Funny Foreigners

Proust was an inveterate giggler, by all accounts, at least as a young man. I'm not talking about the delicate, mincing variety of giggler. I refer to those suffering/enjoying the impossible to control, embarrassingly public fits of laughter that render you breathless, teary-eyed and physically doubled over - quite painfully so. The absurdity of human folly, especially of the seriously pompous type would set him off, so there were plenty of opportunities to lose control. I was thinking about this as I was running along the streets of Katong this evening, and (the mind works in an odd way) recalling my own youthful indiscretions in this line, for, alas, I suffered from the same affliction (or gift, as it might be understood.)

I was once sent out of an RE lesson (Religious Education) for repeatedly breaking up as a classmate was speaking. The hesitant rhythms and deafening pauses of his contributions to the discussion were too much for me to resist and the Brother in charge (it was a school run by a teaching order of priests) did the right thing. Unfortunately I was still chuckling uncontrollably as I stood outside so I didn't really learn my lesson. It's even more embarrassing to admit I was some fifteen years old at the time. My career as altar boy proved extremely short-lived when I ended up almost crying with laughter assisting the priest at Holy Communion. In this case the seriously spiritual faces of my classmates and partners in crime proved too much for me as I viewed them in close-up receiving the host. Mind you, that was in primary school so maybe there was some excuse.

When I first started teaching, back in England, assemblies were a torment for me as I was frequently on the verge of maniacal laughter in front of the kids. I suppose it was the possibility of a serious professional indiscretion that helped calm me. I am still proud of not bursting out laughing in one assembly in which the teacher-in-charge had decided to use the music from the film Bridge Over the River Kwai to prove some point. I realised that after the rather grand orchestral flourishes that opened the piece we were going to get the Colonel Bogey theme. Readers (probably British ones) familiar with ribald army songs will no doubt appreciate what might have set me going. Sadly a colleague and good friend was not armed with the foreknowledge that I possessed. The tune began, she looked up in delighted astonishment, her shoulders began to shake, and a major indiscretion ensued.

Years of cultivating a frown that might out-frown even false fortune's have resulted in an almost complete cure for me. But I live in hope of some unexpected memorable disaster. In the meantime, it's an illuminating exercise to try and guess what kind of laughers favourite writers might have been. Today I've been dealing with Twain and Hesse in lessons (odd combination methinks) and I think there was probably a bit of a contrast. Twain, I suspect, practised the manly guffaw, loud and explosive. Hesse, I surmise, laughed sparingly, if at all. But then, he was a German. (Yes, that's dreadfully xenophobic in a Fawlty-ish fashion, but jokes about the poor Germans are acceptable on the grounds that they are funny. This reminds me of Frank Richards's (author of the Billy Bunter stories, amongst others) reply to George Orwell's criticism of his transparently racist descriptions of any non-English schoolboy in his books - the magisterial 'But foreigners are funny.' And, of course, he was right. We are all exiles in this fallen world. We are all foreigners and we are funny.)