Listening While I Work (23)

New Zealand Listener, Volume 10, Issue 249, 31 March 1944, Page 14

Listening While I Work (23)

By

Materfamilias

The Listener, supposes that I did not find the Fibber McGee show funny. He was wrong. If I did not laugh quite as heartily as did my psychologist friend — and he laughed a lot-it was because I don’t know my American so well. And that is, I think, one reason why so many people do not like American shows. It is not a matter of being highbrow or lowbrow. It is just irritating to miss jokes. This of course can be remedied, The more we listen the more we get the hang of the idiom and the more we laugh, but not everyone wants to bother. Let me point out also that I did not ask my psychologist friend why it was funny: I asked why it had such a big appeal. I would agree with "Jocasto" when he says that if he had to listen often he would get tired of the programme, and that it is probably owing to a deficiency in comedy radio fare that he listens at all. That is just my point. Here in New Zealand we may listen because we .don’t get anything funnier, but in America this is one of the very popular funny shows. People listen because they want to hear just this and not because they don’t get other and better comedy. © tie in his letter to ne * * ‘THE greater part of our comedy pro- _ grammes come from America, and American comedy is funnier to Ameri‘cans than to New Zealanders. It is probably funnier to New Zealanders than it is to people in England. For every country has its own brand of humour. I am told that Punch is not funny to Americans, It is not so funny in New Zealand as in England, and even in England its appeal is limited to certain social groups. Humour is closely tied to local habits and conventions and only occasional masterpieces (such as, for example, The Gold Rush) have a very wide appeal. Even these would perhaps leave an audience of Eskimos or Hottentots solemn. as ad me ET me illustrate what I mean with a programme which, as far as I can tell, people like to hear either seven days a week or never. (See Listener correspondence of March 10.) For months I had intended to listen to a steady course of Easy Aces, but every time I turned it on the ghastly strident voices shook my resolution. Then one day we met Mrs. Ace-not the real Mrs. Ace of courseand she talked and she talked. A week or two later I found my husband with his ear glued to the radio. He was listening to Easy Aces. Well, we wouldn’t miss a date for it, in fact we frequently don’t listen, but we are quite fascinated to \listen now and then to that voice going on and on and saying sillier and sillier things. We had met Mrs. Ace’s prototype and she had brought Mrs. Ace herself to life. The extent to which we appreciate American humour may be a rough-and-ready gauge of the extent to which we (Continued on next page)

(Continued from previous p2ge) understand America. If Berlin could laugh at the jokes perpetrated in London and if London could laugh at German humour we would be so much further toward world unity. And insofar as radio gets us to laugh all together I am all for it. . * * AS§ for Gert and Dais I, like "Jocasto," also enjoy them-even if I still laugh at them rather than with them. One of my regrets is that Gert and Dais and Sam Small, whom I aiso like, turn up unexpectedly in programmes such as Music, Mirth, and Melody, or Humorous Interlude or Famous Comedians, and we don’t know that they are coming and we don’t get enough of them. But I doubt whether they have such a wide appeal or even whether they are popular at all in America. A good deal of American humour is straight clowning. It is this element of buffoonery that makes me think that I would tire of Fibber McGee if I had too much of him. Take a recent show. A doctor friend complains that his house is full of ants. Fibber and Molly go to clean them out for him and in the course of cleaning smash (if I remember rightly) a window, a refrigerator, and a piano, ruin a carpet, drop a silver frame out of the window, pull the blind down, and so on. Then they find out it was aunts, not ants, that the friend was complaining of. Children like seeing the glorious wreckage of things going smash. Adults find humour in subtler things. Surely it is not a lack of a sense of humour? aS %* * ASTLY, "Jocasto" says: "I can understand a sense of superiority causing pity or causing disgust but not amusement except in a satirist whose amusement, I imagine, is more akin to weeping than to laughter." I would say that Gert and Dais are satirical sketches, but this does not detract from their humour. The greatest examples of comedy are in essence intensely tragic. Take the scene in The Gold Rush when Chaplin waits for his guests, or more terrible still when the girl he loves comes to dance with him and his braces give way. Bo x 2 |F New Zealand is a half-way house be- *" tween English and American humour so much the better-though the best would be if we could bubble up over the air with more native humour from our own native situations. This will come, and I hope I shall then be able to laugh as heartily as "Jocasto"’-and without worrying about the correct psychological reactions.