§29 Why Americans aren’t witty
Following on from a previous note on the Amises, memoirs* and the wittiness of the British (see note §16), here are some little truths from Martin Amis about why he misses the British (or Londonders more precisely) and why the Americans aren’t as comparatively witty:
”I miss Londoners. I miss the wit. Americans, they’re very, well, de Tocqueville saw this coming in about 1850 — he said, it’s a marvellous thing, American democracy, but don’t they know how it’s going to end up? It’s going to be so mushy that no one will dare say anything for fear of offending someone else. That’s why Americans aren’t as witty as Brits, because humour is about giving a little bit of offence. It’s an assertion of intellectual superiority. Americans are just as friendly and tolerant as Londoners, but they flinch from mocking someone’s background or education.” (Brockes, 2017)
*Martin Amis latest book The rub of time : Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump : essays and reportage, 1986–2016 was published by Jonathan Cape late in 2017. It is his second memoir, or novel, as he insists it be called.
References:
Brockes 2017, Martin Amis: ‘I miss the English’, The Guardian www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/16/martin-amis-miss-the-english-homesick
Originally published at anowmedia.com on May 18, 2018.
