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the faces grinning and vacuous, the women monstrously parodied, with bottoms like Hottentots. Your second impression, however, is of indefinable familiarity. What do these things remind you of? What are they so like? In the first place, of course, they remind you of the barely different post cards which you probably gazed at in your childhood. But more than this, what you are really looking at is something as traditional as Greek tragedy, a sort of sub-world of smacked bottoms and scrawny mothers-in-law which is a part of Western European consciousness. Not that the jokes, taken one by one, are necessarily stale. Not being debarred from smuttiness, comic post cards repeat themselves less often than the joke columns in reputable magazines, but their basic subject-matter, the kind of joke they are aiming at, never varies. A few are genuinely witty, in a Max Millerish style. Examples: "I like seeing experienced girls home." "But I'm not experienced!" "You're not home yet!" yours?" "I've been struggling for years to get a fur coat. How did you get "I left off struggling." JUDGE: "You are prevaricating, sir. Did you or did you not sleep with this woman?" CO-RESPONDENT: "Not a wink, my lord!" In general, however, they are not witty but humorous, and it must be said for McGill's post cards, in particular, that the drawing is often a good deal funnier than the joke beneath it. Obviously the outstanding characteristic of comic post cards is their obscenity, and I must discuss that more fully later. But I give here a rough analysis of their habitual subject-matter, with such explanatory remarks as seem to be needed: Sex.—More than half, perhaps three-quarters, of the jokes are sex jokes, ranging from the harmless to the all but unprintable. First favourite is probably the illegitimate baby. Typical captions: "Could you exchange this lucky charm for a baby's feeding-bottle?" "She didn't ask me to the christening, so I'm not going to the wedding." Also newlyweds, old maids, nude statues and women in bathing-dresses. All of these are ipso facto funny, mere mention of them being enough to raise a laugh. The cuckoldry joke is very seldom exploited, and there are no references to homosexuality. Conventions of the sex joke: (i) Marriage only benefits the women. Every man is plotting seduction and every woman is plotting marriage. No woman ever remains unmarried voluntarily. (ii) Sex-appeal vanishes at about the age of twenty-five. Well-preserved and goodlooking people beyond their first youth are never represented. The amorous honeymooning couple
eappear as the grim-visaged wife and shapeless, moustachioed, red-nosed husband, no intermediate stage being allowed for. Home life.—Next to sex, the henpecked husband is the favourite joke. Typical caption: "Did they get an X-ray of your wife's jaw at the hospital?"—"No, they got a moving picture instead." Conventions: (i) There is no such thing as a happy marriage. (ii) No man ever gets the better of a woman in argument. Drunkenness.—Both drunkenness and teetotalism are ipso facto funny. Conventions: (i) All drunken men have optical illusions. (ii) Drunkenness is something peculiar to middle-aged men. Drunken youths or women are never represented. W.C. jokes.—There is not a large number of these. Chamber-pots are ipso facto funny, and so are public lavatories. A typical post card, captioned "A Friend in Need," shows a man's hat blown off his head and disappearing down the steps of a ladies' lavatory. Inter-working-class snobbery.—Much in these post cards suggests that they are aimed at the better-off working class and poorer middle class. There are many jokes turning on malapropisms, illiteracy, dropped aitches and the rough manners of slum-dwellers. Countless post cards show draggled hags of the stage-charwoman type exchanging "unladylike" abuse. Typical repartee: "I wish you were a statue and I was a pigeon!" A certain number produced since the war treat evacuation from the anti-evacuee angle. There are the usual jokes about tramps, beggars and criminals, and the comic maidservant appears fairly frequently. Also the comic navvy, bargee, etc.; but there are no anti Trade-Union jokes. Broadly speaking, everyone with much over or much under £5 a week is regarded as laughable. The "swell" is almost as automatically a figure of fun as the slum-dweller. Stock figures.—Foreigners seldom or never appear. The chief locality joke is the Scotsman, who is almost inexhaustible. The lawyer is always a swindler, the clergyman always a nervous idiot who says the wrong thing. The "knut" or "masher" still appears, almost as in Edwardian
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All Art Is Propaganda George Orwell
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Text set in Garamond MT Designed by
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Writers and Leviathan • 337 Revie
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overstatement and attack; his talen
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specialization in writing, too litt
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He is wrong in these essays about E
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"Writers and Leviathan." There is e
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eady phrases, you purge your langua
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actually makes it more difficult to
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English public has always been a li
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has very little direct power. Unlik
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Dickens sees clearly enough that th
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comparatively sanely treated, no no
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curriculum, a little watered down.
