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Tuesday 7 October 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.

I wonder if a contemporary Vicky, a refugee from, say, Burma, Venezuela or Iran were to come to London today and seek to learn about the English sense of humour in 2007, how he and his mentors would set about it. What would he or she be told to read, see, listen to and study? Leaving censorship aside for the moment, there have been major and quite genuine changes in what makes us laugh. For instance, that curiously sinister strand of humour, originally evolved from James Joyce through The Dubliners and Ulysses, perfected by his pupil Samuel Becket in Waiting for Godot and other plays, and codified by Harold Pinter in an oeuvre he has described as ‘the weasel beneath the cocktail cabinet’, did not exist at the start of Vicky’s learning-curve. And, closer to the mainstream, we can detect the fundamental shifts by comparing Coward’s plays or those of George Bernard Shaw (Vicky told me he learned a lot from Pygmalion and Arms and the Man) with Tom Stoppard’s. There are, to be sure, plenty of continuities, not least among the works that appeal to children, which formed an important part of Vicky’s reading when he was under Gerald Barry’s tuition. Of the three most important children’s authors today, C.S. Lewis and Professor Tolkein were already writing in secret their fantastic tales when Vicky was stocking up his notions of what stirred the imagination of the English. Even the creator of Harry Potter is reasonably described as part of a tradition broad enough to include not just Alice in Wonderland but Sherlock Holmes, The Wind in the Willows and Peter Pan. Until quite recently there were continuities in broadcasting too, for Much Binding in the Marsh, Richard ‘Stinker’ Murdoch, Jimmy Edwards and Morecambe and Wise were umbilically linked to Itma. And shows such as Steptoe and Son, Till Death Us Do Part, Dad’s Army and Fawlty Towers were enjoyed for the same reasons that English people in the 1930s laughed at Coward and Waugh. But some fundamental shifting of the tectonic plates of humour and appetite has taken place to explain the enormous popularity of Big Brother and similar successes.

More articles from: Paul Johnson | this section

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