1,787 words
When I first said I wanted to be a comedian, everyone laughed. Well, they’re not laughing now.
— Bob Monkhouse
If you and your friends were to have a séance, and you channeled the spirit of George Orwell, the greatest Englishman never to appear on a banknote would use the glass to tap out the following: stop quoting 1984. His shade would be as right in death as he was in life.
We’ve read it now, we’re living it, we get it. Actually, when last I read it (the fourth time) I read it as a love story, and I can’t think of another more heartbreaking. But we need a new go-to novel for what is happening in the UK just now, and there can be only one contender; Milan Kundera’s The Joke.
In the Czech author’s first novel, published in 1967, a man makes a casual joke concerning Marxism and Trotsky on a postcard to a friend, and ends up not quite in the gulag — as Solzhenitsyn did for a similar postal wisecrack about Stalin — but in the mines, having been forcibly drafted into the military as punishment for his humorous quip. The girl he loved, the recipient of the postcard, reported him.
As we all know, the Left are simply not funny people, and so humor is a threat to them. Same with Islam, which is one reason the Left and the Mohammedans make such natural allies. It is almost impossible not to laugh — like Monty Python’s Roman centurions — when Iranian super-beard Ayatollah Khomeini intones, “There are no jokes in Islam.” Ooh, I wouldn’t go that far, mate. Have you seen what you’re wearing on your head?
One thing life has taught me is that although not all intelligent people are funny, all funny people are intelligent.
I watched 20 minutes of a BBC comedy show the other day on YouTube. As Joe Pesci famously said in Goodfellas, funny how? I won’t link to it because I don’t want you to have to go down to the garage and dust off the 30-ought-six and blow your brains out. But I went at it open-mindedly, as I am English, from a land of possibly the best comedy ever.
Full declaration: I am not calling America unfunny. That’s Germany’s job, like high-performance motor cars. Lenny Bruce is my comic hero, and you have or had Dangerfield, Rickles, Hope, Hicks, Martin (in the day), Stephen Wright, Brian Stelter, and the rest. But England was just an amusing place to grow up in partly because of its cultural tradition of stupid jokes. England is the land of Monty Python, Peter Cook, The Goons, Morecambe and Wise, Rik Mayall, Ronnie Barker, Blackadder, Chris Morris, Peep Show. The English are stoically and surreally funny people. I always imagine Captain Edward Smith, as the Titanic slipped beneath the cold waves and he finished his Scotch, saying to the first mate, “Here, have you heard the one about. . .”
We are all aware that the first casualty of war is truth, but the second infantryman to be gunned down in the culture war is humor. The BBC show I saw was pure anti-white propaganda of which Goebbels would have thoroughly approved, and not just because it wasn’t funny and Germans are by nature an unfunny people. This is evinced, incidentally, by the fact that although it is their New Year’s Eve tradition to watch a comedy show on TV, that show is Dinner for One (aka The 90th Birthday) a knockabout — and very funny — black-and-white comedy from 1962 and featuring English music-hall comedians Freddie Frinton and May Warden. Other than that, and trust me on this, the German Book of Humor is as slim a volume as The French Book of War Heroes.
Now, just as J. G. Ballard once said that one day all of Europe would look like a suburb of Bonn, so too Western humor is being reduced to the unfunniest joke you ever heard.
And just as the English Puritans were exasperated that someone, somewhere, might be dancing, so too the British Woke-istas are worried that someone, somewhere, might be laughing. Just ask English ex-policeman Harry Miller.
Mr. Miller has become somewhat famous in Blighty for a joke. He retweeted some gags about transgender folk, and asked who won some men’s Olympics race in 1976 (the answer being Bruce Jenner) in a humorous context, and the police in the UK immediately ceased their relentless pursuit of Muslim rape gangs in the north of England (that is a joke, by the way, although not for the girls involved) and called Harry’s abode. What happened next is funny but, as my father (the funniest man I ever met) used to say, funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha.
The officer who interviewed Harry Miller was a Police Constable (PC) Gul. This is the relevant snippet from Mr. Miller’s own website, Fair Cop:
Harry Miller: Were any of the Tweets criminal?
PC Gul: No.
Harry Miller: Then why are you ringing me?
