Bawdiness

Rowan Atkinson might be better known as Mr Bean, but I prefer him as Edmund Blackadder. It might be that the humour is more subtle, though I doubt that that's it - in the episode "Head", for instance, Blackadder says to Baldrick, "And don't forget, becaaauuse?", and Baldrick answers, "Because we're not at home to Mr. Cock-Up." I laughed and laughed at this, but you probably have to watch the episode to get the full effect of the statement.

This was going to be a post about Blackadder and Mr Bean. I dislike Mr Bean the way I dislike George Costanza. His chief characteristics seem to be pettiness and a really mean kind of selfishness. Blackadder is no saint, but at least his ambitions are slightly nobler. It's a strange thing that people prefer one to the other, but that may be just because nobody's heard of Blackadder. But, truth be told, I haven't paid any attention to Mr Bean, so any criticism would be unfair (except, perhaps, such criticism as is implied by the fact that I didn't pay any attention to him). So this post shall be about bawdiness instead.

I've always taken great pleasure in bawdiness. Dirty limericks are a staple, but I like to think that I've graduated from limericks that are tolerable only because they have naughty words in - the kind that delight eleven year old boys - to limericks that are genuinely funny if one can shut one's mind (or open it) to the filth, bigotry, scandal, and what have you. I also greatly admire limericks that scan well, even though they are not particularly funny or have anything otherwise to recommend them. Here's an example:

There was a young parson named Bings,
Who had risen above all earthly things
Save his secret desire
For a boy in the choir,
With a bottom like jelly on springs.

The way the last line rolls off the tongue is a pleasure worth repeating.

And then, of course, in similar vein, there is:

The new cinematic emporium
Is not only a super-sensorium,
But a highly effectual
Heterosexual
Mutual masturbatorium.

That heterosexual scans and rhymes is quite glorious, and, to my mind, not unlike fantastical scanning in:

From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

Unexpected cleverness is a bonus, as with the half-limerick Sweta told me:

There was a young woman named Blunt
In the ocean up to her knees...

with the explanation:

"It doesn't rhyme now, but wait till the tide comes in."

My friends tell me that I should not tell dirty jokes, at least not to new acquaintances, and particularly so if these new acquaintances happen to be women. One argument is put-your-best-foot-forward: when one meets girls, one should not smoke, or drink, or tell bawdy limericks, or do anything unseemly. This is an equilibrium: girls (and people you have just met in general) expect to be treated better than you generally behave, and they discount your good behaviour by several points. If you behave as you generally do, they think that your everyday behaviour is far worse than even that.

But I have a general principle that forbids dissimulation, so this argument I condemn as deceitful. I acknowledge that it is rational to act as this argument dictates, but I do not think it desirable.

The only other argument that I think has weight is the one that it makes listeners uncomfortable to be told dirty jokes. Yes, it does. But I hope by my evident harmlessness to set such concerns at rest. Delighting in dirt, if done in a purely academic way - by which I mean without the intent to participate in the acts at whose description you merrily laugh - seems to me to be a particularly harmless vice. Refusing to countenance marvellously constructed poems or phrases because they are not quite clean seems unnecessarily prudish, and likely to deprive me of much of my enjoyment of life. For it is true of much of life, or at least of my life, what is true of the limerick:

The limerick packs laughs anatomical
In space that is quite economical,
But the good ones I've seen
So seldom are clean,
And the clean ones so seldom are comical.

American humour

I'm currently reading Gormenghast, the second book of a trilogy of the same name by Mervyn Peake. Gormenghast is a castle, the home of the Earls of Groan, and so large that it is a world unto itself. The everyday life of the castle is rigorously ritualized, and this book follows the rise of Steerpike, an ambitious, Machiavellian, viciously conniving man who, by intrigue and murder, becomes the Master of Ritual. The story itself is very dark - Steerpike plots the death or subjugation of almost everything in his path - and by the end of the book, nothing beautiful has been left untouched. My principal feeling after the last hundred pages, in which Steerpike, having been discredited, found guilty of murder, and outlawed, is killed by Titus, was one of relief - relief that the tension that had built up over the last hundred pages was resolved - rather than joy in the ending. It was like an ordinary sunny day after prolonged rain: a fitting metaphor, because the setting of the denouement of Gormenghast is a storm that floods the castle, and with the death of Steerpike the rain stops.

