an extension of the stupidity and canniness jokes into the area of traditional female roles, at a time when these roles have been challenged both by the movement of women into skilled and responsible positions in the labour force and by the decline of traditional social controls over female sexual behaviour. The JAP and Jewish wife jokes emerged before the Blonde/Essex Girl jokes; they came initially from within the Jewish community, as an extension of the existing jokes about canny Jews to create a new script about Jewish women, who were comically depicted as being canny about sex. For once the canny jokes preceded the stupidity jokes, but not for long, as the corresponding opposed joke about female stupidity

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including sexual stupidity soon followed, as might be predicted from the "linked and opposed pairs" model of joking used throughout this book. Some of the Essex/Blonde Girl jokes were standard stupidity jokes and some were focussed on stupid (i.e. unthinking and reckless) female sexual behaviour. In both Britain and America they were pinned on suitable groups. In Britain, Essex girl jokes were fastened on a plebian group on the edge of London who commuted into the City of London, the heart of a key financial district, to work; they were the successors of the earlier British jokes about the Irish, which mocked a plebian group from the edge of the British Isles that had travelled to the economic centres of Britain in search of employment. The American Blonde Girl jokes make use of an earlier image of the dumb blonde, but it is possible that the Blonde jokes are in a direct sense the opposite of JAP and Jewish wife jokes, i.e. "the Blonde Girl" is their non-Jewish opposite number. The Blonde girl combines the goyisher kop of Jewish stupidity jokes about gentiles with a comic, reckless, uninhibited sexuality that is the exact opposite of the comically manipulative and canny attitude to sexual life ascribed to the JAP or to the Jewish wife in Jewish jokes. Once again the assumption that ethnic and other jokes ascribed to particular groups occur in opposed pairs enables us to explain several joke cycles with very few variables. Such a model also explains why the jokes have become universally popular beyond the boundaries of the groups where they originated. American Protestants and Roman Catholics laugh at JAP jokes and people from Wales, Scotland and Northern England, laugh at Essex girl jokes, even though there is no connection (in either sense of the word) between the joke-tellers and the butts of their jokes. The reason for this is that the jokes tap broader social questions, ones that must impinge on the thinking of anyone who has experienced some aspect of the very large change in female sex roles that has taken place in modern industrial societies in the last forty years. It has thus been possible to identify four opposed pairs of jokes, if we include the drunken/teetotal jokes analysed in Chapter 7 and the cowardly/ militaristic pair discussed in an earlier work (Davies 1990a). Jokes about (for example) cowardly Italians and militaristic Germans are about male roles in society, so they complement the pair of jokes about females in the JAP/JAW/ JAM and Essex/Blonde girl jokes. Work, war, alcohol and sex are all central aspects of human behaviour, each of which gives rise to two opposed patterns of jokes corresponding to two possible antithetical forms of failure as shown in Table 3.

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Table 3. Opposed sets of ethnic jokes Human activity underlying the joke

Comically defective attributes displayed in opposed sets of ethnic jokes Activity is not taken seriously enough

Butt of jokes is inept, heedless, reckless

Activity is taken too seriously with too much emphasis on long-term goals at the expense of present pleasure Butt of jokes is too calculative

Consequence is crass failure

Consequence is joyless failure

Stupidity

Canniness

Sex, family, female roles

Reckless and stupid promiscuity

Calculated and begrudging sexlessness

Consumption of Alcohol

Drunkeness

Bigoted Teetotalism

War

Cowardice

Militarism

Work and other similar purposive activities

The advantage of grouping jokes in pairs in this way is threefold: first it is economical; it provides a common explanation of pairs of jokes rather than having to explain each kind of joke separately. Second, it links separate and disparate pairs of jokes together; each pair represents two opposed modes of failure in relation to a central activity in modem society such as work, war, male drinking or female sex roles. Both of these advantages can be justified by recourse to the principle that one particular explanation of a phenomenon is to be preferred over another if it employs fewer variables. Finally it is helpful because it concentrates attention on the quality that is ascribed to the butts of the jokes rather than on the attitude towards the butts held by the joke-tellers. It is these comic attributes (stupid/canny, cowardly/militaristic, promiscuous/sexless, drunken/teetotal), stemming from four central social concerns of modern society that come first; it is almost as if these attributes then go in search of suitable groups to bear them. In the case of stupidity there is nearly always a local stupid group by definition, since every joke-telling centre has a corresponding periphery. In the case of the canny, the cowardly,

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the militarists, the drunken and the teetotal, the choice of the butt of the joke is determined by one aspect or another of the joked-about group's social, economic, religious or military history and in the case of the promiscuous and the sexless by the special factors discussed above. If there is no suitable local group, it is always possible to borrow one from a distant country such that Czechs tell jokes about cowardly Italians (Anekdoty Slunné Italie 1978) and Italians have jokes about canny Scots (Bramieri 1980). There may or may not be a corresponding blason populaire or seriously held stereotype. The JAP and JAW jokes preceded the Essex/Blonde girl jokes but both are relatively recent phenomena. In all other cases the types of jokes listed in the first column of Table 3 are older in origin than those in the second column. Ethnic jokes about stupidity are thousands of years old, as is humour about drunkenness and the origins of today's ethnic jokes about cowardice may be traced back to medieval times (Pinon 1980: 76-79). By contrast jokes about the canny probably date only from the eighteenth century, jokes about the teetotal began in the nineteenth century and ethnic jokes about militarists date only from the twentieth century, i.e.jokes about excessive self-control or rigid adherence to rules or to orders are a purely modern phenomenon and coincide with the growth of modern industrial societies, which require that individuals behave in a controlled and predictable way in accordance with the demands of the market place or of bureaucratic institutions. Jokes about stupidity, cowardice and drunkenness are primordial; it is only in modern times that they are twinned with jokes about the canny, the militarist and the teetotal. The latter forms of behaviour are of course contrary to the ethic of hedonistic individualism which is the other spirit of modern capitalism. Within the twentieth century this spirit has also manifest itself in much more permissive attitudes towards female sexual behaviour, particularly with the much more widespread use and availability of effective means of contraception (Davies 1975). It is this that has given rise to the most recent opposed pair of ethnic and quasi-ethnic jokes about women and sex. The fact that the twinning of the opposed comic characteristics employed in jokes only makes sense for modern societies indicates that this pattern of jokes is a reflection of the way these particular societies are organised, rather than being the product of some universal quality of the human mind. As Elliott Oring (1992: 52) has noted in another context, "perhaps Lévi-Strauss should have begun with jokes". In using a model employing a systematic pattern of dichotomies, I am not subscribing to Lévi-Strauss' structural anthropology nor to his contrast between the diachronic and synchronic (a distinciion made mainly to protect a discredited ideological theory of historical development).

