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Essay
Who does not know the 'comics' of the cheap stationers' windows, the
penny or twopenny coloured post cards with their endless succession of
fat women in tight bathing-dresses and their crude drawing and unbearable
colours, chiefly hedge-sparrow's-egg tint and Post Office red?
This question ought to be rhetorical, but it is curious fact that many
people seem to be unaware of the existence of these things, or else to
have a vague notion that they are something to be found only at the
seaside, like nigger minstrels or peppermint rock. Actually they are on
sale everywhere--they can be bought at nearly any Woolworth's, for
example--and they are evidently produced in enormous numbers, new series
constantly appearing. They are not to be confused with the various other
types of comic illustrated post card, such as the sentimental ones
dealing with puppies and kittens or the Wendyish, sub-pornographic ones
which exploit the love affairs of children. They are a genre of their
own, specializing in very 'low' humour, the mother-in-law, baby's-nappy,
policemen's-boot type of joke, and distinguishable from all the other
kinds by having no artistic pretensions. Some half-dozen publishing
houses issue them, though the people who draw them seem not to be
numerous at any one time.
I have associated them especially with the name of Donald McGill because
he is not only the most prolific and by far the best of contemporary post
card artists, but also the most representative, the most perfect in the
tradition. Who Donald McGill is, I do not know. He is apparently a trade
name, for at least one series of post cards is issued simply as 'The
Donald McGill Comics', but he is also unquestionable a real person with a
style of drawing which is recognizable at a glance. Anyone who examines
his post cards in bulk will notice that many of them are not despicable
even as drawings, but it would be mere dilettantism to pretend that they
have any direct aesthetic value. A comic post card is simply an
illustration to a joke, invariably a 'low' joke, and it stands or falls
by its ability to raise a laugh. Beyond that it has only 'ideological'
interest. McGill is a clever draughtsman with a real caricaturist's touch
in the drawing of faces, but the special value of his post cards is that
they are so completely typical. They represent, as it were, the norm of
the comic post card. Without being in the least imitative, they are
exactly what comic post cards have been any time these last forty years,
and from them the meaning and purpose of the whole genre can be inferred.
Get hold of a dozen of these things, preferably McGill's--if you pick
out from a pile the ones that seem to you funniest, you will probably
find that most of them are McGill's--and spread them out on a table.
What do you see?
Your first impression is of overpowering vulgarity. This is quite apart
from the ever-present obscenity, and apart also from the hideousness of
the colours. They have an utter low-ness of mental atmosphere which comes
out not only in the nature of the jokes but, even more, in the grotesque,
staring, blatant quality of the drawings. The designs, like those of a
child, are full of heavy lines and empty spaces, and all the figures in
them, every gesture and attitude, are deliberately ugly, the faces
grinning and vacuous, the women monstrously paradied, with bottoms like
Hottentots. Your second impression, however, is of indefinable
familiarity. What do these things remind you of? What are they'so like?
In the first place, of course, they remind you of the barely different
post cards which you probably gazed at in your childhood. But more than
this, what you are really looking at is something as traditional as Greek
tragedy, a sort of sub-world of smacked bottoms and scrawny
mothers-in-law which is a part of Western European consciousness. Not
that the jokes, taken one by one, are necessarily stale. Not being
debarred from smuttiness, comic post cards repeat themselves less often
than the joke columns in reputable magazines, but their basic
subject-matter, the KIND of joke they are aiming at, never varies. A few
are genuinely witty, in a Max Millerish style. Examples:
'I like seeing experienced girls home.'
'But I'm not experienced!'
'You're not home yet!'
'I've been struggling for years to get a fur coat. How did you get yours?'
'I left off struggling.'
J U D G E : 'You are prevaricating, sir. Did you or did you not sleep
with this woman?'
Co--respondent: 'Not a wink, my lord!'
