The comic writer George Mikes, who died nearly 40 years ago, knew he had made it when he received a fan letter one day from Albert Einstein. Mikes, the scientist said to him, was blessed with ‘radiant humour… Everyone must laugh with you, even those who are hit with your little arrows.’
Chief among Mikes’s targets were the British people, whom the writer – a refugee from Hungary – had chosen to spend the greater part of his life among. He had come to the UK on a visit in 1938 and wisely, given what would happen to his country in the years that followed, decided never to leave. Though it describes an England now long vanished, his 1946 book How to be an Alien, a comic study of the country and its foibles, brought him fame and acceptance. It was published, he wrote, ‘at a moment when the English were in an introspective mood, preoccupied with themselves and their status in the world… A little foreigner came along and made fun of them but that was all right, they had always been proud of being able to laugh at themselves… My book flattered them, although I never meant it to.’ It also gave us epigrams that have since become part of the national lexicon:
- ‘An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one.’
- ‘On the Continent people have good food; in England people have good table manners.’
- ‘Continental people have sex lives; the English have hot water bottles.’
The last observation drew an indignant response from one reader when the book was reprinted a few years later. His observation, she told him huffily, was quite out of date and no longer applied to the English people at all. These days they used electric blankets.
In some ways, Mikes was typical of his generation of Magyars in London – they invariably knew each other, were in and out of one another’s flats for pálinka and goulash, and seemed to move as a pack. The men were unrepentant woman-chasers and often worked for the BBC Hungarian Service at Bush House (where, Mikes said, ‘everyone flirted with everyone else’). Barely able to speak the language on his arrival, he quickly fell in love with the Brits – their understatement, eccentricity and strange, stoic humour – and soon was the most English Hungarian of the lot. He joined the Garrick Club, played tennis at the Hurlingham and, with the Duke of Bedford, co-authored the Book of Snobs.
He also wrote in an English prose – effortless, warm and drily comic – that won him a legion of readers both here and abroad, and which can still make you laugh out loud. One of his happiest moments, he said, was finding himself next to a stranger on a London bus, both of them clutching copies of his books. ‘You read him too then?’ asked his neighbour eagerly. ‘No, sir,’ Mikes replied. ‘I write him.’
How to be an Alien was both Mikes’s blessing and lifelong curse. However many books he wrote thereafter – and he wrote a shelf-full – he would always be known for this one. But the author, who always said he was ‘damned’ with a ‘pleasant and equable nature’, accepted it: ‘Why complain? It is better to be remembered for one book than for none.’
There are plenty of others worth reading. Alien was followed by a spate of ‘How to’ books by Mikes – How to be Affluent, How to be Poor, How to be Decadent, How to be God. He wrote travel books on (among other countries) Italy, Central Europe, France, Greece and Israel. Though these were basically benign, Mikes never shied away from the skewering one-liner. On a visit to Austria, he found the Viennese ‘annoyingly over-courteous. The manners of waiters, hotel staff, shop assistants and so on have a slightly feudal flavour, implying a great deal of respect, indeed humility towards you, which appears (and is) completely phoney.’
Of Italy’s cultural treasures, Mikes had this to say: ‘The Italian picture galleries are the pride of western civilisation. It is a great pity, if you come to think of it, that they make you sick of the arts in every shape for four or five years to come.’ Comparing Italian emotion with British reserve, he observed that England was ‘the only country in the world where people discuss the eventual death of their parents with objectivity – sometimes bordering on gusto. The discussion very frequently takes place in the presence of the parents concerned.’
British national decline, he saw as the inevitable consequence of our politeness: ‘We know it was wrong to rule two-thirds of the world. Our mistake. We do apologise. We’ll never do it again… We shall try to sink lower, difficult though it is, with all our gifts. But we’ll try. We won’t give up. Sorry for being alive.’
British national decline, he saw as the inevitable consequence of our politeness
But it is when this professional humourist writes about comedy that we get the really timely insights. In his 1971 Laughing Matter, Mikes was already (even in the era of Peter Cook, Peter Sellers and Woody Allen) announcing humour’s impending death. ‘The idea that something might be seriously funny seems to be alien to young people today,’ the editor of the New Yorker complained to him, and Mikes, looking at the upheaval of the 1960s, concurred: ‘A new era is unsure of itself; and uncertainty has created pomposity and hypocrisy. Our age cannot afford to laugh at itself because it is ridiculous.’
Dwelling on the subject, he went on to tell a story from his childhood, when a friend, Tibor, had called him out for making others the butt of his savage jokes. ‘He said that one’s spiritual powers were given one to protect the weak against the unjust tyrant… making a fool of harmless and defenceless people was a worse crime than stealing.’ As a man, Mikes said, he had felt gratitude to Tibor for a long time for showing him the error of his ways. It was only when he became a professional humourist that he realised the gratitude was perhaps misplaced.
Tibor’s ‘nobility of soul,’ Mikes wrote, ‘is the cause of my pending downfall; it is [the] more or less general acceptance of his mentality that has killed Humour… In many great practitioners – from Swift through W. S. Gilbert to Evelyn Waugh – a strong streak of cruelty is noticeable and, for weaker souls like myself, disturbing.’ But, he added, ‘to deprive humour of its streak of cruelty is like depriving the elephant of its trunk, like depriving water of its wetness. It is like putting a meek, old cow, kindly disposed to the world and to all toreros, in the bullring… The ensuing spectacle is pleasanter, less bloody and less hair-raising than those provided by more spirited animals, but it is not a bullfight. And it does not quite satisfy the crowd…’
Those who make the case for woke comedy, who rail against punching down, or who work in publishing houses as sensitivity readers – that dismal non-job devoted, at its worst, to casting its own patina of mediocrity over the individual writer’s voice – should sit up here and pay attention. So should we all. It seems that in 2025, even from beyond the grave, George Mikes – that most astute and generous Boswell to the British – has something important to tell us about who we are.
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