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On the contrary the model is specifically designed to describe and analyse the humour of complex modern societies characterized by a high degree of moral uncertainty, whose citizens are able to reflect on the contrasts existing within their own society. The model used here is, though, to some extent inspired by the same tradition as Lévi-Strauss but reaches much further back in time to the earlier patterns of dichotomous social conditions (egoistic/altruistic, anomic/fatalistic) postulated by Durkheim (1970) in his study Suicide, a pattern, which he in turn may well have derived from Aristotle (Ethics Book 2 1104a 32 and 1107a 28 to 1108b 9). It is, however, primarily an empirical model derived from a study of the jokes themselves. It has always been possible to perceive the social and moral world in terms of some kind of a golden mean between extremes or to think in terms of pairs of opposites, but it is neither necessary to do so, nor is such an outlook favoured in all societies. A quite different kind of world view underpins the way of life of, say, Hindu ascetics who stare at the sun until they go blind, Japanese samurai committing seppuku as an expression of honour or those who are mocked in ethnic jokes for being excessively single-minded. The kind of moral balancing act and the pattern of sets of opposed jokes associated with it discussed above is likely only to be found in societies characterized by openness, individualism, diversity, self-awareness and moral uncertainty. These conditions are to be found particularly, but by no means exclusively, in modern Western capitalist societies. In this book several levels of explanation for the existence of particular ethnic and political jokes have been provided. In the case of the jokes about the stupid and the canny, for instance, the explanation of this linked pair of jokes in terms of the universal characteristics and pressures of industrial society is an explanation at the highest level of generality; it seeks to explain the existence of both kinds of joke in all the present day societies where such jokes are popular. Below this comes the general explanation of ethnic stupidity jokes in terms of the centre periphery model, of political stupidity jokes in terms of the absence of political competition and free speech and of political legitimacy in the countries where they are told and of ethnic canny jokes in terms of the existence of a strongly developed Protestant ethic or its secular equivalent among the butts of the jokes. Below these explanations come even more specific explanations of differences between the jokes told in some clusters of countries but not others such as the ethnic jokes about the filthy habits of the "stupid" told in North America but not in Britain, France and Ireland, a difference explained in terms of the differing patterns of values and attitudes towards "rational" hygiene found in the two groups of nations. Finally at the

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very lowest level lie explanations for merely idiosyncratic aspects of the stupid or canny jokes that are found in one country only. British jokes about Irish eccentricity that are rooted in the Irish tendency to use figurative language in mundane contexts — which is also the basis of the Irish people's well-deserved reputation for wit (Davies 1988b) — would be one such example; jokes about Jewish canniness that cannot be switched to another "canny" group such as the Scots (Davies 1986) would be another. These different levels of explanation do not contradict one another; what is important is that they should be kept separate and not muddled together. Each can be tested independently using appropriate data. None of them provides a full explanation of patterns of joking, though the more general levels of explanation explain more and are thus in one sense superior to those that have more limited explanatory power. However, taken together they provide a very comprehensive account of explanation for the remarkable and ordered patterns of joking that human beings have created, not by design but as a consequence of their everyday interactions and humorous exchanges.

Notes

Chapter 1: Introduction 1.

This comment has been ascribed to A. J. Balfour; presumably he was talking about Ireland.

Chapter 2: Fooltowns: Traditional and modern. Local, regional and ethnic jokes about stupidity 1.

Russell 1982: 4; for other references to and instances of ancient jokes see Clouston 1888; Esar 1978: 295, 517-518; Legman 1986: 123-134; Thompson 1977.

2.

SeeFairservis 1960:14, 85,90,126,182; Kees 1961: 39,142,308,332; Possony 1976: 4.

3.

Abdera was a Greek city colony in Thrace whose inhabitants traded with the Thracians of the interior but which eventually declined due to Thracian incursions. The Phrygians who lived in Anatolia, were not Greek but spoke a related language which was written using the Greek alphabet. The legendary King Midas, whose wish for a gold touch rebounded on his wife, is said to have been a Phrygian. The naming of outsiders based on the idea that their speech is like the uncertain stammer of the old or the nervous, is also to be found among the Amerindians of Guatemala.

4.

See Briggs 1970, Part A, 2: 3; Briggs 1977: 51-53; Burke 1978: 54; Chambers Encyclopaedia 1890 vol.5 entry on Gothamites; Clouston 1888: 16-17; Colleville and Zepelin 1896: 1-10; Craigie 1898: 220; Esar 1978: 6, 136-137, 153, 195-196, 295, 398; Feinburg 1978: 49; Gaspariková 1980: 125-162; Rockwell 1981: 285; Rosten 1970: 185; Schwartz 1973:109; Searing 1984:10; Shankar 1934:1-3; Sobotka 1919; Stapleton 1900: 9-11; Thompson 1977: 190; Weiss 1965: 400-401; Welsch 1967: 184.

5.

"Rivals" are often similar and rivalry is a controlled contest between peoples who in other contexts are allies not enemies. Sporting contests between rivals express this relationship, e.g. Oxford versus Cambridge,

194 Notes

Yorkshire versus Lancashire, England versus Australia, Liverpool versus Everton, Wales versus England. Supporters of these teams in a sense have a bigger investment in beating their rival than in winning against a team of distant or alien origin, but it would be foolish to infer from this that they were enemies in any other context. It is also easy to see how this situation can go wrong, as in the 'bodyline bowling' row of the 1930s when the Australians objected to Harold Larwood's successful but possibly dangerous fast bowling in a cricket match between England and Australia. Larwood, though, later emigrated to Australia and became an Australian, a feat which a real enemy of Australia such as General Hideki Tojo, could never have accomplished. Also the English and the Australians remained united by the fact that they (together with the peoples of India, Pakistan, the West Indies, New Zealand, South Africa and Sri Lanka) were playing an esoteric game which is beyond the capacity of other less civilized nations. We should not confuse playful aggression with real hostility. There is such an enormous quantitative difference between them as to make them qualitatively different. 6.