In general, however, they are not witty, but humorous, and it must be
said for McGill's post cards, in particular, that the drawing is often a
good deal funnier than the joke beneath it. Obviously the outstanding
characteristic of comic cards is their obscenity, and I must discuss that
more fully later. But I give here a rough analysis of their habitual
subject-matter, with such explanatory remarks as seem to be needed:
SEX.--More than half, perhaps three-quarters, of the jokes are sex
jokes, ranging from the harmless to the all but unprintable. First
favourite is probably the illegitimate baby. Typical captions: 'Could you
exchange this lucky charm for a baby's feeding-bottle?' 'She didn't ask
me to the christening, so I'm not going to the wedding.' Also newlyweds,
old maids, nude statues and women in bathing-dresses. All of these are
IPSO FACTO funny, mere mention of them being enough to raise a laugh. The
cuckoldry joke is seldom exploited, and there are no references to
homosexuality.
Conventions of the sex joke:
(i) Marriage only benefits women. Every man is plotting seduction and
every woman is plotting marriage. No woman ever remained unmarried
voluntarily.
(ii) Sex-appeal vanishes at about the age of twenty-five. Well-preserved
and good-looking people beyond their first youth are never represented.
The amorous honeymooning couple reappear as the grim-visaged wife and
shapeless, moustachioed, red-nosed husband, no intermediate stage being
allowed for.
HOME LIFE--Next to sex, the henpecked husband is the favourite joke.
Typical caption: 'Did they get an X-ray of your wife's jaw at the
hospital?'--'No, they got a moving picture instead.'
Conventions:
(i) There is no such thing as a happy marriage.
(ii) No man ever gets the better of a woman in argument.
Drunkenness--Both drunkenness and teetotalism are ipso facto funny.
Conventions:
(i) All drunken men have optical illusions.
(ii) Drunkenness is something peculiar to middle-aged men. Drunken youths
or women are never represented.
W.C. JOKES--There is not a large number of these. Chamber pots are ipso
facto funny, and so are public lavatories. A typical post card captioned
'A Friend in Need', shows a man's hat blown off his head and disappearing
down the steps of a ladies' lavatory.
INTER-WORKING-CLASS SNOBBERY--Much in these post cards suggests that
they are aimed at the better-off working class and poorer middle class.
There are many jokes turning on malapropisms, illiteracy, dropped aitches
and the rough manners of slum dwellers. Countless post cards show
draggled hags of the stage-charwoman type exchanging 'unladylike' abuse.
Typical repartee: 'I wish you were a statue and I was a pigeon!' A
certain number produced since the war treat evacuation from the
anti-evacuee angle. There are the usual jokes about tramps, beggars and
criminals, and the comic maidservant appears fairly frequently. Also the
comic navvy, bargee, etc.; but there are no anti-Trade-Union jokes.
Broadly speaking, everyone with much over or much under £5 a week is
regarded as laughable. The 'swell' is almost as automatically a figure of
fun as the slum-dweller.
STOCK FIGURES--Foreigners seldom or never appear. The chief locality
joke is the Scotsman, who is almost inexhaustible. The lawyer is always a
swindler, the clergyman always a nervous idiot who says the wrong thing.
The 'knut' or 'masher' still appears, almost as in Edwardian days, in
out-of-date looking evening-clothes and an opera hat, or even spats and a
knobby cane. Another survival is the Suffragette, one of the big jokes of
the pre-1914 period and too valuable to be relinquished. She has
reappeared, unchanged in physical appearance, as the Feminist lecturer or
Temperance fanatic. A feature of the last few years is the complete
absence of anti-Jew post cards. The 'Jew joke', always somewhat more
ill-natured than the 'Scotch joke', disappeared abruptly soon after the
rise of Hitler.
