Page 81 - The Language of Humour

68 ‘CRIKEY, THAT’S A HARD ONE!’

A: Very sick at the end, poor George. Very
sick.
B: Bad luck.
A: Stripped of his faculties. Took me aside,
asked me if I’d help speed up the going… put
him out of his misery with a bit of dignity.
B: And did you, dear?
A: Had to. Hit him over the head with a shovel
and dumped him on the bonfire.
B: Well, it’s what he would have wanted.
Marvellous compost. (Feast of French and
Saunders, Heinemann, 1991)

Commentary

Although taboos are being broken—calling her daughter ‘some old
bitch on heat’ and her husband ‘stupid-looking bugger’—the
participants are fictional; there is no actual death. The audience is
laughing at, not sharing, the crude attitudes of the old women. The
sketch is clearly marked as humorous. There is parody of an upper-class
register with the clipped sentences: ‘[He was] Stripped of his faculties’
and phrases like ‘lot of fuss and nonsense’. There is incongruity in the
sudden shift of register from euphemisms like ‘speed up the going…put
him out of his misery with a bit of dignity’ to the plain ‘Hit him over the
head with a shovel and dumped him on the bonfire’. Any taboo words
used have become acceptable: ‘bloody dull’.

TABOOS: RELIGION

Religion is the third taboo area to be examined. There is still a
blasphemy law in Britain—it can be a crime to make offensive
references to the Christian religion. In practice the decline in church
attendance seems to go along with a decline in the amount of shock
caused by flippant, or offensive, references to religion. Although the
Monty Python film Life of Brian, about a Messiah figure called Brian,
caused outrage in some circles, it was popular and has been shown on
mainstream television.