A sub-plot follows the Professors, who are in charge of the education of the children who grow up within the castle walls, including Titus, the seventy-seventh Earl. These are men who are made out to have failed at living, and for each of whom the job before them is merely a way to pass the time while waiting out their lives. Certainly not the least impotent of the lot is the new headmaster, Bellgrove.

Within the castle also lives a doctor, Prunesquallor, and his sister Irma. Irma is a singularly unattractive middle-aged spinster, with a pointed nose, weak eyes, and a manner that would try the patience of a saint. She conceives a plan to find herself a husband: hold a soirée, inviting all the Professors (the capitalization is Peake's) and pick out one to marry.

When she sees Bellgrove, she is quite overcome. For all his deficiencies, Bellgrove is a handsome, distinguished man, so long as he remembers to not open his mouth and show his rotting teeth. Bellgrove is similarly overcome, not having held the hand of a woman in a month of Tuesdays, and there is a chapter in which we follow them in their wanderings about the garden in the moonlight. It is a romance of the weak, where the flaws in each party are starkly clear, and where we know that the emotion they think they feel is only in their minds, produced by the novelty of it all. It would be better, even, if they "mistake instinct for emotion", as Pratchett says, but there is no feeling there, just empty dreams of passion. It is a terrible thing to read - the pathos is almost unbearable. More so because you recognize in your own past the sorrow of their unknowing - every girl you've thought you've had feelings for which subsequently turned out to be only the desire to have feelings.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I looked up the book on Amazon, and saw that a reviewer had written about how amusing the courtship of Irma Prunesquallor was, and how grateful he was for this comic relief in an otherwise tense book. But I was only startled for a moment, because I have had frequent cause to remark on what seems to be an American attitude to humour: the ability to laugh at the absolute misery of your fellow man.

Before you think I am unjustifiably using a single example - and one whose American provenance has not even been established - to make a general point, I should reiterate that this cavalier treatment of Irma Prunesquallor and Bellgrove only brought the thought to the surface of my mind. There are other examples whose antecedents are indisputable.

The first is The Life Acquatic with Steve Zissou, a movie with Bill Murray and Owen Wilson I watched a long time ago. Owen Wilson is the failure son of Bill Murray, who disappoints him at every opportunity. While I was weeping silently in my seat at the utter humiliation and desperation that Bill Murray's character felt, all around me the audience was rolling in the aisles, going into hysterics at each new stab into Bill Murray's heart.

But a better example is Charlie Chaplin. I've only seen him as an icon of funniness because that was what I was told, not because I'd watched the movies and seen what they were actually like. When I finally did watch one, it was not funny in the slightest bit. Not. The. Slightest. Bit.

Finally, there's every movie that Ben Stiller ever made. Each of them has him suffering ignominies that would make me curl up and die. People actually laugh at him while he suffers, and I am horrified by it.

Is there an alternative view of humour? Is there humour which does not require someone to be pilloried to make me feel good? I can delight in clever puns, which, even if they are meant as put-downs by the person who says them, are recognized as such and dismissed as unimportant by the victim. Jokes in which the victim does not realize that he is being made fun of are more painful than anything. Self-deprecating humour is the best, perhaps. Herriot's stories are funny and devoid of venom, because more often than not he is the victim of circumstance - there is no malevolent force or person that makes him suffer. And his cheerful optimism and the constant recognition of how wonderful his life is helps a great deal. The humiliation or ridiculousness of the victim, so essential a component of American humour, is entirely missing.