POLITICS--Any contemporary event, cult or activity which has comic
possibilities (for example, 'free love', feminism, A.R.P., nudism)
rapidly finds its way into the picture post cards, but their general
atmosphere is extremely old-fashioned. The implied political outlook is a
Radicalism appropriate to about the year 1900. At normal times they are
not only not patriotic, but go in for a mild guying of patriotism, with
jokes about 'God save the King', the Union Jack, etc. The European
situation only began to reflect itself in them at some time in 1939, and
first did so through the comic aspects of A.R.P. Even at this date few
post cards mention the war except in A.R.P. jokes (fat woman stuck in the
mouth of Anderson shelter: wardens neglecting their duty while young
woman undresses at window she has forgotten to black out, etc., etc.) A
few express anti-Hitler sentiments of a not very vindictive kind. One,
not McGill's, shows Hitler with the usual hypertrophied backside, bending
down to pick a flower. Caption; 'What would you do, chums?' This is about
as high a flight of patriotism as any post card is likely to attain.
Unlike the twopenny weekly papers, comic post cards are not the product
of any great monopoly company, and evidendy they are not regarded as
having any importance in forming public opinion. There is no sign in them
of any attempt to induce an outlook acceptable to the ruling class.
Here one comes back to the outstanding, all-important feature of comic
post cards--their obscenity. It is by this that everyone remembers them,
and it is also central to their purpose, though not in a way diat is
immediately obvious.
A recurrent, almost dominant motif in comic post cards is the woman with
the stuck-out behind. In perhaps half of them, or more than half, even
when the point of the joke has nothing to do with sex, the same female
figure appears, a plump 'voluptuous' figure with the dress clinging to it
as tightly as another skin and with breasts or buttocks grossly
over-emphasized according to which way it is turned. There can be no
doubt that these pictures lift the lid off a very widespread repression,
natural enough in a country whose women when young tend to be slim to the
point of skimpiness. But at the same time the McGill post card--and this
applies to all other post cards in this genre--is not intended as
pornography but, a subtler thing, as a skit on pornography. The Hottentot
figures of the women are caricatures of the Englishman's secret ideal,
not portraits of it. When one examines McGill's post cards more closely,
one notices that his brand of humour only has a meaning in relation to a
fairly strict moral code. Whereas in papers like ESQUIRE, for instance,
or LA VIE PARISIENNE, the imaginary background of the jokes is always
promiscuity, the utter breakdown of all standards, the background of the
McGill post card is marriage. The four leading jokes are nakedness,
illegitimate babies, old maids and newly married couples, none of which
would seem funny in a really dissolute or even 'sophisticated' society.
The post cards dealing with honeymoon couples always have the
enthusiastic indecency of those village weddings where it is still
considered screamingly funny to sew bells to the bridal bed. In one, for
example, a young bridegroom is shown getting out of bed the morning after
his wedding night. 'The first morning in our own little home, darling!'
he is saying; 'I'll go and get the milk and paper and bring you up a cup
of tea.' Inset is a picture of the front doorstep; on it are four
newspapers and four bottles of milk. This is obscene, if you like, but it
is not immoral. Its implication--and this is just the implication the
ESQUIRE or the NEW YORKER would avoid at all costs--is that marriage is
something profoundly exciting and important, the biggest event in the
average human being's life.
So also with jokes about nagging wives and tyrannous mothers-in-law. They
do at least imply a stable society in which marriage is indissoluble and
family loyalty taken for granted. And bound up with this is something I
noted earlier, the fact there are no pictures, or hardly any, of
good-looking people beyond their first youth. There is the 'spooning'
couple and the middle-aged, cat-and-dog couple, but nothing in between.
The liaison, the illicit but more or less decorous love-affair which used
to be the stock joke of French comic papers, is not a post card subject.
