"YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE MISSING"
“What I miss most about England,” sighed the woman at the party, fixing me with a lugubrious Home Counties eye, “is the sense of humor.”
My hand tightened on my wineglass.
“You can’t find it here, can you?” she continued, gloomily. “People just don’t seem to know how to laugh at themselves.”
If she mentions irony, I thought, I swear I will throw my wine at her.
“The real trouble with Americans,” she tut-tutted, shaking her head in disapproval, “is that they simply don’t understand the English sense of i …”
“Excuse me,” interrupted Mr. Los Angeles firmly. “I just remembered we have to go and … uh … go. Right now.”
With a vice-like grip he led me to the farthest corner of the room, and both the occasion and the contents of my glass were saved.
One of the biggest misperceptions that I have encountered in my years of living in Los Angeles is that English people are, by virtue of being English alone, somehow wittier than are Americans. This is – to put it bluntly – a crock. There are witty English people around, of course, and have been since the days of Chaucer (although not many before then: the Anglo-Saxons were a grim bunch); but there have been witty Americans too, ever since a famed wag called Ben Franklin agreed with his friend Tom Jefferson that all men were indeed created equal and went ahead to help him found the nation. It’s true that England had Jane Austen; but America had Mark Twain. England had P.G. Wodehouse; but America had Ring Lardner, creator of what is possibly the most sublime comic sentence in the history of the language: “’Shut up,’ he explained.” England had Noël Coward; but America had the Algonquin Round Table. And there were more of them.
In fact, the perception of the English sense of humor as being intrinsically more elegant than the American is a relatively new one. When I was growing up, in the 1950s and 60s, English comedians were a distinctly lowbrow bunch, cheerful working stiffs who had cut their professional teeth in small theatres and working men’s clubs in the provinces, or occasionally in the entertainment corps during their War service. They were reliably entertaining and occasionally hilarious – if you haven’t yet made the acquaintance of Morecambe and Wise, do yourself a favor and do so – but they would have laughed their own collective socks off at the idea of being considered sophisticated.
In those days there was precious little for us living in Britain to be sophisticated about anyway. Life there was bleak: the aftereffects of World War II were still being felt, bomb sites still peppered our city streets, and if you look at photographs of, for instance, the young Beatles or Rolling Stones, you can see quite plainly that a well-nourished childhood had by no means been a given. If we wanted sophisticated humor we would wait for high-flying Americans like George Burns or Jack Benny to come to town and pop up on a chat show to tell stories of the high life in Manhattan or Beverly Hills, leisurely tales delivered with perfect comic timing and the whiff of an ice-cold martini in the background. If there were no Americans around, we were stuck with Benny Hill.
And then came Monty Python. Because I am somewhat older than the dinosaurs (not hot on repartee, as I recall), I remember Python from the first time it aired. It ran late at night and kept switching time slots because the BBC didn’t quite know what to do with it; it referenced French history and Norse mythology and did thrillingly subversive things like running fake credits before the show had ended, and finishing sketches without a punchline. It was a new brand of British humor, produced by a group of privileged young men – only men in those dark days, although, happily, that would change – who had gone to Oxford and Cambridge and carried themselves with the swashbuckling swagger of those born to the ruling class: they could flourish a classical allusion with the panache of a fencing master, and in my own case, it didn’t hurt that I had a huge crush on Michael Palin – a crush on a comedian being an unimaginably novel experience in that era. I loved Monty Python then; and – although I’m now over my crush on Michael Palin (whom I have since met, and am pleased to report to be almost ridiculously charming), and have a sinking feeling that the show would fail significantly to pass the current inspection of the Woke Police – I still enjoy it today.
It did, however, spawn the myth – and, oh, is it ever a myth – that all Brits are as witty as the Pythons, the irony, if I may be permitted to use the dread word, being that those Brits who adhere most enthusiastically to the theory are, to a one, the sort of people who would not recognize a joke if it danced up to them and performed a soft shoe shuffle. I once, for reasons I have yet fully to understand, had staying in my house for several days a colleague from my magazine in London, a pasty young man who sat stone-faced and silent through many an otherwise merry hour with the all-American yuckamucks of Mr. Los Angeles’ and my ragtag social circle, while pontificating enthusiastically in the intervals on the all-encompassing scope of the American lack of wit. The “i” word was used frequently, prefaced reliably by the confident declaration that “Americans don’t understand the concept of.”
During all of my guest’s extremely long week’s visit, I remember his making precisely one joke himself: the content has long limped to the valley where failed jokes go to die, but I do remember that so woefully feeble, and so hopelessly poorly delivered, was it that I was required to ask him to explain that a joke was, indeed, what it was.
“I’m sorry,” I said, then, feeling sympathetic for what I supposed would be his natural embarrassment and thinking to help lessen it with a little mild facetiousness of my own. “I guess after living in America for so long, I’ve lost my sense of irony.”
It turned out that this was precisely what the little twit had been hoping to hear ever since he had cleared customs. He shot physically from his chair to perform a victory strut across the room, ending up standing in front of me, grinning down in triumphant pity at the sad husk of Americanized humor-deprivation that was his hostess.
“Blimey,” he crowed, rocking back and forth on his heels in delight. “You don’t know what you’re missing.”
I had the feeling that I did.