Thinking of becoming a cartoonist in today's Britain? Think again
PAUL JOHNSON The cartoonist Vicky (Victor Weisz, 1913-66) fled to London not long after the Reichstag fire, with the Gestapo at his heels. Had he not possessed a Hungarian passport he would never have got away, for as the boy wonder of Berlin political cartooning in the 12 Uhr Blatt, he had gone for Hitler as far back as 1928, and was a marked man. He spoke no English, and he told me he found it hard to learn. Living in a bedsit in Hampstead, he went one morning into a greasy-spoon place for a cup of coffee. He was unemployed, almost penniless and despondent. Suddenly the radio began to blare the 'Horst Wessel' song. He shouted to the waitress, translating literally from the German: 'I cannot hear it! I cannot hear it!' The poor girl, doubtless muttering to herself, 'Some people need to get their ears tested,' moved over to the radio and turned up the volume as high as it would go. Aghast, Vicky rushed out into the street. 'It was the lowest point of my life,' he told me. 'I thought the ordinary people of England were turning Nazi. Not until the next day did I discover my mistake. Then I determined to learn English properly.'
Vicky was lucky to meet and make friends with Gerald Barry, then editor of the News Chronicle. He not only helped Vicky to master English, but decided that, if he was to become a successful cartoonist in London, he would need to familiarise himself with all the key elements in our literature and folklore which reflect the English sense of humour. So Vicky was encouraged to read certain bits of Shakespeare — Falstaff, Malvolio, the Porter in Macbeth, the graveyard scene in Hamlet, for example. He was given Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Jon-ocks's Jaunts and Jollities, the poems of Edward Lear and Alice in Wonderland. Bound volumes of Punch were put before him, so he could puzzle over John Leech's 'Servant Problem' jokes and (the latest craze) 'Aspects of the English Character' by the great and tragically short-lived artist Pont. He had to read Three Men in a Boat, the Just William stories, A.A. Milne and Beatrix Potter, Wodehouse's Jeeves books, Aldous Huxley's Chrome Yellow and Waugh's Vile Bodies. He listened, week after week, to Tommy Handley's lima, and studied the scripts, watched George Formby and Will Hay movies, and was taken to see the motionless ladies at the Windmill ('We Never Closed). Gilbert and Sullivan, the Empire music hall, Noel Coward's Blythe Spirit, then on its record-breaking run — he had to see them all. Indeed he was introduced to Coward himself, who advised: 'Listen carefully to the BBC, old boy, especially when they're not trying to be funny. Oh yes, and Gracie Fields. Why do they call her our Gracie, I wonder. She's certainly not mine.' He worked on the English use of irony, and the double entendre (indeed the selective use of French in general for particular subjects), the role and content of the seaside postcard and the inner workings of comics like the Wizard and the Girl's OW71 Paper. Once started, he went on learning for the rest of his life. By the time I met him, in 1955, he spoke pretty well faultless English, and knew more about our sense of humour than we did ourselves.
When Gerald Barry put Vicky on his crashcourse in English humour, the subject, though enormous, was at least legal. I mean by this that you could learn about it, analyse and investigate it without breaking the law. When Vicky was doing his homework you could tell a joke about an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman without having to look over your shoulder to see if a policeman was listening and might book you for a 'hate crime'. The word 'racist' did not then inspire nervous fear in stand-up comics, happy-go-lucky schoolteachers or Christmas cracker-makers. You could still buy golliwogs in toy shops and find Little Black Sambo on the shelves of public libraries. The term Politically Correct had not yet been invented, let alone the mass of punitive legislation designed to enforce it.
I wonder if a contemporary Vicky, a refugee from, say, Burma, Venezuela or Iran were to come to London today and seek to learn about the English sense of humour in 2007, how he and his mentors would set about it. What would he or she be told to read, see, listen to and study? Leaving censorship aside for the moment, there have been major and quite genuine changes in what makes us laugh. For instance, that curiously sinister strand of humour, originally evolved from James Joyce through The Dubliners and Ulysses, perfected by his pupil Samuel Becket in Waiting for Godot and other plays, and codified by Harold Pinter in an oeuvre he has described as 'the weasel beneath the cocktail cabinet', did not exist at the start of Vicky's learning-curve. And, closer to the mainstream, we can detect the fundamental shifts by comparing Coward's plays or those of George Bernard Shaw (Vicky told me he learned a lot from Pygmalion and Arms and the Man) with Tom Stoppard's. There are, to be sure, plenty of continuities, not least among the works that appeal to children, which formed an important part of Vicky's reading when he was under Gerald Barry's tuition. Of the three most important children's authors today, C.S. Lewis and Professor Tolkein were already writing in secret their fantastic tales when Vicky was stocking up his notions of what stirred the imagination of the English. Even the creator of Harry Potter is reasonably described as part of a tradition broad enough to include not just Alice in Wonderland but Sherlock Holmes, The Wind in the Willows and Peter Pan. Until quite recently there were continuities in broadcasting too, for Much Binding in the Marsh, Richard 'Stinker' Murdoch, Jimmy Edwards and Morecambe and Wise were umbilically linked to Itma. And shows such as Steptoe and Son, Till Death Us Do Part, Dad's Army and Pawky Towers were enjoyed for the same reasons that English people in the 1930s laughed at Coward and Waugh. But some fundamental shifting of the tectonic plates of humour and appetite has taken place to explain the enormous popularity of Big Brother and similar successes.
If we delve further into what a contemporary Vicky would need to know, we come across the hard rock of a frightening question: is there an English sense of humour any more? Or rather, is it right, or 'acceptable', or even legal to speak of one? Should we not now say British sense of humour? Or is even this latitudinarian enough in a multiracial, multicultural society? Not long ago a chief constable in the principality tried to get sent to prison a speaker on the radio who made a harmless joke about the Welsh. And the Times Literary Supplement, which is updating its house-style book, now says that the phrase 'dour Scot' is no longer an acceptable cliché. The modern Vicky would have to begin with a list of terms to avoid as legally risky, depending on the context. This would begin with 'northern' and, still more, 'Nordic'. The term 'white' can be dangerous too, except in an abusive sense, of course. And what about 'English' itself? Used in a provocative context it is jail-bait. You certainly can't lawfully accuse people of 'lacking an English sense of humour' if they are British citizens. That's racist, and a hate-crime. The only safe rule for an apprentice cartoonist is: avoid all human archetypes. Much simpler, and safer, is to choose another profession.
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