And this reflects, on a comic level, the working-class outlook which
takes it as a matter of course that youth and adventure--almost, indeed,
individual life--end with marriage. One of the few authentic
class-differences, as opposed to class-distinctions, still existing in
England is that the working classes age very much earlier. They do not
live less long, provided that they survive their childhood, nor do they
lose their physical activity earlier, but they do lose very early their
youthful appearance. This fact is observable everywhere, but can be most
easily verified by watching one of the higher age groups registering for
military service; the middle--and upper-class members look, on average,
ten years younger than the others. It is usual to attribute this to the
harder lives that the working classes have to live, but it is doubtful
whether any such difference now exists as would account for it. More
probably the truth is that the working classes reach middle age earlier
because they accept it earlier. For to look young after, say, thirty is
largely a matter of wanting to do so. This generalization is less true of
the better-paid workers, especially those who live in council houses and
labour-saving flats, but it is true enough even of them to point to a
difference of outlook. And in this, as usual, they are more traditional,
more in accord with the Christian past than the well-to-do women who try
to stay young at forty by means of physical-jerks, cosmetics and
avoidance of child-bearing. The impulse to cling to youth at all costs,
to attempt to preserve your sexual attraction, to see even in middle age
a future for yourself and not merely for your children, is a thing of
recent growth and has only precariously established itself. It will
probably disappear again when our standard of living drops and our
birth-rate rises. 'Youth's a stuff will not endure' expresses the normal,
traditional attitude. It is this ancient wisdom that McGill and his
colleagues are reflecting, no doubt unconsciously, when they allow for no
transition stage between the honeymoon couple and those glamourless
figures, Mum and Dad.
I have said that at least half of McGill's post cards are sex jokes, and
a proportion, perhaps ten per cent, are far more obscene than anything
else that is now printed in England. Newsagents are occasionally
prosecuted for selling them, and there would be many more prosecutions if
the broadest jokes were not invariably protected by double meanings. A
single example will be enough to show how this is done. In one post card,
captioned 'They didn't believe her', a young woman is demonstrating, with
her hands held apart, something about two feet long to a couple of
open-mouthed acquaintances. Behind her on the wall is a stuffed fish in a
glass case, and beside that is a photograph of a nearly naked athlete.
Obviously it is not the fish that she is referring to, but this could
never be proved. Now, it is doubtful whether there is any paper in
England that would print a joke of this kind, and certainly there is no
paper that does so habitually. There is an immense amount of pornography
of a mild sort, countless illustrated papers cashing in on women's legs,
but there is no popular literature specializing in the 'vulgar', farcical
aspect of sex. On the other hand, jokes exactly like McGill's are the
ordinary small change of the revue and music-hall stage, and are also to
be heard on the radio, at moments when the censor happens to be nodding.
In England the gap between what can be said and what can be printed is
rather exceptionally wide. Remarks and gestures which hardly anyone
objects to on the stage would raise a public outcry if any attempt were
made to reproduce them on paper. (Compare Max Miller's stage patter with
his weekly column in the SUNDAY DISPATCH) The comic post cards are the
only existing exception to this rule, the only medium in which really
'low' humour is considered to be printable. Only in post cards and on the
variety stage can the stuck-out behind, dog and lamp-post, baby's nappy
type of joke be freely exploited. Remembering that, one sees what
function these post cards, in their humble way, are performing.
What they are doing is to give expression to the Sancho Panza view of
life, the attitude to life that Miss Rebecca West once summed up as
'extracting as much fun as possible from smacking behinds in basement
kitchens'. The Don Quixote-Sancho Panza combination, which of course is
simply the ancient dualism of body and soul in fiction form, recurs more
frequently in the literature of the last four hundred years than can be
explained by mere imitation. It comes up again and again, in endless
variations, Bouvard and Pécuchet, Jeeves and Wooster, Bloom and Dedalus,
Holmes and Watson (the Holmes-Watson variant is an exceptionally subtle
one, because the usual physical characteristics of two partners have been
transposed). Evidently it corresponds to something enduring in our
civilization, not in the sense that either character is to be found in a
'pure' state in real life, but in the sense that the two principles,
noble folly and base wisdom, exist side by side in nearly every human
being. If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or
Sancho Panza? Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you
that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little
fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a
whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting
against the soul. His tastes lie towards safety, soft beds, no work, pots
of beer and women with 'voluptuous' figures. He it is who punctures your
fine attitudes and urges you to look after Number One, to be unfaithful
to your wife, to bilk your debts, and so on and so forth. Whether you
allow yourself to be influenced by him is a different question. But it is
simply a lie to say that he is not part of you, just as it is a lie to
say that Don Quixote is not part of you either, though most of what is
said and written consists of one lie or the other, usually the first.