PC Gul: I need to check your thinking.
You can buy It’s Okay to Be White: The Best of Greg Johnson here.
While I let that phrase sink in with you, a humorous aside. PC Gul, at one point in the interview, explains transgenderism. Sometimes, he says, the wrong gender gets mixed up with a foetus in the womb, so a boy could be born a girl and vice versa. PC Gul knew this, he said, “because I’ve been on a course.”
Now, before I got my lifetime ban from Twitter (for another joke), I posted this response, with an accompanying joke of my own, and an Australian journalist (whom I won’t shame by naming her) found mine so funny she stole it from me and used it in an article in the Australian Spectator. I confronted her with the chuckle-theft (technical term), and although she admitted it, as women sometimes do, she didn’t apologize, as women never will. As ransom, I demanded she give me a personal — well, by email — introduction to the editor. The bastard still didn’t publish me.
Anyway, the gag was this: “Did you know that ants are not really creatures but tiny little robots? I know. I’ve been on a course.”
Now, it’s not a rib-tickler, but the point is that in WokeWorld you can state any cockamamy horseshit proposition — it is not possible to be racist against whites, for example — and back up its veracity by saying you’ve been on a course. And that is really not funny. That is way more serious than 1984, which also, like Islam, features no jokes outside of the author’s natural dry humor. I love Orwell’s description in the book of a man wearing “a concertina-like black suit,” and a room containing a “deep, slatternly armchair.” But back to the gags.
Mr. Miller is a canny, down-to-earth Englishman, and he knew what to do next. He sued the College of Policing, itself a joke institution, and once again in an unfunny way. The British police, like the health service, academia, public utilities, and so on, are part of the public sector, paid for by tax money. The College of Policing is not. Incidentally, another unfunny joke is the way politicians refer to income hijacked from tax-payers as “government money.” Hilarious. Laugh? I thought I’d never start.
The College of Policing employs 650 people on an average salary almost exactly twice that of a PC. It is unclear exactly what it is they are supposed to do, but their broad yet unwritten mission statement is to quietly enforce what we are forced to refer to as “woke” culture. To join the British police, for example, it is now necessary to have a university degree. Now, given that STEM graduates are unlikely to be looking for a career in the notoriously thick British police force, this will in every case be what used to be called a humanities degree and has now become an easier-to-understand “arts” degree. And we all know what that means. It means they will have been taught for three years not how to think but what to think. The end result is PC Gul’s need to check Harry Miller’s thinking.
Once humor goes, a great swathe of culture goes with it, in any country. My father taught me the value of humor. To laugh is life-enhancing, to make another person laugh more so. No wonder the Left despise it. Nietzsche wrote that every joke contained an element of cruelty, Orwell that every joke was a tiny revolution, and Freud that, if you have to explain a joke, it ceases to be funny. With that type of intellectual cargo aboard the good ship belly-laugh, no wonder the Left can’t take it. In a saner world, they would be wearing rubber head protection and sitting at the little table.
Harry Miller’s case is ongoing, which highlights another point worth making. Woke costs money. And cui bono? Lawyers, of course. Funny that, as so much of the British political class comes from a legal background. Tony Blair (not to be confused with Eric Blair, George Orwell’s real name) was a lawyer. I rest my case, m’lud. But Harry Miller is not going to stop, and it is not just liberty he is fighting for — it is humor, an essence rare and one worth defending.
I suppose we had better finish with a joke, as I have probably left you feeling like the only meaningful choice to make today is which silk tie to hang yourself from the rafters with. So, buckle up.
A hip New Yorker is lying in bed in Manhattan with his newly acquired German girlfriend. He says,
“Do you really want to stay in New York?”
“Yes. I love you. I’ve never been happier.”
“What if you get homesick and want to go back to Germany?”
“I won’t. New York is better.”
“Better how?”
“In every way! You are here. It’s just better.”
“Name one other thing that makes New York better than Berlin.”
“Okay. . . Wait. . . Got it! If I want, like, the best bagel I ever tasted, I go to the shop on the corner here. Can’t do that in Berlin.”
“Well, whose fucking fault is that?”
I thank you.
