Jokes that describe my culture.

My initial (first) reaction to this topic was a feeling of uneasiness. The world has become such a violent place because of, among other things, racism and stereotyping, that I am reluctant to poke fun at any people, culture or ethnic group.  For example, way back in the ‘70s and 80’s, ‘white’ British people frequently made jokes about Pakistanis (who were also born and raised in Britain and therefore equally British). These jokes were called ‘Paki Jokes’ and were even used by comedians on TV! Very few people realized how racist our culture is at that time. Eventually the jokes disappeared, but the innate racism that underpins British society remains as strong as ever in my opinion.   

However, after further reflection I thought there probably isn’t much harm in laughing at my country of origin. After all, one of the reasons I live in Japan is because I cannot bear Britain. I never hesitate to criticize Britain’s terrible past behaviour and present conditions so why not just gently joke about them instead? Humour may, in fact, be a better option.

The next problem I had was that I actually don’t know any jokes about the British. As usual, technology came to the rescue and I simply googled that topic! (Yes, ‘to google’ is in fact an acknowledged verb these days…) I came up with a very nice example from one of my favourite writers, George Bernard Shaw. (As an interesting aside,  many people believe Shaw and many other ‘British’ writers were English. In fact he came from Ireland, which truly is a land of lyrical poetry and literature. (We Brits were too busy invading poor countries to spend time on a truly great tradition of literature although we can boast of Shakespeare, Dickens and Jane Austen.) 

Anyway, I digress. The Shaw joke is:

‘The English are not a very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.’

This is very funny to me because it is indeed true that many British people hate the idea of spiritual things and routinely dismiss them as codswallop.  However, it is perhaps a little more complicated than this these days. What Shaw may have meant is that (‘white’) British people -are not very religious- which is true in terms of Christianity although I am not sure about other ethnicities who are British such as muslims and jews. In fact, although a majority of ‘white British’ (don’t forget you can be a white muslim or jew though!) dismiss God and religion as ‘codswallop,’ they may have no trouble enjoying spiritual practices such as meditation, yoga and the like which may actually have a very strong connection to religion in a more general sense.

Anyway, the joke is extremely funny because cricket is, to many people, an extremely boring and pointless game that does indeed seem to last for eternity!