English humour

“…though she knew, and we knew, and she knew that we knew, and we knew that she knew that we knew, she had been busy all morning making tea-bread and sponge-cakes.”

Cranford, by Elizabeth Leghorn Gaskell

I absolutely adore the English sense of humour. My husband claims I don’t always ‘get’ him, but this is not true. You see, I grew up on a diet of Faulty Towers, Birds of a Feather, The Two Ronnies, Mr Bean, The Vicar of Dibley, My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins, Roald Dahl novels, Enid Blyton books… the list goes on.

The thing is that because of my English, Colonial, South African, Rainbow Nation, Hollywoodised, wordsmith, story-obsessed upbringing, I really have access to a whole range of humour, culture and class references! It’s like being multi-lingual really.

I once saw a book entitled “Laugh your way to a happy marriage”. I haven’t read it, but I imagine that’s a good concept. Anyhow, my apparent inability to ‘get’ him, I believe, is not that I don’t ‘get’ him which I do; nor is it that I don’t find him funny which I do; but that sometimes I just need to lighten up. This is one of my sworn aims in my life, my family and my marriage. What’s the use of laughing through a good book or film and appreciating all the nuances of the gag, if you can’t laugh in your real life.

So, my darling husband, I plan to laugh more, lighten up, loosen up, give up some of that control, let the balls I’m juggling occasionally drop, and see what happens next.