Went with Xi to the National Portrait Gallery where they were showing the Photographic Portrait Prize and Pop Art Portraits exhibitions. For many of the prints, although first impressions were of an occasion of solemnity, if you were to read the captions and the story beneath it, you’d be hard-pressed to suppress a chuckle when you look at the picture again. Somehow, there’s something intellectually funny about it.
I’ve been meeting quite a lot of people (relative to my usual weeks) in the past week - all quintessentially very English sort of people.
From pre-teenage kids to retired seniors, from the BBC to tabloid papers, from the highly-rated TV programmes to YouTube homemade clips, from those classic Orange ads in the cinemas to the posters they have on buses (I saw one they other day which went: “I’d do anything for you… including your wife” but couldn’t see what it was trying to sell) - they all have it: humour. And it’s not just any humour. It’s English humour:
The English do not have any sort of global monopoly on humour, but what is distinctive is the sheer pervasiveness and supreme importance of humour in English everyday life and culture. In other cultures, there is ‘a time and place’ for humour: among the English it is a constant, a given - there is always an undercurrent of humour. Virtually all English conversations and social interactions involve at least some degree of banter, teasing, irony, wit, mockery, wordplay, satire, understatement, humorous self-deprecation, sarcasm, pomposity-pricking or just silliness. Humour is not a special, separate kind of talk: it is our ‘default mode’; it is like breathing; we cannot function without it. English humour is a reflex, a knee-jerk response, particularly when we are feeling uncomfortable or awkward: when in doubt, joke. The taboo on earnestness is deeply embedded in the English psyche. Our response to earnestness is a distinctively English blend of armchair cynicism, ironic detachment, a squeamish distast for sentimentality, a stubborn refusal to be duped or taken in by fine rhetoric, and a mischievous delight in pricking the balloons of pomposity and self-importance. (English humour is not to be confused with ‘good humour’ or cheerfulness - it is quite often the opposite; we have satire instead of revolutions and uprisings.)
~ Kate Fox (2004), Watching the English
And I’m lovin’ it!
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The Aussie election outcomes were announced yesterday. On the streets, we saw a group of people, dressed up to an Aussie theme. What was odd was not so much of how they looked; even odder was the response (or lack of) that they got from others. We tagged along, observing them for a while. Other pedestrians, although they were aware of the comic group of characters proceeding their way, would hardly give them a second glance as they walked past. As if it was a most normal affair - to have people costumed as the Tassie devil, girls in pink fluffy dresses as though they came straight from Dreamworld, and Steve Irwin impersonators (cargo shorts in winter complete with ‘Akubra’ hats and dangling corks). “This is London!” - where everyone minds their own business. I came to the same deductions when doing street photography here too - compare shooting on the streets and markets in London, and in China, for example (where people’s reactions are simply hostile), or in Japan (where they’d pose and give the ‘V-sign’), or in other parts of South-east Asia (where people would look down, face away, or walk off).