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puritan tradition, which is not dea
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culture. But never anywhere does he
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childhood ... But I held some stati
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this red-headed animal's, remained
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a novelist, like Dickens himself. W
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memory; but, as usual, Dickens has
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fond sister, the same in the love o
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child, who wasn't hungry, was playi
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hard to hold that young man off of
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Tolstoy is not. Tolstoy's character
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Page 52 and 53: eading one or more of them. The Gem
Page 54 and 55: of characters in Dickens. Needless
Page 56 and 57: the British Empire, by Australians,
Page 58 and 59: That's soon enough for me Gonna get
Page 60 and 61: for the Modern Boy none of them is
Page 62 and 63: is led to identify with a G-man, wi
Page 64 and 65: 23 period and not of recent controv
Page 66 and 67: English boys, including many who wi
Page 68 and 69: Inside the Whale Inside the Whale,
Page 70 and 71: ecognisable experiences of human be
Page 72 and 73: In mid-nineteenth-century America m
Page 74 and 75: 2 When one says that a writer is fa
Page 76 and 77: women as something unattainable. Wh
Page 78 and 79: that there are no waves of generosi
Page 80 and 81: information or statement. The first
Page 82 and 83: activity was libelling the Labour P
Page 84 and 85: personal immunity. The attitude was
Page 86 and 87: implicit throughout his work. Every
Page 88 and 89: Catholic-feudal one. But it is cert
Page 90 and 91: actually burbling about a renaissan
Page 92 and 93: An uncanny play possibly owing some
Page 94 and 95: How good a film is this, simply as
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Page 102 and 103: days, in out-of-date-looking evenin
Page 104 and 105: proved. Now, it is doubtful whether
Page 106 and 107: No, Not One Review of No Such Liber
Page 108 and 109: quite a lot who wins, and the usual
Page 110 and 111: Rudyard Kipling 1 Horizon, February
Page 112 and 113: ealising that the "box-wallah" call
Page 114 and 115: facetiousness of his stage Cockney
Page 116 and 117: "East is East, and West is West. Th
Page 118 and 119: come back into your mind and seem b
Page 120 and 121: He knew that thought clings round d
Page 122 and 123: One is no longer disposed to say it
Page 124 and 125: Can Socialists Be Happy? 1 Tribune,
Page 126 and 127: Holy, holy, holy, all the saints ad
Page 128 and 129: thinks that happiness consists in n
Page 130 and 131: A year earlier than this Dali had "
Page 132 and 133: at his paintings. And these two set
Page 134 and 135: in. Take away the skulls, ants, lob
Page 136 and 137: Propaganda and Demotic Speech Persu
Page 138 and 139: language is like. But this is nothi
Page 140 and 141: espond to. At present propaganda on
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Page 144 and 145: Several other points need noticing
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Most of these have been prolific wr
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The Prevention of Literature Polemi
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"romanticism" and so forth, are mer
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concerned, there is not much differ
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value. Prose is a different matter,
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Meanwhile, if he wants to safeguard
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"(3) On the one side we have the fr
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mutandis, status quo, gleichschaltu
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this essay. Professor Laski (1) use
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conditions, and that we cannot infl
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Confessions of a Book Reviewer Trib
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The best practice, it has always se
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one would deny that Gulliver's Trav
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The Houyhnhnms, Swift's ideal being
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that the impulse to make constructi
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dissident opinions be tolerated? Th
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what? In order that the same proces
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like Swift to say: "If horror and p
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Tolstoy's final verdict on Lear is
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feel that Tolstoy's criticisms are
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know, perhaps, just what he misses
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Of course, one cannot assume that T
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poetry for its texture—valuing it
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Writers and Leviathan Politics and
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"the enemy is in your own country"
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sane. Even a general election is no
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movement—is not mentioned at all.
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Reflections on Gandhi Partisan Revi
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objects is an illusion to be escape
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or less approachable and will respo
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dramatist (1803-185 7). Boys' Weekl
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1939 (as Delta from April 1938). On
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36. Lawrence Durrell (1912-1990), p
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proper reading is in the notes. The
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Tom's Cabin (1852), which brought h
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2. Stuart Chase (1888-1985), econom
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*** *Dali mentions L'Age d'Or and a
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*** *The physical decadence which S
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