* * *
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21 comments
The BBC show I saw was pure anti-white propaganda of which Goebbels would have thoroughly approved.
Not sure I follow you, Mark.
Um, propaganda. Goebbels. I think I constructed that sentence clumsily. I meant the force of the propaganda, rather than the fact is was anti-white. A good point well made.
Due to the eradication of the cockneys, coming up with clever insults for transgenders such as “williebirds” has to be outsourced to Eastern European wits-for-hire.
Clown world isn’t funny at all. Good humour especially stuff that points out glaring inconsistencies and double standards is impossible for a leftist. Once at work a lefty colleague made a comment about securing equality for women in high positions in society etc. I then said we should strive for equal female representation in coal mines, cleaning sewers and other not so enticing occupations in a joking way. She stopped her equality sermon.
“…the German Book of Humor is as slim a volume as The French Book of War Heroes.”
This is just a flagrant display of blatant ignorance on both parts.
No, captain. It is a joke based on national stereotypes. Mm, my favourite!
The joke you finish with is brill. Like your Australian journalist, I intend to steal it.
you can state any cockamamy horseshit proposition — it is not possible to be racist against whites, for example — and back up its veracity by saying you’ve been on a course
If you insist it is possible to be racist against whites, the latest woke response is to say, “You need to educate yourself.” Which means: sod off, and don’t come back until you agree I’m right.
which silk tie to hang yourself from the rafters with
Thought I’d heard that quip before – “which silk tie to hang yourself with” – so Googled the phrase. The top reply was an offer of help from the Samaritans’ suicide helpline!
(I may have been thinking of the suicide of the tragic, but captivating, French poet Gérard de Nerval, who hanged himself using a cook’s apron-cord that he believed was the Queen of Sheba’s garter. The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling)
Help yourself to the joke. I may have been thinking, concerning the tie, of the Tom Waits lyric on one of the numbers on Heart Attack and Vine, ‘Swinging from the rafters in a brand-new tie’. I used to like Lord Snooty and his pals. Beano or Dandy?
William Shirer, in his autobiography, noted how, when he was in England in the 1920’s, most of the humor seemed based on how ridiculous foreigners were. He thought the French were much more sophisticated. The English also were crazy about Gilbert and Sullivan. Shirer was less than impressed with the team.
As for the constant knocking of German humor or lack of it, there is actually a lot of German humor. I translated the comedies of Andreas Gryphius (1620-1668), and there are a lot of funny scenes in the plays. Also, I like the play Der Zerbrochende Krug by Kleist, and it was made into a funny movie in the 1930’s. One contemporary comedian I enjoy is Otto Waalkes, kind of like a German Danny Kaye. Hans Ruhmann was also a funny comic actor who did well in 1930’s-40’s films. He was Anne Frank’s favorite actor.
Although Gunter Gras’s The Tin Drum is a heavy novel about Nazi Germany, it’s actually quite funny. The Volker Schlondorf movie took all the fun out. I also find Stefan Heym’s stories humorous.
German comedy does exist, but you have to look for it. Germans themselves believe to be serious is to be solemn, so they don’t show much of their humor. Sort of like when Wagner wrote the opera Tannhauser. He originally titled it The Mount of Venus, which is, in German, a reference to a woman’s nethers, but his publishers said no: he could not name a SERIOUS GERMAN OPERA that name. So, they’re kind of like that.
Also the Goethe Centers, when showing German film, go in for the serious, boring, artistic stuff. Sort of like our academics.
Also, I appreciate the crack about a nonexistent book of French war heroes, but France has a very strong and noble military tradition, with lots of war heroes.
Also found the joke about bagels and Germany kind of obtuse: unless we were talking about Jews. The bagel is German anyway, the Broetchen. Jews kind of steal a lot of stuff and call it theirs, but everyone does that. The French poodle is actually German: Pudel.
Yes, but humour doesn’t require some kind of quoracy of correspondence. Of course there were and are French war heroes (and look how the French treat them when they write informed letters to Macron about the imminence of civil war), of course there are funny Germans, civil blacks, Jews uninterested in finance, interesting Swedes and so on. But they’re not funny. Just as the English had a long tradition of Irish jokes (like American Polish jokes) doesn’t stand up to experience, it is not supposed to be an exercise in empiricism. It is humour, which subverts all rules.
