English Humour for Beginners by George Mikes

Author:George Mikes
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9780241978559
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-04-06T16:00:00+00:00

The butt of this pre-war joke is Romania.

A Romanian lieutenant goes to another Balkan country and accompanies home a famous courtesan. He spends the night with her and is about to leave in the morning. He is girding on his sword when the lady asks him: ‘I say, what about money?’

He clicks his heels and salutes: ‘A Romanian officer does not accept money.’

Jewish Jokes

If the English can smile at themselves, the Jews can positively roar with laughter at their own weaknesses and peculiarities. A nation must have a great deal of self-confidence to be able to laugh at itself and both these peoples – the English and the Jews – know perfectly well, who are the most excellent and admirable people in the world … although their answers to this question are not identical.

Many people – I am one of them – think that Jewish jokes are the best of all. They are not only funny but are often wise and profound, revealing as much about human nature, the secrets of the human soul, as a good poem.

The Jewish sense of humour must be one of the decisive factors in the Jews’ survival of thousands of years of persecution and diaspora. If you take your oppressors and persecutors seriously, you will sooner or later adopt their valuation of yourself; you will feel guilty and you will see yourself through their eyes. Take despots seriously and you will be broken by them and will, eventually, perish. But if you are able to laugh at them – see their stupidity, their vanity, their meanness – if you realize the fatuity of their claims to superiority, then oppression will steel you, make you stronger, more united as a group; and victory – or at least liberation – becomes possible. I am sure that the Jews of antiquity, wandering in the desert for forty years, were sustained not only by prayer, by Moses’ strength of character and by manna from heaven, but also by primordial Jewish jokes.

But a lot of people have grave doubts about this thesis. Take this joke, for example, a product of Jewish humour in Czarist Russia.

An old Jew is travelling on a train. A young and smug officer is the only other passenger in the compartment. The officer does not like the idea of being closeted with the old Jew for a long journey so he is silent and aloof for a long time. But in the end he gets bored and starts talking to the other man who is having his lunch now, from a brown paper parcel, placed on his knees.

‘I say, Jew,’ says the lieutenant, ‘you all have the reputation of being so clever.’

‘Well, perhaps we are.’

‘Are you? … Then tell me what makes you so clever?’

‘Oh, I can tell you that easily,’ says the old man. ‘The heads of fish.’

‘What d’you mean “the heads of fish”?’ asks the officer, astonished.

‘Yes … You see, the fish have wonderful brains. We eat them – and that’s all.’

The officer is incredulous but the journey is long and one should try everything once, so he says: ‘Very well.

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