• Reference Number: DW-252/2/10
• Ref No: DW-252/2/10
• Date: 11 Sep 2019
• Level: Item
• Extent: 1 file (450394 KB)
• Format: WAV Audio file
• Description: FINDING OUR FUNNY ROOTS
  ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW 11/09/2019
  Interviewee: Dr Paul McDonald
  Interviewer: Josiane Boutonnet
  J: Where does your interest in humour come from?
  P: I?ve always been interested in humour generally, always thought I had a humour dimension to his personality. At school I bonded with people with humour, I use humour for all the reasons that people use it, as a social lubricant, as a psychological crutch, to please friends, to please my mother etc. Humour has been part of my life since I can remember. I?m very similar to my dad, he had a similar personality. He was always attempting to be humorous, with ?dad jokes?. Dad jokes were even worse in the 60s and 70s! So because humour has been a facet of my personality, it is natural that when I started writing things, I started to write humorous stories. Initially I started writing fiction for women?s magazines, and they weren?t that keen on humour, anything overtly funny they didn?t like. If I had a flair for anything in a literary sense, it was humorous writing.
  J: Did the subjects you studied at university contribute to that?
  P: When I was a research student, when I did my Phd, I studied a comic novelist, because of my interest in humour I was drawn to studying a writer who is a comic writer, Philip Roth. I was interested in the way he uses humour, I could relate to his humour, he is a Jewish American writer. I enjoy Jewish humour. In Jewish humour there?s a degree of acceptance of absurdity and the inevitable tragedy that I warm to and identified with maybe. In studying Roth I read a lot about humour, about how humour works, the history of humour and humour theories. I can?t say how much my work on Roth has influenced my own writing, my writing is nothing like Roth?s, apart from the obscenities and the sex. But I don?t sell as much as he does, I?m not an internationally known writer! The comparison ends with the obscenities. However, there is an earthiness about Roth?s writing and the American voice which is maybe a bit more colloquial than a lot of the material that I studied as an undergraduate student. It?s a lot different from English literature. My supervisor once said to me, you?re drawn to American literature because you?re working class. I think it?s because working class writing is more colloquial, earthy and vernacular. While humour has been a big part of British novel as well, going back to the origins of the English novel, it may be a different kind of humour. The humour in Jane Austen is very different from the humour in Huckleberry Finn, which is a colloquial, earthy, folksy humour, the kind you wouldn?t find in English literature pre 20th century. I was drawn to that and the comic potential of that. Philip
  Roth in his funniest novels writes in an informal colloquial voice, using the rhythms of natural speech.
  J: What are the similarities between Jewish humour and Black Country humour?
  P: The colloquial voice, Jewish humour is often self-deprecating, and you find that in BC humour. Jewish humour is often an inoculation, inoculating oneself against a potential oppressor, and I think that can be the case with BC humour. We don?t have a similar history of being oppressed, but we have a history of being disparaged. People have treated us as ?thick?, people who live in a place that?s ugly. By taking the mickey out of ourselves, we beat people to the punch. That is a significant characteristic of Jewish humour. It?s a way of reclaiming power. The same applies to BC humour, I can make jokes about Walsall, a place I come from, but I bristle a bit if other people do it. So, it?s a kind of insider?s humour in that respect.
  J: What kind of themes do you think are common to Black Country jokes?
  P: There are common themes in humour, taboo topics for ex. I think in terms of BC humour, I think specifically, it?s ?stupidity?. Aynock and Ayli are using the equivalent of stupid Irish jokes, stupid ethnic jokes, which have a common formula, and reclaiming those, reclaiming power in relation to the social hierarchy, and the negative characteristics of the BC feature a lot in BC humour. So if you look at someone like Doreen Tipton, the kind of subjects she addresses have to do with the negative aspects of the BC, to do with people being unemployed, and the problems associated with the BC generally, ugliness.
  J: Doreen Tipton is quite a recent comedian, how different would comedians of your youth be?
  P: Doreen Tipton belongs in the tradition. So the region was perceived as an ugly place where life was difficult. So if you go back to the 1970s, there was a comedian called Dolly Allen whose routines were very similar. Dolly Allen would take mickey out of the fact that her husband was unemployed for ex. and her routines were peopled by characters that had those traits, that had shortcomings that we associate with Black Country characters.
  J: What are the kinds of taboos reflected in BC humour? Is there perhaps a connexion with Christian tradition?
  P: I?m not sure about Christian tradition, there are Christian traditions affecting Black Country culture, like Methodism for instance, am not quite sure to what extent humour is tolerated in religions of that kind. In terms of taboos, it?s about using a space where you can be disparaging about characters that you associate with BC culture. For ex. it?s taboo to call people ?ugly?, it?s not civilised behaviour to start disparaging, and yet we kind of have a desire to do it, we repress that desire to say things society prohibits, humour is a space in
  which you can give a voice to those. So there?s a transgressive element to that. Humour creates a space which gives you licence to do that.
  J: What about gender relations?
  P: BC humour is quite traditional, so representations of gender are quite traditional too. It is working class humour, maybe one that is reductive in the way it conceives of things.
  J: What do you think about the language used to create these types of jokes in BC humour?