The same joke was told to me by a Syrian engineer in Swansea, South Wales in 1984; see also Clouston 1888: 16, and pp. 169-170 for further Homsiot jokes.

7.

Collected by Jacqueline Ferraro. This is a very clever twist on a standard joke c.f. Ferguson 1933: 167.

8.

See Aggie Games you can't lose 1977; Best of 606 Aggie Jokes 1976; 101 Aggie Jokes, 8 vols, 1965-79; Costnet 1975; Key 1949: 244; Legman 1986, 2: 961, Randolph 1952, Stewart 1963: 894-899; Uva and Tech, The Joke's on You 1987.

9.

See for example W.B. 1928; Crompton 1970a; Crompton 1970b; Howe 1891; Joe Miller's Jests [1739] 1963: 42-43; Joell 1944; Mitchell and Waddell 1971; Mr. Punch's Country Life 1908: 45; Spencer 1938: 265; Wright 1935: 155-156 and UCBFA.

10. References to Polack jokes are very rare prior to the 1960s and their content is very uncertain since those who refer to them often don't quote the actual jokes. See for instance Cerf 1959: 384; Stackman 1953: 78; Welsch 1967: 184 (jokes exchanged between northside and southside Polacks in Milwaukee in 1944); Wolff, Smith and Murray 1934: 356; Yao 1946: xxv.

Notes

195

11. On the poor peasant origins, low occupational status and slow upward mobility of those ethnic groups who are the butt of jokes about stupidity see Andreski 1973: 63, 83; Bodnar 1976: 44-72; Clark 1962: 76-77, 165-166; The Diverse Ethnic Roots of Bay Residents 1984; Dundes 1971 : 199-201; Edwards 1975:132; Fox 1970:58-60; Greeley 1972:121-124; Haiman 1974: 3; Helmreich 1982:40-41; Kusielewicz 1973: 102; Lang 1976; Lutz 1962:95,146-147; Lyon 1969:167; Morawska 1977; Nichols 1973: 28; Renkiewicz 1973: vii, 10, 13, 21; Sowell 1981; Stephenson 1951: 571; Zurawski 1975: 123-132. 12. On the contrary jokes about Jews implied theywere too clever. See Davies 1986: 39-52; Davies 1990: 115-123; Wolff, Smith and Murray 1934.

Chapter 3: From the Milesians to the Milesians: The Irish-Pontian joke, its history and its absence in China and Japan 1.

The first version is the (1976) English translation by J.Thomson and H.Tredennick of an epigram ascribed to the mythical bard Demodocus. See Aristotle (1976) Ethics Book 7, 1151a 4-23: 245. The second version is my rewording of the first.

2.

In Georg Autenrieth's (1958) Homeric Dictionary Miletus is described as an Ionian city in Caria.

3.

From the Taiping Miscellany. An essentially similar joke about Poles is told in modern America.

4.

From the Record of Glee, attributed to Hou Bai, Sui dynasty. Versions of this tale are common in other cultures also.

5.

From Record of Merriment, a collection by Zhou Wenqi of the Song period.

6.

From General Chatter, Past and Present compiled by Feng Menglong. This is often told as an ethnic joke about stupidity in other cultures.

7.

The public lecture I gave in Osaka in 1995 organized by the Japanese Society for Humour was entitled "Are jokes about the stupidity of other ethnic, regional and political groups a universal phenomenon .... or is Japan an exception?" Thanks to the translating skills of Dr. Goh Abe and his colleagues, the Japanese audience were able to laugh at a diverse selection of stupidity jokes from a number of countries including several jokes included in this book. This proved that there is no impenetrable

196 Notes

linguistic or cultural barrier to the appreciation of these jokes by monoglot Japanese. However, they have no indigenous or imitative tradition of telling such jokes.

Chapter 4: The Protestant ethic and the comic spirit of capitalism 1.

Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism^ was originally published in German in 1904-5 and reprinted with considerable revisions in 1920. The translation used here is by Talcott Parsons 1930, and all references refer to this translation.

2.

For humour on this theme see Burns 1970: 73-76.

3.

This book was originally published in the United States in 1958 but the internal evidence from the joke itself such as the low price of the truck farm shows that the joke is much older and was probably gleaned from a much earlier publication or recorded by the editor at a much earlier time.

4.

See Weber 1930: 24: "the old medieval (even ancient) idea of God's book-keeping is carried by Bunyan to the characteristically tasteless extreme of comparing the relation of a sinner to his God with that of customer and shop-keeper."

5.

I can say this on the basis of interviews with leading compilers of joke books, notably Larry Wilde, Henry D.Spalding and Russell Lewis and from having edited joke-books myself: Davies and Lewis 1973; Davies 1978.

6.

The Geist ofBanko meaning the spirit of bank money sounds very much like the Geist [ghost] of Banquo as seen by Macbeth. This is an appropriately modified version of a joke made by Heinrich Heine about Hamburg, a joke which was later studied by Freud.

7.

The verse expresses the Scots' comic view of the English comic view of the Scots. There is also probably an indirect reference here to The Shorter Catechism of the Westminster Assembly. "Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him for ever but men may have subordinate ends ... men ought to be diligent in their particular callings, for this end, that they may provide for themselves and their families. Do your own business and work with your own hands, that ye may lack nothing" — 1. Thess. iv, 11, 12 (Vincent [1674] 1980: 13).

Notes

197

Chapter 5: Stupidity and rationality: Jokes from the iron cage 1.

For Australian jokes about the Irish see Howcroft 1977:105. The Americans also told jokes about Irish stupidity until the 1940s e.g. see Cerf 1945 which has jokes about stupid Irishmen: 58, 82-83, 97, 108, 111, 140, 149, 159, 167, 206, 211, 220, 237, but none about Polish Americans.

2.

See Steeman 1977: 95: "The submarine seems to inspire our French friends and it is with 'chips' the most popular subject of Belgian jokes invented in France."

