Page 97 - The Language of Humour

84 WRITTEN TEXTS—LITERATURE
It isn’t about me at all.
Is it?

Commentary
The humour of the poem is based on the initial premise that Helen of
Troy is writing a letter to Menelaus. We have to understand the
allusions to the story in Homer’s lliad, that Helen—called by Marlowe
‘the face that launched a thousand ships’—left her husband for Paris
and so started the ten-year seige of Troy. There is dramatic irony in the
gap between the reader’s knowledge of the wooden horse they are
building and Helen’s ignorance of the trick that is about to end the war:
‘hammering wood together all day long’. There is potential incongruity
in portraying such famous characters as having the sort of emotions we
would recognise—‘I do think this is all a bit excessive’; ‘I fancied
Paris. I would have got over it’; ‘I’m bored to tears’—or perhaps it jolts
us into recognising that humans remain basically the same across the
centuries. Still the way we express our feelings today has certainly
changed, so the concepts of modern therapy are amusingly
anachronistic: ‘he needs an outlet for his energy’; ‘you cannot build
relationships on rippling flesh’; ‘You’ve overreacted as usual’. The
incongruous register is maintained throughout the poem—the informal,
spoken style of modern English, with fillers and tag questions: ‘I can
see you from the walls, you know, don’t think I can’t’ ‘Well, wind you
asked for then and wind you’ve got.’ There is no attempt to create an
archaic, or even a formal style, which we might find more appropriate
for a historical or mythical character. Instead there are distinctive
features of late twentieth-century English: ‘Bloody needlework’; ‘serves
you right’. It all creates a specific ic tone for Helen, so that we perceive
her as a young, chatty female and the situation as no more momentous
than everyday quarrels: ‘beseiging away like mad’; ‘but there you
go…’; ‘busy, busy, busy’. It builds up to a punchline, which hits with a
serious point for the apparently playful joke about the situation being no
more nor less than today’s strife between men and women: ‘I think war
turns you on, Menelaus,/you and all the men./It isn’t about me at all./Is
it?’