'It's an odd job, making decent people laugh'
'It's not what I do, but the way I do it. It's not what I say, but the way I say it', said the film star Mae West, and perhaps this is the essence of humour. The writer Quentin Crisp is said to have once closed an interview with the words 'I am so sorry. We have to stop there. I have just come to the end of my personality', though President George Bush famously said 'What's wrong with being a boring kind of guy?' A review of the film Troy was headlined 'Beware geeks bearing scripts'. But it is not necessarily the speaking parts that matter. The actress Tippi Hedren was blunt about her role in an earlier film: 'Hitchcock was more careful about how the birds were treated than he was about me. I was just there to be pecked'.
Another writer, David Benedictus, described the arrival of John Birt as Director General of the BBC as 'not unlike watching the Prague Spring in reverse'. He may have been thinking of Birt's own description of the BBC's symphony orchestras as 'a variable resource centre whose viability depends upon the business plan of the Controller of Radio 3'. Of course, management has endless problems in broadcasting. For example, when the actor Christopher Eccleston took over as Doctor Who, the scriptwriter Russell T. Davies included a line to explain his accent: 'Lots of planets have a north'.
Bush may have had one view of the presidency, but Bob Hope took another: 'I was happy when I first heard Ronald Reagan was running for the presidency. I've always thought, once you're in show business you should stay in it'. The British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan put this into effect. On being shown a pile of papers by his colleague Rab Butler, described as 'policies', he said 'Oh, I beg you, not policies. They come back to haunt you. Give them broad sunlit uplands, dear boy'. After all, whatever the politicians do, Jerry Seinfeld's observation remains true: 'Ever noticed that no matter what happens in one day, it exactly fits in the newspaper?'
It was Molière who summed up humour as an odd job more than three hundred years ago. Humorous sayings old and new can be found in the latest paperback edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations, edited by Ned Sherrin.
Susan Ratliffe
20/11/2009
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