3.

The advantage of the metaphor is that everyone can readily understand the disastrous but comic consequences of introducing a stupid outsider into a plane or submarine. One does not need any specialized knowledge to understand the physical and technical parameters of the situation described in the joke.

4.

These jokes are far from being a purely American phenomena. The French tell similar jokes about lazy Corsicans or people from the Midi, the South of France, the Dutch tell them about Surinamers and the British have Andy Capp who has become popular all over the world.

5.

In fairness to the Germans it also says "Défense de se dépendre dehors".

6.

The problems the former socialist East European economies encountered as a result of their inherant irrationality stemming from their attempts to suppress and control spontaneous forms of order were predicted well in advance by such far-sighted economists and sociologists as Vilfredo Pareto, Ludwig von Mises (1974: 211-220) and Max Weber (1968:81-113).

Chapter 6: Humour for the future and a future for humour 1.

It may be objected that the stress I have placed on the jokes about the politicians being stupid is one-sided and that I have neglected jokes about their more evil and sinister qualities such as, say, the jokes about Lenin and Stalin being cruel tyrants. These jokes, however, tell us nothing new for they are literally true, they simply restate in comic form a ghastly historical fact known to us in great detail from other sources (e.g. see Conquest 1971). The jokes in a sense do not even exaggerate, for no

198 Notes exaggeration is possible. Admittedly it was and is gratifying to see the "sacred" figure of Lenin revealed in his true viciousness and the nonsense of the cult of Lenin thoroughly mocked. Nonetheless these are jokes about a particular individual and like all jokes, they are ambiguous. The jokes about the stupidity of politicians, however, are jokes about a category in the same sense as similar jokes about an ethnic group or a social class. The members of these social categories are not literally stupid individuals in the sense that Lenin and Stalin really were monsters. The jokes about stupidity are an index of social position; in this case a statement about the monopoly of power of and the absence of truly competitive achievement enjoyed and displayed by the members of the category. Such an inference can only be made on the basis of a comparative analysis of these and similar jokes from other societies such as that employed in this book. A similar point can be made about the militia jokes which are quite different from, say, the jokes about the brutality of the security police. The brutality was real; the stupidity may or may not have been and in the jokes was primarily a way of signalling the social origins of the militia and their lack of legitimacy through merit. 2.

My comments on the militia are also based on contemporary discussions with East European criminologists in the 1980s. I deliberately did not record any names.

3.

Upper class twits have been a consistent butt of British humour from W.S.Gilbert (1983), Iolanthe Act II to Monty Python. In American jokes they are tongue tied to the point of double dumbness. See Cerf 1945: 111; Ernst 1919: 90; Wilde 1978: 65. For further jokes both British and American about English upper class twits see Barr and York 1982 and 1983; Bentley and Esar 1962: 21, 31. Bradley 1982: 222, notes 79-80; Hicks 1936: 98-99; Hoggart 1981: 39; Lynn and Jay 1981; Melly and Fawkes 1962 and 1979b: 7, 27.

4.

For jokes about Graf Bobby, Arisztid and Taszilo and other dim Central European aristocrats see Böhm 1983: 9-12; Ember 1988: 24-30; Grill 1949; Heinrich and Lothar 1979.

5.

Dr. A.M.Kirakosian was said in 1972 to be the director of Radio Erivan/ Armenia broadcasting on 74,26 m; 347,6 m; 41,27 m; 248,42 m; 1181, 1 m; 4, 5 m; 4, 25 m. See Schiff 1975 and Parth and Schiff 1978. According to Emil Abramovitch Draitser formerly of Krokodil, meetings

Notes 199

in Moscow at which a speaker from Radio Erivan/Armenia was announced used to dissolve into laughter. 6.

See also Fischer 1973:259. The implication of these jokes for the future was that the peoples of Eastern Europe during Communist rule knew that the achievement of a Utopian Communist society was both impossible and undesirable. The people knew that the socialist societies in which they lived were doomed to economic, technological and social stagnation and lacking in the kinds of innovation and entrepreneurship found almost exclusively in capitalist societies; they knew they were trapped in stupidity at a societal level and that the official view of a rosy future following the "transition to communism" was a meaningless Marxist mirage. It is not possible to know what society will be like in the future since, inter alia we cannot predict future scientific discoveries or technological innovations, but we can say what it will not be like. To run a complex, industrial society on the basis of communism is impossible (Polanyi 1940). The jokes indicated a profound disillusionment, a sense that the system had failed and was doomed, which provided a humour for the future but an uncertain future. The inner contradictions of the system were much clearer to people than the likely direction of its evolution or even the possible alternatives available. The public opinion surveys done in Czechoslovakia in 1968 bring out the people's low opinion of politicians (Piekalkiewicz 1972: 124-125), their lack of confidence in political organizations (Piekalkiewicz 1972: 133-134), their distrust of political monopoly (Piekalkiewicz 1972:171-175) and their knowledge that the economy had failed (Piekalkiewicz 1972: 274, 286290). However, no clear popular view of the kind of radical change needed emerged. People knew what they wanted but not how to get there, though a different set of questions might have produced different results.

7.

In the last years of the crumbling Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Emperor Franz Josef II was known in the Czech lands as Old Procházka (Hasek 1974: 261). A photograph of the Emperor appeared in a newspaper with the title "Procházka na moste" [i.e. "A walk on the bridge"]. However, this phrase can also mean Mr. Procháska on the bridge, Procháska being a common Czech name with the same pronunciation. The joke soon caught on and provided the Czechs with an irreverent nickname for the emperor such that even advertisements for walking sticks or "sticks-for-the walk", i.e., "sticks to beat the Emperor with"

200 Notes

could be seen as a subversive joke. Under Communism the Czechs recreated this tradition of seeing or planting subversion in everyday objects, such as the subversive symbols concealed in the design of their then paper currency. 8.

Now that there is freedom of speech in the post-socialist countries of Eastern Europe there has been a sad decline in the number and quality of political jokes and anecdotes in those countries. The jokes flourished best during the decadence of late socialism when ambiguous mockery of the system through jokes in private was possible but not public criticism. It would be false to say that jokes are a substitute for political activity but it is true that when opportunities for real opposition and resistance to socialist tyranny are lacking, people turn to jokes instead. Jokes are a mere barometer of political pressure.

