Watching the English

by Kate Fox

our apparent lack of patriotism might have more to do with the ban on earnestness, and perhaps some other closely related aspects of Englishness, than an absence of national pride.

My survey and many others invariably show that the English quality we feel most proud of is our sense of humour.

The boastful, sentimental, flag-waving patriotism of other nations is frowned upon and makes us cringe.

We may feel proud to be English, but we are mostly too squeamish and too cynical – too conscious of the unwritten ban on earnestness – to make a big, gushy, patriotic fuss about it.

Ironically, the English quality in which we take most pride, our sense of humour, prevents most of us from ...

Our sense of moderation, as well as our horror of earnestness, means that we tend to be rather apathetic: we avoid extremes, excess and intensity. And

we have an Eeyorish tendency to indulge in a lot of therapeutic moaning about a problem rather than actually addressing it.

Royal events are brief episodes of what anthropologists call ‘cultural remission’ or ‘festive inversion’ – like carnivals or tribal festivals, where some of the usual social norms and unwritten rules are temporarily suspended and the English do things we would never normally do: waving national flags, cheering and dancing in the streets, and even talking to strangers.

Social Desirability Bias – defined as a standard error on self-report measures due to respondents attempting to present themselves in a socially desirable/acceptable light (otherwise known as ‘lying’).

Our lack of excitement (normative or otherwise) does not mean that we are ardent anti-monarchists either. We just don’t tend to get very ardent or fervent about anything.

majority of us support the monarchy, in a lukewarm

The same ‘family’ principle applies to our ‘Auntie Beeb’: there is a kind of tradition of grumpy affection and respect for the BBC, even among those who use the term ‘BBC’ as a metaphor for ‘snooty middle class’, and grumble about having to pay the annual licence fee. Our

In surveys, the BBC consistently gets roughly the same amount of support as the monarchy

almost ‘default’ sense of affection and respect for the BBC and the monarchy, or revealing a need for the comfort of old, familiar institutions

or perhaps even expressing the patriotic pride that around 80 per cent of them acknowledged in my own survey.

fact, if a country or culture could be said to have a catchphrase, I would propose ‘Oh, come off it!’ as a strong candidate for England’s (although not as strong as ‘Typical!’, which I’ll come to later).

for the English, mockery is not a substitute for weapons but a lethal weapon in itself, and far more effective at bringing down unpopular political leaders than any amount of violent protest.

‘Get over yourself’,

‘Oh, come off it!’

the patriotic pride we take in our sense of humour,

particularly in our expert use of irony. The

popular belief is that we have a better, more subtle, more highly developed sense of humour than any other nation, and specifically that other nations are all tediously literal in their thinking and incapable of understanding or appreciating irony.

What is unique about English humour is the pervasiveness of irony and the importance we attach to it.

Irony is the dominant ingredient in English humour, not just a piquant flavouring. Irony rules. The English, according to an acute observer of the minutiae of Englishness,36. are ‘conceived in irony. We float in it from the womb. It’s the amniotic fluid

Joking but not joking. Caring but not caring. Serious...

It must be said that many of my foreign informants found this aspect of Englishness frustr...

We do not always say the opposite of what we mean, but we are always alert to the possibility of irony.

‘Oh dear. Been one of those days, has it?’).

understatement is a form of irony, rather than a distinct and separate type of humour. It is also a very English kind of irony – the understatement rule is a close cousin of the Importance of Not Being Earnest rule, the ‘Oh, come off it’ rule and the various reserve and modesty rules that govern our everyday social interactions.

The reasons for our prolific understating are not hard to discover: our strict prohibitions on earnestness, gushing, emoting and boasting require almost constant use of understatement.

Rather than risk exhibiting any hint of forbidden solemnity, unseemly emotion or excessive zeal, we go to the opposite extreme and feign dry, deadpan indifference. The understatement rule means that a debilitating and painful chronic illness must be described as ‘a bit of a nuisance’; a truly horrific

experience is ‘well, not exactly what I would have chosen’; a sight of breathtaking beauty is ‘quite pret...

or achievement is ‘...

How the hell are you supposed to know when “not bad” means “absolutely brilliant” and when it just means “OK”?

This is the problem with English humour. Much of it, including and perhaps especially the understatement, isn’t actually very funny

But, then, that is surely the whole point of the understatement: it is amusing, but only in an understated way. It is humour, but it is a restrained, refined, subtle form of humour.

We are not taught the use of the understatement: we learn it by osmosis.

The understatement ‘comes naturally’ because it is deeply ingrained in our culture, part of the English psyche.

The understatement is also difficult for foreigners to ‘get’ because it is, in effect, an in-joke about our own unwritten rules of humour. When we describe, say, a horrendous, traumatic and painful experience as ‘not very pleasant’, we are acknowledging the taboo on earnestness and the rules of irony...

Every understatement is a little private joke about Englishness.

Like the English understatement, English self-deprecation can be seen as a form of irony. It usually involves not genuine modesty but saying the opposite of what we really mean – or, at least, the opposite of what we intend people to understand.

The modesty that we actually display is generally false – or, to put it more charitably, ironic.

found it all rather beyond me,

Among ourselves, this system works perfectly well: everyone understands that the customary self-deprecation probably means roughly the opposite of what is said,

The problems arise when we English attempt to play this game with people from outside our own culture, who do not understand the rules, fail to appreciate the irony, and therefore have an unfortunate tendency to take our self-deprecating statements at face value.

They don’t know that this is the prescribed English response to prescribed English self-deprecation. They don’t know that we are playing a convoluted bluffing game. They inadvertently call our bluff, and the whole thing backfires on us. And, frankly, it serves us right for being so silly.

Just because the English have ‘a good sense of humour’ does not mean that we are easily amused – quite the opposite: our keen, finely tuned sense of humour, and our irony-saturated culture probably make us harder to amuse than most other nations.

This is because the ‘guiding principles’ of English humour are classless.

We are always laughing at class-related habits and foibles, mocking the aspirations and embarrassing mistakes of social-climbers, and poking gentle fun at the class system.

upper class a may also become a short e, so that ‘actually’ sounds like ‘ectually’