That the British OFFICIAL media were Anti-English and fought against British interests as far back as in 80´s, was already descripted by Chapman Pincher in his book “The Secret Offensive”, and it was in 1986.
The humor is anyway a Jewish phenomenon, not Aryan (IndoGerman), not Altaic, not of any other native EuroAsian nations. The satire, irony, yes, it is Aryan, but the humor is not. Our Northern ancestors in Steppe and Woods and Mountains have had too hard times and struggled for life, no time and no mood for humor. Humor is Levantine, Near-Eastern.
You must be joking.
Oof, swing and a miss on that one. Hard times are precisely when you need humor. I think the funniest things I’ve heard/seen were DEEP in the suck.
As we all know, the Left are simply not funny people, and so humor is a threat to them. Same with Islam, which is one reason the Left and the Mohammedans make such natural allies. It is almost impossible not to laugh — like Monty Python’s Roman centurions — when Iranian super-beard Ayatollah Khomeini intones, “There are no jokes in Islam.” Ooh, I wouldn’t go that far, mate. Have you seen what you’re wearing on your head?
In the West, the Left sides not with Islam but with racial/ethnic minorities against the majority Whites. If the Whites embrace Islam and begins to take their faith seriously, does anyone seriously think the Left would then happily side with these Whites?
And, Yes, whether one likes it or not, Islam doesn’t play around. It’s a formidable and serious doctrine.
“If the Whites embrace Islam and begins to take their faith seriously, does anyone seriously think the Left would then happily side with these Whites?”
Yes, they would, in fact, because they would quite rightly recognize that those Whites had simply adopted a new universalist and inimical horse of a different color.
The Left has no problem with any ideology practiced by Whites (communism, liberal Christianity, Islam) or its collateral damage, so long as it makes White people miserable and surrounded by aliens..
“The BBC show I saw was pure … propaganda of which Goebbels would have thoroughly approved, and not just because it wasn’t funny…”
I don’t know, dude, from the footage I’ve seen Goebbels looks like the life of the party. 😎
The overexposed and barely droll David Mitchell is bad enough, but ye gods, spare us his vulgar and venal wife! Just as Neil Gaiman (of similar ilk) has somehow been elected the world’s sole authority on Germanic mythology (displacing dodgy old fogies like J.R.R. Tolkien), so Victoria Coren and her hangdog mate have become ubiquitous interlocutors of British Culture, high and low. It is scarcely possible to open a newspaper or flick on the idiot box without one or other (usually both) of the haughty North London sectarians popping up to sneer at the benighted mass of regular Britons excluded from their well-heeled coterie. Just how the gruesome twosome have ascended to middlebrow hegemony could well be one of those questions that cannot safely be asked, let alone satisfactorily answered.
Do not know anything about that Victoria, but Wikipedia explains:
“Victoria Elizabeth Coren was born in Hammersmith, West London,[4] the only daughter of the humourist and journalist Alan Coren and his wife, Anne Kasriel. Her father had been brought up in an Orthodox Jewish household“.
Quod erat demonstrandum. Humor is a Jewish phenomenon. And non-Jewish humorists, which of course exist and existed like Nasreddin Hoca /Qoca Nasir, were and are amongst non-Jewish nations (Aryan, Altaic, Finnish and others) only after the indirect Judaisation of those nations through Christianity or Islam.
I don’t think so: Aristophanes and Terence were writing comedy long before our merchantile friends got to work on us, and the point about Coren/Mitchell is that for all their lauded ubiquity they are not actually very funny.
Humor is a Jewish phenomenon.
What do you mean by ‘Humor’? Larry David directing his urine stream towards the portrait of Jesus? Sarah Silverman’s verbal diarrhea? The Pharisee sanctioned Charlie Hebdo rubbish?
This is not humor. This is pouring sewage on the Majority; the same majority that the Jews have been shamelessly swindling for centuries.
Islam never tolerated such crap. Hence, the constant screeching and campaigning for more ‘freedom of speech’ in Muslim majority lands by Judeophile gentiles ensconced in the West. There is a reason for laws against blasphemy. As I said in a previous comment above, Islam doesn’t play around.
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