9.

The decor of many bars where jokes were told in Prague in the 1980s was such as to create a feeling of a Western oasis where the customers could forget or even mock socialism, in a setting decorated with sexist naked ladies and racist gollywogs, those two essential icons and witnesses of personal freedom, which advertised American, British, Canadian and German drinks; western pop music was played and the customers wore shirts that featured Old Glory, the Union Jack and the Maple Leaf. Only the shortage of decent food reminded the customers that this was a socialist country.

Chapter 7: Ethnic jokes about alcohol: A study of the humour of ambivalence 1.

Polish 1980s. See also Davis 1985: 399-400, and Letter from Warsaw 1982. For further jokes see Meyer and Meyer 1978. On some of the underlying alcohol problems of Eastern Europe see "Alcohol problems in Eastern Europe" 1985; Bokun 1986: 69; and Davis 1985.

2.

See Dumazedier 1977: 27-33; Geikie 1904: 317; Kitson Clark 1962: 127-129; Lambert 1975; Lowerson and Myerscough 1977: 8-16,68-70; Roberts 1981; Zelnik 1976.

3.

See Fisher and Brougham 1928: 12-13, 208; Gusfield 1962: 101-110; Short 1984: 71.

4.

e.g. see Meyer and Meyer 1978; Nisard 1864; Stych 1970; Tiinnes und Schäl Witze 1977.

Notes

201

5.

I am indebted to Richard Scase for pointing out to me the importance of the "drunk" comedian in Sweden. See also the relevant comment by Freud 1960: 126-127.

6.

See also Chappell 1986: 195; Jarvenpa 1976: 90-91.

7.

The table in the text is based on a content analysis of a 5 best-selling joke-books by Wilde 1973, 1974, 1975, 1978 and 1979. The tables below provide a statistical demonstration of the relationship noted in the text which should be obvious from inspection of Table 2 anyway. Table 4. Irish and Polish jokes about drinking

Irish Poles Total

Drink

Other

Total

167 9 176

411

578 666 1244

657 1068

Corrected Chi square = 190.98 Corrected Tschuprow's Τ = 0.3918 Ρ = 0 (i.e. highly significant)

Table 5. Irish and Polish jokes about stupidity

Irish Poles Total

Stupidity

Other

Total

153 455 608

425 211 636

578 666 1244

Corrected Chi square = 216.87 Corrected Tschuprow's Τ = 0.4159 Ρ = O (i.e. highly significant)

It should be also be noted that over half the French jokes in the Irish section of the Guillois and Guillois (1979) anthology of jokes about the peoples of the British Isles are about drinking, which is a far higher proportion than in the English, Scots and Welsh sections. 8.

See Chappell 1986: 195; Jellinek 1962: 382; Sargent 1979: 8 i ; Sowell 1981.

202 Notes 9.

It had been like this throughout the previous week-end as well, a fourday drinking extravanganza involving crowds of up to a quarter of a million, that must have made General Oglethorpe turn in his grave. See reports in the Savannah Evening Press, Savannah, Georgia, March 16th to 18th 1987 and also the Savannah Morning News, Wednesday 18th March 1987, notably the report by Sonya T. Gordon on p. 1 "Drinks dominate riverfront in revelry following parade". Elsewhere in the paper Lt. Steve Smith of the local police is quoted: "If Saint Patrick's Day gets any worse we're going to have to apologise to God for another Sodom and Gomorrah". There is also a local Georgia tradition of jokes about alcohol and Savannah: "A stranger travelling in Georgia is always asked the following questions. In Atlanta: 'What's your business?' In Macon: 'What's your religion?' In Augusta: 'What was your mother's maiden name?' In Savannah: 'What do you want to drink?'"

10. See Bermant 1986: 71-72; Rosemarine 1962; Snyder 1962: 206-207 and University of California at Berkeley Folklore Archive Yiddish-American files. 11. See Ford 1901:121-126; Geikie 1904:312-320; Ramsay 1873:101-126; Rogers 1867: v-vii, xii. 12. See Allen 1968: 181, 186; Kessel and Walton 1969: 19; Littlewood and Lipsedge 1982: 94; O'Connor 1977: 12; Wilson 1980: 15, 17. 13. In addition to those in the text, see for example Elliott 1968; Howe 1891a; Crosland 1908 and also Hales 1910 and McCorresken 1981: 222-231.

Chapter 8: "Nasty" legends, "sick" humour and ethnic jokes about stupidity 1.

For further examples of cannibal jokes from many countries see Adams 1886:15; Alvin 1983: 57-62; Bell 1980:198;Climent-Gallant 1979:69; Eco 1983; Gorer 1945: 209; Jerrold 1913: 260; Marshall 1979: 177; Mossessons 1974; Scopelliti 1981: 47; 97; and Vincent 1977: 25.

2.

For further examples see Brunvant 1981: 94; Janssen 1970: 738; Smith 1986: 26, 104, 106.

3.

For further examples see America, the Golden Age of Comedy 1973: 127; Barlow et al. 1980: 81, Delaney and Delaney 1979: 83; Jacobs 1903: 273; Kimmins 1928: 159.

Notes 203

4.

See also Smith 1986: 95. For instances of cats and dogs eaten by the besieged see Bevan 1911: 86-97; Moglia 1981: 338, Taylor (ed.) 1906: 238.

5.

See Davies 1982a, 1987a, 1987b, 1988, 1990a.

6.

Real book-sellers on the contrary (in the twentieth century at least) seem to avoid such themes. When J. K. Galbraith asked at La Guardia airport if they had a copy of his book The Great Crash 1929 (which is in fact about the collapse of the stock market) the woman in charge of the airport book store replied, "That's certainly not a title you could sell in an airport" (Galbraith 1961: 19).

7.

The English editor, Lang, manages to misquote the original American version in such a way as to lose half the point of the joke thus fulfilling an American comic script about the English.

Chapter 9: Making fan of work: Humor as sociology in the humorous writings ofH. G. Wells 1.

