Humour rules

Spend a day in any English workplace, from a street-market to a merchant bank, and you will notice that one ofthe most striking features of English working life is the undercurrent of humour.

I am talking about the more subtle forms of humour – wit, irony, understatement, banter, teasing, pomposity-pricking – which are an integral part of almost all English socialinteraction.

the humour in your workplace interactions will be so familiar, so normal, so ingrained that you may find it hard to ‘stand back’ far enough to see it.

In my discussions with immigrants and other foreign informants, I found that the English

sense of humour, in various guise s, was one of the most common causes of misunderstanding and confusion in their dealings with the English at work.

The Importance of Not Being Earnest Rule

In most other cultures, taking oneself too seriously may be a fault, but it is not a sin – a bit of self-important pomposity or over-zealous earnestness is tolerated,

perhaps even expected, in discussion of important work or business matters. In the English workplace, however, the hand-on-heart gusher and the pompous pontificator are mercilessly ridiculed – if not to their faces, then certainly behind their backs. There are such people, of course, and the higher their status, the less likely they are to be made aware of their errors, but the English in general tend to be subconsciously sensitive to these taboos, and usually avoid overstepping the invisible lines.

The Importance of Not Being Earnest rule is implicit in our whole attitude to work. The first ‘guiding principle’ I mentioned was that we take work seriously, but not too seriously. If your work is interesting, you are allowed to be interested in it – even to the point of being ‘a bit of a workaholic’; but if you are too much of a workaholic, or overzealous about an intrinsically uninteresting job, you will be regarded as ‘sad’ and pathetic and it will besuggested that you should ‘get a life’. It is not done to be too keen.

Training in Not Being Earnest starts early: among English schoolchildren, there is an unwritten rule forbidding excessive enthusiasm for academic work. In some schools, working hard for exams is permitted, but one must moan about it a lot, and certainly never admit to enjoying it.

The English are often accused of being anti-intellectual, and while there may be a grain of truth in this, I am

If someone shows signs of any of these tendencies (all unfortunately rather common

among intellectuals), the English respond with our cynical national catchphrase ‘Oh, come off it! ’

Our instinctive avoidance of earnestness results in a way of conducting business or work-related discussions that the uninitiated foreigner finds quite disturbing: a sort of offhand беззаботно dispassionate, detached manner – always giving the impression, as one of my most perceptive foreign informants put it, ‘of being rather underwhelmed by he whole thing, including themselves and the product they were supposed to be trying to sell me’.

dispassionate approach works perfectly well with English customers and clients, as there is

nothing the English detest more than an over-zealous salesman, and excessive keenness will only make us cringand back off. But our unexcitable manner can be a problem when dealing with foreigners, who expect us to show at least a modicum of enthusiasm for our work, particularly when we are trying to persuade others of its value or benefits.

Irony and Understatement Rules преуменьшение замалчивание

The English predilection for irony, particularly our use of the understatement, only makes matters worse. Not only do we fail to exhibit the required degree of enthusiasm for our work or products, but we then compound the error by making remarks such as

‘Well, it’s not bad, considering’ o

r ‘ You could do a lot worse, ’ when trying to convince

someone that our loft conversions or legal acumen or whatever are really the best that money can buy. Then we have a tendency to say ‘Well, I expect we’ll manage somehow, ’ when we mean ‘ Yes, certainly, no trouble’ and

‘That would be quite helpful, ’ when we mean ‘ For Christ’s sake, that should have been done yesterday! ’; and ‘ We

seem to have a bit of a problem, ’ when there has been a complete and utter disaster. (Another typically English кesponse to, say, a catastrophic meeting where a million-pound deal has fallen through, would be ‘ That all went

rather well, don’t you think? ’)

It takes foreign colleagues and clients a while to realise that when the English say ‘Oh really? How interesting! ’ hey might well mean ‘I don’t believe a word of it, you lying toad’. Or they might not. They might just mean ‘I’m ored and not really listening but trying to be polite’. Or they might be genuinely surprised and truly interested.

You’ll never know. There is no way of telling: even the English themselves, who have a pretty good ‘sixth sense’ for detecting irony, cannot always be entirely sure.

An Indian immigrant, who has been valiantly trying to do business with the English for many years, told me

that it took him a while to get to grips with English irony because although irony is universal ‘the English do not do irony the way Indians do it. We do it in a very heavy-handed way, with lots of winks and raised eyebrows and xaggerated tones to let you know we are being ironic. We might say “ Oh yes, do you think so? ” when we don’tbelieve someone, but we will do it with all the signals blazing.

Only the English do irony with a completely straight face.

Most English workers, however, far from being concerned about the difficulties it poses for foreigners, are

immensely proud of our sense of humour.

3.THE MODESTY RULE – AND THE ‘BUMPEX’ SCHOOL OF ADVERTISING

A further potential impediment препятствие to the successful conduct of business is the English modesty rule. Perhaps the modesty rules act as a counter-balance to our natural arrogance,

just as our courtesy rules protect us from our aggressive tendencies? Whatever their source, the English rulesforbidding boastfulness and prescribing a modest, unassuming manner can often be at odds with modern business practices.

That is an extreme example, and most English business people would now laugh at this old-fashioned attitude, but there are still traces of this mindset in the majority of English businesses. While most of us would not go to he extreme of rejecting any kind of marketing effort as ‘boasting’, there is a near-universal distaste for the ‘hardsell’, for ‘pushiness’, for the sort of brash нахальство, in-your-face approach to advertising and marketing that the English invariably describe, in contemptuous tones, as ‘ American’. As usual, this stereotype reveals more about the

English than it does about the maligned Americans: we like to think that our approach to selling things is more subtle, more understated, more ironic – and certainly less overtly boastful.

This suggests to me that his main point, that advertising itself is essentially un-English, and would have to be radically re-invented to comply with English rules of modesty and reserve, is also much more than just an amusing exaggeration. Advertising, and by extension all forms of marketing and

selling, is almost by definition boastful – and therefore fundamentally at odds with one of the guiding principles of English culture.

For once, however, our self-imposed constraints have had a positive effect: advertising does not fit our

system of values, so, rather than abandon our unwritten rules, we have twisted and changed the rules of

advertising, and developed a form of advertising that allows us to comply with the modesty rule. The witty, innovative advertising for which the English are, I am told by people in the trade, internationally renowned and much admired, is really just our way of trying to preserve our modesty.

We English can blow our own trumpet хвалиться if we have to; we can put on displays of heartfelt, gushing enthusiasm for our products or services, but the anti-boasting and anti-earnestness rules mean that many of us find this unseemly and acutely embarrassing, and we tend therefore to be somewhat unconvincing. And this problem is not just a feature of the higher echelons of English work – I found that workers at the bottom of the social scale are no less squeamish or cynical about trumpet-blowing than the educated middle- and upper-middle classes.