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Sunday 7 September 2008

And another thing

Thinking of becoming a cartoonist in today’s Britain? Think again

The cartoonist Vicky (Victor Weisz, 1913–66) fled to London not long after the Reichstag fire, with the Gestapo at his heels. Had he not possessed a Hungarian passport he would never have got away, for as the boy wonder of Berlin political cartooning in the 12 Uhr Blatt, he had gone for Hitler as far back as 1928, and was a marked man.

Vicky was lucky to meet and make friends with Gerald Barry, then editor of the News Chronicle. He not only helped Vicky to master English, but decided that, if he was to become a successful cartoonist in London, he would need to familiarise himself with all the key elements in our literature and folklore which reflect the English sense of humour. So Vicky was encouraged to read certain bits of Shakespeare — Falstaff, Malvolio, the Porter in Macbeth, the graveyard scene in Hamlet, for example. He was given Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities, the poems of Edward Lear and Alice in Wonderland. Bound volumes of Punch were put before him, so he could puzzle over John Leech’s ‘Servant Problem’ jokes and (the latest craze) ‘Aspects of the English Character’ by the great and tragically short-lived artist Pont. He had to read Three Men in a Boat, the Just William stories, A.A. Milne and Beatrix Potter, Wodehouse’s Jeeves books, Aldous Huxley’s Chrome Yellow and Waugh’s Vile Bodies. He listened, week after week, to Tommy Handley’s Itma, and studied the scripts, watched George Formby and Will Hay movies, and was taken to see the motionless ladies at the Windmill (‘We Never Closed’). Gilbert and Sullivan, the Empire music hall, Noël Coward’s Blythe Spirit, then on its record-breaking run — he had to see them all. Indeed he was introduced to Coward himself, who advised: ‘Listen carefully to the BBC, old boy, especially when they’re not trying to be funny. Oh yes, and Gracie Fields. Why do they call her our Gracie, I wonder. She’s certainly not mine.’ He worked on the English use of irony, and the double entendre (indeed the selective use of French in general for particular subjects), the role and content of the seaside postcard and the inner workings of comics like the Wizard and the Girl’s Own Paper. Once started, he went on learning for the rest of his life. By the time I met him, in 1955, he spoke pretty well faultless English, and knew more about our sense of humour than we did ourselves.

More articles from: Paul Johnson | this section

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