All three are to be found in H. G. Wells ( 1928) A Quartette of Comedies', subsequent quotations from this edition are cited parenthetically in the text. I have deliberately chosen to analyse Wells' successful writings and to ignore Love and Mr. Lewisham (of which Wells himself wrote: "The attempts to get comic relief into Love and Mr. Lewisham certainly failed". See Harris Wilson: Introduction to H. G. Wells' The Wealth of Mr. Waddy 1969: XIV. I have also omitted Wells' late humorous novel You Can't Be Too Careful (1941) which is a total failure. For our present purposes The Wealth of Mr. Waddy may be regarded as an early version of Kipps.

2.

From Frederick W. Taylor, author of The Principles of Scientific Management (1911), an American engineer who rationalized work so as to attempt to produce maximum productivity by rigidly programming the actions of each individual. His system, known as Taylorism, was, as one might expect, much admired by Lenin.

3.

On the reality behind the satire see Weber 1930: 181-182; Wilson 1969: 41-44, 259.

4.

Anthony West (1984:196-197) notes that his father H. G. Wells strongly

204 Notes

deprecated the life led by H. G.'s own elder brother, who became a permanent drop-out cycling round rural England like Mr. Polly, earning pin-money as an itinerant clock mender and watch-pedlar. 5.

See Herbert Spencer's The Man Versus the State, ed. by Donald G. MacRae (1969). MacRae forcefully indicates Spencer's importance and criticizes those who have condemned him without reading him. A perusal of Samuel Smiles' The Autobiography of Samuel Smiles 1905:131 indicates that Smiles is a very different figure from the caricature mocked by Wells. The adjective Smilesian describes the self-help virtues advocated by Smiles.

Chapter 10: Conclusion 1.

It is much easier and cheaper to administer questionnaires to students than to a random sample of the population but it is also illicit then to use the results as if they were typical of that wider population.

2.

(Inspector Gregory): "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?" (Sherlock Holmes): "To the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime." (Inspector Gregory): "The dog did nothing in the night-time." "That was the curious incident," remarked Sherlock Holmes. (Conan Doyle [1892] 1985:250)

3.

Elliott Oring (personal communication) has shrewdly noticed that Β londe girl style jokes are also told in America about sorority girls and about Β YU (Brigham Young University, the main Mormon university) co-eds, the latter of whom in particular are sexually conservative. He deduces from this that the Blonde/Essex girl jokes are about women who are vigorously pursuing traditional female objectives to the neglect of the modern alternative of being clever and pursuing an indendent career. Thus, the reason he gives for the Essex Girl/Blonde Girls/BYU Girl (sorority girl) being labelled stupid and promiscuous is that they have an old-fashioned sense of priorities with success through sex being emphasised at the expense of success through brains. If I cannot follow him in this argument, it is because I see the opposite of the Essex/Blonde girl of the jokes as being not the independent career woman but as being the JAP who insists "no chuppe, no stuppe!".

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= = = =

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Index

Abdera 11-12, 32-33,64, 193 Aberdeen and Aberdonians 2,18,48,50, 133 Acquaviva, S. S. 59, 205 Alcohol 7-8,101-136,148,182,187-189, 200-202 America and Americans 2,8-9,22-23,31, 35, 44, 46-47, 55, 64-65, 71-73, 7677,85-86,91,101-103,105,107-111, 114,120,122-123,134,140,143,155, 167-168,170,173-174,177,182,184185, 187, 190, 197-198, 200, 203 Amis, Kingsley 153 Andreski, Stanislav L. 195, 206 Anti-Semitism, 23, 121, 141, 177, 181 Aristophanes 35 Aristotle 190, 195, 206 Athens and Athenians 6, 11, 30, 33-34, 68 Australia and Australians 3, 61, 64, 67, 101-103,105-109,114,116-117,121, 134, 140, 182, 194, 197

Bacon, Seldon D. 103, 206 Baechler, Jean 20, 206 Bales, Robert 111,206 Barry, Norman 52, 162, 206 Bartley, John Oliver 46, 111, 206 Beckmann, Petr 80, 82, 88, 95-96, 206 Belgium and the Belgians 2, 4-5, 9, 12, 29-30,61,63-64,67,87,101,145,197 Bell, Daniel 58, 70, 151, 159, 206 Bergson, Henri 59, 207 Blair, Tony 88 Blonde girl jokes see Essex girl jokes Boetia and the Boetians 11,32,34-35,68

Bradbury, Malcolm 131, 207 Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable 11, 19,21,27 Briggs, Katherine M. 12, 193, 207 Britain and British 4, 6, 8-9, 14, 19, 21, 23, 29, 31-32, 35, 39-40, 61, 64, 67, 75,85-86,93,103,107-108, 111, 114, 117,126,133,140,143,166,170,172, 174,177,182-183,185,187,190-191, 198, 200, 201 Brown hatters 21 Brunvand, Jan H. 144, 208 Buck, R. J. 34-35, 208 Bureaucracy 7, 9, 41, 52, 59, 65-66, 68, 70, 77, 79-80, 96, 156, 160-161, 189 Bush, George 177 Butterfield, Fox 38, 91-92, 208

Calculativeness see 'rationality' Calvinism and Calvinists 7, 43-63, 73, 123-124, 126, 128-130, 170, 196 Canada and Canadians 2,8-9,31,40,4748, 69, 101, 103, 107, 172-174, 200 Cannibalism, jokes about 137-139, 141, 150, 202 Capitalism and capitalists 9-10, 43-62, 81-82, 161, 171, 177, 189-190, 196 Cardis and Cardiganshire 2, 55-58, 60, 102, 132 Catholicism, Roman 4, 19, 44, 53, 6162, 103, 111-113, 121, 129, 134, 165166, 169, 187 Centre and periphery 1-5, 11, 13-14, 2931, 33-35, 63-64, 82, 85, 166, 168170, 190 Cerf, Bennett 49, 72, 194, 197, 198, 208

