Another voice

A joke in very bad taste

Auberon Waugh

'I know a lot of coloured people who don't mind being called niggers or wogs,' said Mr John Kingsley Read, of the Democratic National Party, at his first Old Bailey trial on a charge of inciting racial hatred. The words which he agrees he used at a political meeting in West Ham were these: 'Fellow racialists, fellow Britons, fellow whites, but I have been told that I cannot refer to coloured immigrants, so you will forgive me if I refer to niggers, wogs and coons.'

After explaining that his remarks were intended as a joke, Mr Read claimed that the crowd laughed. Another joke he was alleged to have made concerned the murder of an Asian youth who had been killed a week earlier in Southall: 'One down, one million to go.'

His acquaintance is obviously wider than mine. Try as I might, I can think of no coloured person of my acquaintance who wouldn't mind either of these jokes. Even if I thought they would enter into the spirit of good-natured persiflage, I should judge such pleasantries unwise as being likely to introduce an element of self-consciousness into the relationship by promoting colourawareness to which so many of even the least sensitive coloured folk in our midst are understandably prone.

I suppose one learns these things by experience. There was a poet at Balliol in my day — nowadays, I believe, he is a Front Bench opposition spokesman in the House of Lords — to whom I frequently made such jokes in my ill-considered youth, but they never went down very well. That was before the Race Relations Act, of course, and undergraduates seemed to enjoy a certain immunity from prosecution for language likely to cause a breach of the peace. At any rate, the Old Bailey jury, which included one coloured person, was unable to agree on the first trial and acquitted him on the second.

In any case, whether Mr Read was trying to be funny or not, it was a rotten joke and I have long been in favour of savage penalties for those who make bad jokes in public. But there is a new development. Perhaps it is the result of the Race Relations Act or of some curious, collective decision produced by the climate of our times but there seems to be growing a sort of code whereby ethnic jokes can only be made by members of the ethnic minority to which they apply. The obvious exception to this rule is the Irish. Any of us

can make hurtful, rude and provocative jokes about the Irish to our hearts' content—

when the Irish make them they are called Kerryman jokes, referring to a type of Irishman who is even more Irish than those we know and love like Patrick Cosgrave, James Callaghan, the late Cyril Connolly, Dr Bernard Donoughue, Mary Kenny etc etc. Exactly the same jokes are told in New York about Americans of Polish origin, and probably in Australia about English immigrant trade unionists. It would be amusing to assemble a book of Irish, or Kerryman, or Polish, or Pommy jokes which would be sold in all four countries with appropriate alterations. But where Jews, West Indian Indians or coloured Englishmen are concerned, they have cornered the market themselves, as anyone who has read the novels of Philip Roth or Vidia Naipaul or has listened to the dirty, boring jokes of Charlie Williams (as I did for two hours in a Coventry working men's club recently) must realise.

A few years ago I told a Jewish joke in the New Statesman for which I was then work

ing. By some oversight, they printed it. It is

quite an old one and will be familiar to many Spectator readers — I used it to illustrate a

complicated argument about the devaluation of our currency. Anyway, here it is again: Q. Why are pound notes green?

A. Because the Jews always pick them before they are ripe.

I thought it quite funny but it' didn't go down at all well in Hampstead. I don't know how many angry letters, threats and can cellations the poor Editor received at the time, but I still suffer repercussions. On my first day in the health farm where I have taken up residence after Christmas I was approached by a fellow inmate, a nice, intel ligent, funny, well-read Jewish girl and asked if I was a member of the National Front. When I denied this, blushing, she asked me if I was sure. It transpired that she works for a Jewish organisation in London and they have a large file on me. Oh dear!

But my objection to Negroes, Jews and other ethnic groups monopolising jokes about themselves goes beyond the natural irritation of a professional joker who finds some of his best lines taken away. I feel there is a very real danger that, left to themselves, they will take the jokes too far. Perhaps I had better explain myself.

People who make jokes about other ethnic groups than their own are restrained in the first place by good manners, then by taste, finally by a judgement of what they can get away with. None of these restraints exist in self-mockery. None of us make jokes about Africans any more, so, left to themselves, they have produced the ulti mate anti-African jokester in General Amin. Few people, I fancy, will disagree with me when I say that as anti-Negro jokes go, General Amin goes much too far.

Last week, the Israeli Knesset passed a law making it an offence, punishable by five years in jail and heavy fines, for anyone to offer material benefits to induce another person to change his or her religion. The law was sponsored by Rabbi Y.M. Abramowitz, who in an explanatory note said the measure was designed to curb Christian missionaries, who had offered huge sums of money and other economic benefits 'to ensnare the souls' of the poor. The United Christian Council, which sent telegrams of protest to Mr Begin and other functionaries, has not even received the favour of an acknowledgment. Of course the law would equally forbid material inducements in the conversion of Christians to Judaism (according to The Times, 500 Christians are converted to Judaism in Israel each year, a tiny handful goes the other way) but Israel remains the only country of the civilised world which has seen fit to pass a law against its citizens being bribed to change their religion.

I hope I am not an anti-semite and don't think I am one, although it is true I often find myself brooding about the Jews, as many Europeans' must after the terrible events of the last war. So I hope it will not be taken as a sign of latent (or even overt) anti-semitic tendencies if I admit, as a Christian of sorts, that the conversion of Judaism to Christianity and to the message of the New Testament strikes me as a worthy, beneficial and possibly salutary exercise. Not everybody will agree, of course, and mention the matter merely to state my particular set of prejudices in forming the second conclusion, that Mr Begin is taking the Jewish joke too far, just as General Amin has taken the Negro joke in Uganda. Not to put too fine a point on it, the new measure strikes me as a dangerously unpleasant Jewish joke in the worst possible taste.

In fact, his latest move takes us right back to the roots of Christian anti-semitism (although not to the roots of anti-semitism itself, as a study of Exodus will show). The new Knesset law will not only catch modern missionaries who are so foolishly kind as to feed or clothe the poor, it would also, quite unmistakably, have caught Jesus at the feeding of the Five Thousand.

Possibly the only beneficial result of the Nazi experience has been to teach the terr ible danger of holding groups of people in contempt or hatred. Nearly two thousand years of hostility between Christians and Jews were washed away in the blood of that horrible episode, and if it also prevents Gentiles from making Jewish jokes, that may seem a small price to pay. My only point is that this deprivation is not without its dangers. It is when such matters are removed from the world of humour and treated with total solemnity that we find ourselves stuck with these unspeakable characters: Hitler, the ultimate German joke; Amin, the ultimate Negro joke; now, perhaps, an ultimate Jewish joke in the nasty and dangerously stupid Mr Beginit-all-over-again.