The language of comedy

Elif Shafak says she finds it easier to write sorrow and grief in Turkish, her mother tongue, and comedy and satire in English. The observation lodged with me. If English is hospitable to humour in a way other languages aren't, the question is why — and one answer is that the language carries the structures of British comedy inside its own vocabulary.

Based on this one single data point, my intuition is:

1. (British) humour relies on awareness of class and power.
2. English itself encodes a class hierarchy in its vocabulary.
3. Speakers use this all the time (even if they dont know it).

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The idea:

1. Humour relies on class and power.
   1. The British comic tradition — from Swift through Wodehouse to Armando Iannucci — is built on the friction between registers: the deflation of the pompous, the puncturing of pretence, the awkward gap between what someone says and what their accent, vocabulary, or posture quietly admits.
   2. Comedy punches up (think court jester).
      1. Satire, the form most often claimed as a British strength, has nowhere to point its weapon without a clear sense of who is up and who is down. Comedy that doesn't speak truth to power tends to feel limp — observational at best, decorative at worst.
   3. Comedy punches those striving upwards, who don't deserve it. Comedy lives in the gap between someone's self-image and reality, and that gap is most reliably found in people reaching for status they don't merit.
2. English itself encodes class hierarchy in its vocabulary.
   1. English is unusual in carrying two parallel lexicons stitched together by history.
      1. There is the Anglo-Saxon strand — short, blunt, concrete: house, eat, ask, kingly.
      2. There is the Norman French and Latinate strand laid over the top after 1066 — longer, abstract, polite: residence, dine, enquire, regal.
   2. At its extreme, we also have things like U vs. Non-U.
   3. The hierarchy isn't incidental, it's a linguistic fossil of conquest. The peasants kept the cow and the pig — Saxon words — and the lords ate the beef and the pork on the table. Even now, the everyday word feels working class and the formal word feels institutional, regardless of what the dictionary says about meaning.
   4. This means an English speaker can move between registers with extraordinary precision. I'm going home and I shall be returning to my residence carry the same information and entirely different social signals. The choice is the joke, or the insult, or the tell.
3. Speakers wield this register-switching with more awareness than is often credited.
   1. Users of rhetoric have known the power of this dual vocabulary for a long time. E.g. Churchill's famous speech — we shall fight on the beaches — is almost entirely Anglo-Saxon, ending with a single Norman word, surrender. The 'plain', short Anglo-Saxon words feel emotive, powerful.
   2. Most speakers don't think about etymology, but they feel the implications of these words inately.
      1. They know purchase sounds different from buy, and they know commence sits awkwardly where start would do. A great example of this is reading someone trying to sound smart or formal, and how their vocabulary shifts without them even being aware of it. The class signal is read even when it isn't named.
      2. To me, there's something psuedo onomatapeic in this upper-class vocabulary
   3. Comedy lives in this gap. A character who says I require assistance when help would do has told you everything about themselves before the punchline lands.

Some additional thoughts:

• Ireland has the same internal register-switching apparatus that English provides, and it has it from a position of historical subordination and with a sectarian axis layered on top. Maybe this argument explains a comic tradition that's pointed in a way pure English comedy isn't, e.g. because pure English comedy is mocking itself from inside its own hierarchy, whereas Irish comedy in English is mocking the imposing hierarchy from a position of historical exteriority to it.
• Perhaps Shifak's use of English for comedy may actually lie in the learned meanings and associations of Turkish, and her use of English is actually one of absence of meaning. I.e. Having grown up with Turkish and perhaps having a life with its fair share of sorrows, Turkish has come to become a language she associates with those sorrows and as a default.
• The ability to imbue sentences with class context is potent in English, but not unique.
  • Accent mockery is near-universal. Almost every language with regional or class variation has a tradition of taking the piss out of how the powerful speak.
  • Honorific languages do something different but related - e.g. Japanese and Korean encode hierarchy grammatically — verb endings, pronouns, whole vocabularies of polite forms.

Still, maybe there's something in this. English carries an internal class system in its vocabulary that most languages do not, and speakers do exploit it, often without naming what they're doing. Whether that causes British comedy or merely equips it is the harder question — and probably the one worth sitting with rather than answering.

I'm definitely interested to know from second language English speakers whether this is something they're aware of or makes sense to them.