All Things Considered | Page 5

begins to talk like oneself, but all the syllables come out different,
then if one is a man one feels inclined to laugh, though if one is a
gentleman one resists the inclination.
Mr. Max Beerbohm, I remember, professed to understand the first two
forms of popular wit, but said that the third quite stumped him. He

could not see why there should be anything funny about bad cheese. I
can tell him at once. He has missed the idea because it is subtle and
philosophical, and he was looking for something ignorant and foolish.
Bad cheese is funny because it is (like the foreigner or the man fallen
on the pavement) the type of the transition or transgression across a
great mystical boundary. Bad cheese symbolises the change from the
inorganic to the organic. Bad cheese symbolises the startling prodigy of
matter taking on vitality. It symbolises the origin of life itself. And it is
only about such solemn matters as the origin of life that the democracy
condescends to joke. Thus, for instance, the democracy jokes about
marriage, because marriage is a part of mankind. But the democracy
would never deign to joke about Free Love, because Free Love is a
piece of priggishness.
As a matter of fact, it will be generally found that the popular joke is
not true to the letter, but is true to the spirit. The vulgar joke is
generally in the oddest way the truth and yet not the fact. For instance,
it is not in the least true that mothers-in-law are as a class oppressive
and intolerable; most of them are both devoted and useful. All the
mothers-in-law I have ever had were admirable. Yet the legend of the
comic papers is profoundly true. It draws attention to the fact that it is
much harder to be a nice mother-in-law than to be nice in any other
conceivable relation of life. The caricatures have drawn the worst
mother-in-law a monster, by way of expressing the fact that the best
mother-in-law is a problem. The same is true of the perpetual jokes in
comic papers about shrewish wives and henpecked husbands. It is all a
frantic exaggeration, but it is an exaggeration of a truth; whereas all the
modern mouthings about oppressed women are the exaggerations of a
falsehood. If you read even the best of the intellectuals of to-day you
will find them saying that in the mass of the democracy the woman is
the chattel of her lord, like his bath or his bed. But if you read the
comic literature of the democracy you will find that the lord hides
under the bed to escape from the wrath of his chattel. This is not the
fact, but it is much nearer the truth. Every man who is married knows
quite well, not only that he does not regard his wife as a chattel, but
that no man can conceivably ever have done so. The joke stands for an
ultimate truth, and that is a subtle truth. It is one not very easy to state

correctly. It can, perhaps, be most correctly stated by saying that, even
if the man is the head of the house, he knows he is the figurehead.
But the vulgar comic papers are so subtle and true that they are even
prophetic. If you really want to know what is going to happen to the
future of our democracy, do not read the modern sociological
prophecies, do not read even Mr. Wells's Utopias for this purpose,
though you should certainly read them if you are fond of good honesty
and good English. If you want to know what will happen, study the
pages of Snaps or Patchy Bits as if they were the dark tablets graven
with the oracles of the gods. For, mean and gross as they are, in all
seriousness, they contain what is entirely absent from all Utopias and
all the sociological conjectures of our time: they contain some hint of
the actual habits and manifest desires of the English people. If we are
really to find out what the democracy will ultimately do with itself, we
shall surely find it, not in the literature which studies the people, but in
the literature which the people studies.
I can give two chance cases in which the common or Cockney joke was
a much better prophecy than the careful observations of the most
cultured observer. When England was agitated, previous to the last
General Election, about the existence of Chinese labour, there was a
distinct difference between the tone of the politicians and the tone of
the populace. The politicians who disapproved of Chinese labour were
most careful to explain that they did not in any sense disapprove of
Chinese. According to them, it was