The Fawlty Rhetoric of National Character

Abstract

While the connection between English humour and national character continues to be debated nostalgically or critically in England, several examples of ‘English humour’ have meanwhile been exported, adopted, and adapted by other nations. In this article, we trace a few examples of the specific uses (national as well as trans-national) to which the shared knowledge and enjoyment of a key scene in the situation comedy Fawlty Towers has been put by Danish TV viewers. A mélange of prejudice, politics, parody, and farce surrounding a young Danish MP's public behaviour in April 2007, while under the influence, was interpreted and made popularly intelligible (or was it?) through the familiar prism provided by John Cleese in the role of Mr. Basil Fawlty pretending to be Adolf Hitler in order to entertain an unfortunate group of German hotel guests. We conclude with some methodological reflections on stereotype and humour.

Keywords:

• English
• Englishness
• humour
• irony
• Danish perspective
• John Cleese
• Fawlty Towers
• Germans
• national stereotypes
• Henri Bergson
• Gilles Deleuze

Notes

He pursues his apologia at greater length in his amiably ambling English Humour (1976); and we note that, like Priestley (1976: 8), we resist using the term ‘English’ as a synecdoche for ‘British’.

On parabasis, see De Man (1996: 178–9).

On the dialectic of eiron and alazon, see Sypher (1956: 228) and De Man (1996: 165).

Translations not otherwise credited are our own. For a historical perspective on English humour quite different from Gelfert's, see Easthope (1999: 159–76).

‘Let rhetoric be [defined as] an ability, in each [particular] case, to see the available means of persuasion’ (Aristotle, 1991: 36, 1.2.1; emphasis added).

For an exception to this rule, see the brief and entertaining survey by Simon Critchley, 2002, On Humour, esp. ch. 5, ‘Foreigners Are Funny’ (64–76).

On the iconography of der Stechschritt (a.k.a. goose-stepping), see Scheffler, 2003. We use heil as an English verb by permission of the OED. And we concur with Priestley's (1976: 160) judgment that Cleese is ‘a fine comic actor’.

Although it appears there were no great problems at the match after all, one commentator, angloteuton, found it necessary to point out on the BBC Sport blog that ‘the sole purpose of Nazi (formerly military) salutes and symbolism being forbidden in Germany is to prevent them from being hijacked by elements of the far-right (cf. National Front using the Union Jack in Britain). It is NOT an attack on the comic genius of John Cleese as Basil Fawlty!!’ (Fletcher, 2006: item 14).

See ‘Forfulgt hotelejer’, 1979; ‘Masser af skæg med en rablende sk⊘r hotelvær’, 1979; ‘Panik på hotellet’, 1979; ‘Skrup-sk⊘rt badehotel’, 1979.

‘Media narraform’ is a term used by folklorists (see Grider, 1981); this type of re-told story from television is a genre of oral narrative in the modern world, and the existence of such narratives is a trustworthy indicator of what has had a popular impact.

The series was dubbed when broadcast in Germany, for example, but subtitled in Denmark, a difference that cannot be underlined too strongly; see the comparative studies by Gentikow (1991) and by Vestergaard (1999).

Here we also readily acknowledge our debt to the history and method of imagology; see Leerssen (2007).

For further details and links, see ‘Morten Messerschmidt’, 2008. While the official policy of the Dansk Folkeparti is claimed to be that no-one with a criminal record is allowed to join, convictions for racism apparently do not count (‘DF accepterer kandidater’, 2006).

Deleuze develops this distinction in Difference and Repetition (1994: 5; 245) and The Logic of Sense (1990: 8–9; 134–41), for example. On Bergson and the comic, see Moore (1996: ch. 4), and Trahair (2007: 125–9); on Deleuze's Bergson, see Boundas (1996); on Deleuze and the comic, see Baruchello (2002); on Deleuze, national identity, and film, see Martin-Jones (2006: 1–49).