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Christmas funny books

Bevis Hillier

Wednesday, 28th November 2007

Stocking fillers

I like the story of Alfred Hitchcock’s going through French customs. An inspector looked quizzically at the occupation stated on his passport: ‘Producer’. The official asked, ‘What do you produce?’ Hitchcock: ‘Gooseflesh.’ Grothe might also have included the rejoinder of Gilbert Harding, the irascible television star of the 1950s. Arriving at American immigration controls, he was required to fill in a long form, on which one of the questions was: ‘Have you ever tried, or do you intend to try now, to undermine the Constitution of the United States?’ Harding scrawled: ‘Sole object of visit.’ He was refused entry.

There are some mistakes. When, in 1842, the British commander Charles James Napier captured Sindh (in modern Pakistan) he did not, as stated here, send Lord Ellenborough the one-word message ‘Peccavi’ (Latin for ‘I have sinned.’) British generals are rarely that clever: it was a joke by Punch. And Grothe has Noël Coward being greeted at an airport by journalists:

A reporter from the newspaper the Sun hollered out, ‘Mr Coward, have you anything to say to the Sun?’ Coward replied pleasantly: ‘Shine.’

In the version I’ve heard of that story, which I tend to believe, it was the evening paper the Star (now defunct) that greeted Coward, whose instruction was: ‘Twinkle.’

Charlie Crocker’s Still Lost in Translation: More Misadventures in English Abroad (R H Books, £10) is not quite as funny as his Lost in Translation, which I praised in an earlier Christmas batch. It is again a collection of notices and brochures in garbled English, found mostly in foreign countries. Perhaps Crocker used up the best ones in the first anthology; but there are still many giggle-making boo-boos, among them:

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