But though in varying forms he is one of the stock figures of literature,
in real life, especially in the way society is ordered, his point of view
never gets a fair hearing. There is a constant world-wide conspiracy to
pretend that he is not there, or at least that he doesn't matter. Codes
of law and morals, or religious systems, never have much room in them for
a humorous view of life. Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is
ultimately a custard pie, and the reason why so large a proportion of
jokes centre round obscenity is simply that all societies, as the price
of survival, have to insist on a fairly high standard of sexual morality.
A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack upon morality, but it is
a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise.
So also with all other jokes, which always centre round cowardice,
laziness, dishonesty or some other quality which society cannot afford to
encourage. Society has always to demand a little more from human beings
than it will get in practice. It has to demand faultless discipline and
self-sacrifice, it must expect its subjects to work hard, pay their
taxes, and be faithful to their wives, it must assume that men think it
glorious to die on the battlefield and women want wear themselves out
with child-bearing. The whole of what one may call official literature is
founded on such assumptions. I never read the proclamations of generals
before battle, the speeches of flihrers and prime ministers, the
solidarity songs of public schools and left-wing political parties,
national anthems, Temperance tracts, papal encyclicals and sermons
against gambling and contraception, without seeming to hear in the
background a chorus of raspberries from all the millions of common men to
whom these high sentiments make no appeal. Nevertheless the high
sentiments always win in the end, leaders who offer blood, toil, tears
and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer
safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are
heroic. Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep
their mouths shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their
guns still firing when their decks are awash. It is only that the other
element in man, the lazy, cowardly, debt-bilking adulterer who is inside
all of us, can never be suppressed altogether and needs a hearing
occasionally.
The comic post cards are one expression of his point of view, a humble
one, less important than the music halls, but still worthy of attention.
In a society which is still basically Christian they naturally
concentrate on sex jokes; in a totalitarian society, if they had any
freedom of expression at all, they would probably concentrate on laziness
or cowardice, but at any rate on the unheroic in one form or another. It
will not do to condemn them on the ground that they are vulgar and ugly.
That is exactly what they are meant to be. Their whole meaning and virtue
is in their unredeemed low-ness, not only in the sense of obscenity, but
lowness of outlook in every direction whatever. The slightest hint of
'higher' influences would ruin them utterly. They stand for the
worm's-eye view of life, for the music-hall world where marriage is a
dirty joke or a comic disaster, where the rent is always behind and the
clothes are always up the spout, where the lawyer is always a crook and
the Scotsman always a miser, where the newly-weds make fools of
themselves on the hideous beds of seaside lodging-houses and the drunken,
red-nosed husbands roll home at four in the morning to meet the
linen-nightgowned wives who wait for them behind the front door, poker in
hand. Their existence, the fact that people want them, is symptomatically
important. Like the music halls, they are a sort of saturnalia, a
harmless rebellion against virtue. They express only one tendency in the
human mind, but a tendency which is always there and will find its own
outlet, like water. On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not
too good, and not quite all the time. For:
there is a just man that perished in his righteousness, and there is a
wicked man that prolongeth his life in his wickedness. Be not righteous
overmuch; neither make thyself over wise; why shouldst thou destroy
thyself? Be not overmuch wicked, neither be thou foolish: why shouldst
thou die before thy time?
In the past the mood of the comic post card could enter into the central
stream of literature, and jokes barely different from McGill's could
casually be uttered between the murders in Shakespeare's tragedies. That
is no longer possible, and a whole category of humour, integral to our
literature till 1800 or thereabouts, has dwindled down to these ill-drawn
post cards, leading a barely legal existence in cheap stationers'
windows. The corner of the human heart that they speak for might easily
manifest itself in worse forms, and I for one should be sorry to see them
vanish.
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