230

Index

China and the Chinese 35-40,91-92,121, 134, 140, 167, 170, 195 Christian Brothers 166 Christians 137, 141 Clark, G. Kitson 200, 208 Clements, William 108-109, 208 Clouston, William A. 33, 193, 208 Cobb, Irvin S. 49, 73-76, 129, 149, 168, 209 Coghill, Neville 107, 209 Communism see socialism Comparative method, nature and use of 167-170 Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur and Sherlock Holmes 167, 204 Conflict and hostility 4-6, 8-9, 20-25, 148, 165-167, 176 Conquest, Robert 91, 197, 209 Conway, Ronald 116, 209 Cook, J. M. 27, 34, 209 Cowardice see militarism, jokes about Crosland, Thomas W. Hodgson 202,209 Cunningham, Hugh 58, 210 Czechs and the Czech lands 3,77-78,80, 82, 87-88, 90-91, 96, 99, 199-200

Davies, D. Elwyn 58, 210 Davis, H. W. C. 19, 210 Davis, Robert B. 200,211 Demand, Ν. H. 34-35,211 Denmark and the Danes 4,16,21,40,166 Deriabin, Peter 175-176, 211 Diana, Princess of Wales 166 Dirt and dirtiness, jokes about 8,86,173174, 190 Division of labour, the 65-66,68-69,158 Douglas-Home, Sir Alec 88-90, 177 Draitser, Emil Abramovitch 78,93,179180, 198,211 Dumazedier, Joffre 200, 211

Dundes, Alan 61, 85,109,167,174-176, 182, 195,211 Dunham, A. G. 27, 34,211 Dunne, Finley P. 120,211 Durkheim, Emile 160, 190, 212 Dutch, the 2-4, 12, 21,46,56, 60-61,64, 101, 197

Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union 5, 10,41,63-64, 77-83,87-91, 94-99, 102, 161, 174-181, 197-200 Eco, Umberto 202, 212 Economizing see 'rationality' Efron, Edith 146, 212 El-Shamy, Hassan M. 35, 212 Engels, Friedrich 19, 212 England and the English 2,12-13,18,2021,23-24,32,46,55,75,93,110,125, 129-132,166,187,194,196,201,203 Essex girl jokes and Blonde girl jokes 182-187, 189, 204 Evans, Eifion 57, 212

Fairservis, Walter A. 35, 193, 212 Feinburg, Leonard 33, 193, 212 Ferguson, Leonard 52, 126-128, 130, 133, 148,212 Finland and the Finns 3, 17, 105-107, 109, 114, 121, 134, 182 Ford, Gerald 88-89, 177 Ford, Robert 125, 127, 129, 202, 213 France and the French 2,4-5,8-9,12,16, 29-30, 39, 48, 55, 61, 72, 101, 106, 111, 140, 172-174, 197, 201 Francis- Jones, Gwyneth 58, 213 Freud, Sigmund 196, 201, 213

Galbraith, John Kenneth 203, 213

Index 231

Gaspariková, Viera 193, 213 Geikie, Sir Archibald 124,200,202,213 Germany and the Germans 2, 5, 12, 1920, 22, 43-44, 46, 48, 54-55, 62, 71, 74-77,85,93,109-110,129,138,146, 166, 170, 187, 196-197, 198, 200 Gibney, Frank 175-176,211 Gilbert, Sir William S. 105, 198, 213 Gillespie, John 129,213 Ginger, Ray 47, 213 Glad, Donald D. 110, 120, 122, 213 Glatt, M. M. 116, 121,213 Gorbachev, Mikhail 94, 99, 177, 184 Gorer, Geoffrey 202, 214 Gotham 12-14,20-21, 193 Goyim and Goyisher kop 121, 187 Graf Bobby 93, 198 Greece and the Greeks 3, 6, 11, 27, 30, 32-34,48, 167, 193, 195 Greeley, Andrew M. 110, 119, 195, 214

Hallpike, C. R. 32,214 Hama see Horns Haraszti, Miklos 82, 214 Hardcastle, William 131, 214 Hasek, Jaroslav 10, 99, 151, 163, 199, 214 Helitzer, Mel vin 146, 215 Helmreich, William Β. 195, 215 Herodotos 33, 215 Herzberg, Frederick 58, 151, 160, 215 Hirszowicz, Maria 78-80, 96, 159, 215 Hobbes, Thomas 172 Hoggart, Simon 198, 215 Holbek, Bengt 16,28,145-147,165-166, 215 Holland see Dutch Homer 33, 195 Horns and Hama 15, 169-172, 194 Hostility see conflict

Hücker, C. 38, 216 Ireland and the Irish 2-4, 9, 13-14, 17, 21-24, 27-32, 35, 40, 47, 61, 63-67, 70,77,87,91,101,105,107-124,126, 130,133-135,145,148-149,165,172, 174,182-183,186-187,190-191, 193, 197,201,202 Iron cage, the 53, 58-59, 62-63, 77, 82 Italians and Italian-Americans 2, 15, 17, 48, 91, 110, 116, 134, 167, 172-173, 187, 189

Jackson, W. Turrentine 45, 216 Janssen, Christian 202, 216 JAP jokes 182-187, 189, 204 Japan and the Japanese 8,22,38-41,170, 190, 195-196 Jellinek, E. M. 106, 201, 216 Jews and Jewish humour 2-3, 8, 22-23, 61,68, 75, 94-95, 101-102, 105, 110, 116,120-123,134,141,181-187,191, 195, 202 Jiang Yu Dai 37, 216 Jokes that do not exist 167-168, 172-174 Junior, Allan 49, 216

Kees, Hermann 35, 193, 217 Key, Jr., Vladimir O. 194,217 Kolasky, John 78,81,88,96-97,181,217 Kowallis, J. 35,217 Kravitz, Seth 165-166,217 Kumar, Krishan 28, 151, 217

Lancashire and Lancastrians 4, 17-20, 194 Langdon-Davies, John 95, 218 Lauder, Sir Harry 48, 218

232

Index

Lebanon see Syria Legman, Gershon 193, 218 Lenin, V. I. 178-179, 197-198, 203 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 189-190 Lewis, Russell 196 Lewis, Sinclair 131, 163-164, 218 Lolli, Giorgio 116,218 Lowerson, John 58, 200, 218 Lucia, Salvatore P. 116, 218 McCosh, Sandra 23-24, 174, 219 MacHale, Des 117, 219 Marshall, Gordon 44, 219 Martin, David 62, 219 Marxism and Marx, Karl 98, 179, 189, 199 Maslow, A. H. 159,219 Meyerson, Abraham 103, 219 Miletus 6, 27, 33, 195 Militarism, jokes about 188-189 Mises, Ludwig von 197, 220 Moodie, Dunbar 62, 220 Morgan, Kenneth O. 57-58, 220 Mr. Punch 51, 140, 148, 194, 220 Myerscough, John 58, 200, 218