  P: The language complements the notion of stupidity that we associate with BC characters. It?s cultural, it?s something that?s developed, there?s nothing inherent in BC phonemes that signify as stupid. It?s the cultural connotations those sounds have. It could have to do with the fact that the BC dialect is very old, and old might equate unsophisticated. People are inclined to make fun of unsophisticated things. It?s become an undeniable part of popular culture, if anyone wants to sound thick, they will put on a BC accent or a Brummie accent. It might be because of the pace of it, the kind of whiny sounds that it has, the flat vowels and the elongated vowels.
  J: With your interest in humour, in your youth, did you ever go to comedy venues?
  P: Not just in my youth, I?ve been going to comedy venues all my life. There was a period in my life that I would go to comedy venues frequently, not so much now. I?ve seen many comedians and enjoy stand-up comedy. I?ve seen pretty much all of my contemporary favourite comedians. But again, I have a fondness for American comedians, Jewish comedians particularly. I tend to like comedians for different reasons, I really like Bill Hicks. I like comedians that have a subversive and a philosophical element to their humour. I like the idea of humourists as social commentators, humourists who explore the morality of human condition, they?re not necessarily the funniest, but I admire them. I admire comedians in the tradition of Lenny Bruce, who was an iconic American Jewish comedian. It may not be so relevant today though. But I enjoyed listening to the kind of issues he interrogated in his routines, and how he does it.
  J: What about BC comedians?
  P: I?ve seen quite a few, although there aren?t that many of them. I?ve seen Tommy Mundon, many of them who use the dialect have died out, in the 80s. I never saw Dolly Allen. I?ve seen comedians who occasionally exploit the accent for comedic effect, I?ve seen people like Frank Skinner, Lenny Henry and so forth.
  J: Do you think BC humour can provide a type of social commentary?
  P: It can do, surprisingly, Doreen Tipton, even though she might ostensibly as an unsophisticated in some ways is quite a subtle humourist. A lot of the subjects of her humour are issues she satirises in quite clever ways, through her persona, who ostensibly
  doesn?t quite understand them. She gets things wrong when she talks about Brexit for ex. she mispronounces words, she uses the wrong words, she draws on her list of BC characters that have negative character traits but at the same time she exposes the absurdity of some of those political institutions, systems, and some of the hypocrisy that?s associated with people in authority.
  J: What about more general aspects of the human condition, for ex. the theme of death?
  P: Taboos are ubiquitous, pan-cultural. So for ex. sex is one, probably 70% of jokes are what Freud calls tendentious jokes. That will be true of BC humour. Death is another, religion is another, all of those things that are difficult to talk about socially, are going to be part of the humour.
  J: How do you engage with humour in your community?
  P: Maybe I do it more than most. We use humour to establish jokey relationships with people because it makes it easier to get on with people, it?s easier to bond this way. I find it difficult to get on with people who don?t offer anything in return, even if it?s through smiling. I find it insulting, and it?s probably not fair, because some people just don?t reciprocate, sometimes it?s cultural. I spent some time in Latvia for instance, and in Latvia I did what I normally do which is to go round smiling at everybody, cracking jokes, and I hardly ever got anything in reply. It was very rare, particularly for older people, even to return a smile. I think it had to do with the culture. Maybe you have to do more to earn a smile or a laugh in some cultures. Prisons are another place where I?ve struggled. I got into prisons as a writer and I?ve been reading some of my work, and I think my work is funny, and in prisons, I?ve never been able to get a laugh reading my work to the inmates. Because it is associated with superiority, and social hierarchy is very important, in that kind of context. People have to grant you that status before they?ll acknowledge your potential to be funny. You don?t earn it by just walking in and telling them you?re funny. I use the kind of social skills I developed over the years, in order to engage them, and that is often to use humour to put people at ease, and it usually works reasonably well, very difficult in that kind of environment. You need different strategies. Maybe over time you would be able to establish some kind of connection for humour to work. Humour is context dependent.
  J: Would you say the BC is a region where humour is prevalent and an important aspect of the culture?
  P: Probably yes. There is a tradition of humour in the BC, we have two comic characters, Aynock and Ali, I don?t think you can say that about many regions. I can think of BC humour books that began to appear at the beginning of the 20th century. In the 1930s there was a book published called Black Country Humour, which I think was a collection published by the Express and Star, there was an Aynock and Ayli book published in the 1900s, right at the beginning of the century, that?s a collection of comic sketches in dialect. So, it?s been so
  much of a thing in the Black Country that it?s written down, that people thought it was worth making a joke book, specifically drawing on a tradition of Black Country humour. Why, I?m not sure, we could draw a parallel with other humour traditions, again Jewish humour might be an obvious one. We are, have been seen, have a perception of ourselves, of living in a region that is disparaged, if you have a sense of yourself as being one of these people living in that kind of environment, it?s healthier to laugh about it. It offers a way of reclaiming the power. We don?t like to think of people who live in a more salubrious way, we don?t like to think about them as superior, they are not, it?s an injustice, and we are aware of it being an injustice.
  J: What would you say is distinctive, specific about BC humour?
  P: Humour that exploits a particular way of speaking, a particular dialect, a particular rhythm, a particular vocabulary, that would be specific to BC humour. Then there are themes common to BC humourists, character types, the ones who fall short in various ways, dumb people are funnier that clever people, ugly people are funnier than beautiful people in humorous contexts. Those are the characteristics of BC humour.
• Access Status: Open
• Contact: Wolverhampton Archives, Wolverhampton Archives & Local Studies

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