Nagoya 38 Netherlands see Dutch New England and New Englanders 2,44, 46-47,49-50,55-56,60,73,123,127, 155 Newall, VenetiaJ. 138, 221 Newfoundland and 'Newfies' 2, 4, 8-9, 13,31,40, 69, 101, 166, 173

O'Connor, Joyce 103,106, 111, 120,202, 221 Opposed pairs of jokes, the pattern of 7, 102, 171, 182-190 Oring, Elliott 142-143, 189, 204, 221

Orwell, George 163, 221 Ostfriesland and Ostfriesenwitze 64, 70, 166 Oxley, H. G. 116, 221

2, 20,

Pähl, Raymond E. 14,221 Pareto, Vilfredo 197 Parrinder, Patrick 153, 221 Parsimony see 'rationality' Penclawdd see Three Crosses Periphery see centre and periphery Petropoulos, E. 27, 221 Pets, jokes about eating 137, 139-141, 150 Pittman, David J. 110, 222 Polanyi, Michael 52,79,81,95,162,199, 222 Poles and Polish-Americans 2,4,8-9,13, 17, 21-24, 31, 63-67, 69-70, 77, 81, 88, 91, 97, 101, 105, 108-109, 111, 167-168,172,174,181,194-195,197, 201 Political correctness 96, 173, 175-177 Political jokes 77-83, 85-100, 175 Politicians 87-90, 94-95, 198, 199 Popovsky, Mark 95, 222 Presbyterians see Calvinists Protestants and the Protestant ethic 7,19, 43-62, 103, 111-112, 127, 129-130, 134,155,165,170-172,187,190,196,

200 Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans 146, 184 Punch see Mr. Punch Purim 182

Quale, Dan 90, 177

Radio Armenia and Radio Eri wan 97-98, 198-199

Index

Ramsay, [Dean] Edward Bannerman 202, 222 Raskin, Victor 1, 24, 50, 121, 136, 183, 222 'Rationality' and economizing 44,48-51, 55, 58, 65-83, 94-96, 103-104, 126, 151-156, 159, 174, 180, 190 Reading (Berkshire) 13-14 Robertson, Kenneth G. 94, 223 Rockwell, Joan 193, 223 Rogers, Charles 202, 223 Rosten, Leo Calvin 121, 223 Rummel, R. J. 178-179, 223 Russell, W. M. S. 35, 147, 168-169, 193, 223 Scase, Richard 104, 201 Schiff, Michael 198, 223 Schoeck, Helmut 160, 223 Schwartz, Alvin 21, 23, 193, 223 Science 65-66, 78-80, 95-97, 160, 162, 175 Scitovsky, Tibor 70, 224 Scotland and the Scots 2-3,7, 12,17-18, 44-51, 55, 60-61, 71, 73-74, 76-77, 102,105,120-136,142-143,147,155, 170,182,187,189,191,196,201,202 Secularization 55, 59-60, 132, 190 Sex, jokes about 166, 182-189 Shtromas, Alexander 99-100, 178, 224 Sik, Ota 82, 224 Smiles, Samuel 122, 161, 204, 224 Smith, Adam 19, 65, 68-69, 224 Smith, Paul 138-140,143-144,202,203, 224 Smith, Rev. Sydney 147-148, 171 Smout, Thomas C. 44, 224 Snyder, Charles R. 110, 121, 202, 222, 224 Socialism 7,10,40-41,63,77-79,81 -82, 93, 96, 98-100, 102, 152, 161-162, 174-177, 180, 197-200 Sodom and Gomorrah 202

233

Soviet Union see Eastern Europe Sowell, Thomas 110, 119, 195,201,225 Spalding, Henry D. 68, 121, 196, 225 Spencer, Herbert 147, 161, 204, 225 Spontaneous versus planned order 52,79, 162 Stalin, Joseph 175, 198 Stivers, Richard 110-111, 113, 118-120, 122, 225 Sturman, Dora 90, 94, 225 Swedes and Swedish-Americans 3, 48, 65, 67, 104, 106-107, 109, 148-149, 201 Switzerland and the Swiss 2, 5, 12, 46, 60-61,87 Syria and the Syrians, Lebanon and the Lebanese 15-16, 169-172, 194

Tadley 13-14 Taylor, Frederick W. and Taylorism 203, 225 TWPs and TWPSINs 5 Technology, jokes and alleged anxiety about 27-29, 31-32, 66-70, 137, 142150, 171, 199 Texas and Texans 17, 194 Thomas, Gerald 31, 69, 226 Thompson, Stith 193, 226 Three Crosses and Penclawdd 19-20 Tohoku 39-40, 170 Tiinnes und Schäl Witze 200, 226

Unitarians 55-58 United States see America Utley, Francis L. 24, 226

Vidier, Alec 56, 226 Virginia and Virginians 17,49

234

Index

Wales and the Welsh 2,12-13,19-20,28, 57-58, 110, 123-125, 127, 130-132, 134, 187, 194,201 Walker, P. J. 19, 226 Ward, Bob 146, 171,227 Webb, Sydney and Beatrice 161, 227 Weber, Max 7, 9, 43-46, 50-59, 62, 66, 70-71, 156, 172, 196-197, 203, 227 Wechsleretal. 121, 194, 228 Wells, H. G. 8-10, 151-164, 172, 203204, 227 Welsch, Roger L. 21-23, 193, 227 West, Anthony 158, 203, 227 Wiener, Martin 54, 227 Wildavsky, Aaron 28

Wilde, Larry 60,68-69,72,112,114-115, 117, 196, 198,201,227-228 Wilson, Bryan R. 111, 202, 203, 228 Wit and Humor from Old Cathay 35-37, 228 Wolfenstein, Martha 58, 228 Wolffetal. 121, 194, 228

Yankees see New England Yorkshire and Yorkshirepersons 17-19, 194

Zijderveld, Anton C. 184, 228