humour and the military

Humour is used both within and about armed forces. Internal uses of humour range from the formal, like the revues and pantomimes staged behind the lines of the western front in WW I and the WW II ‘concert parties’ of servicemen with musical or thespian leanings depicted in the BBC television comedy series It Ain't Half Hot Mum, to the informal web of humour which permeates much of military life. Sometimes it lends spice to criticism. Many an officer cadet at Sandhurst has been told that he is ‘as much use as an ashtray on a motorbike’. Sometimes it forms part of a language (see slang) designed to separate insiders from outsiders, in which aphorisms that were once (at least a little) humorous have simply become figures of speech. Thus: ‘Jimmy had drunk so much that he was up and down like a whore's drawers all night’, ‘I've been out here since the Dead Sea first reported sick’, or ‘I've been flying since Pontius was a student pilot’. It sometimes goes much further, like the brimades, the coarse practical jokes used at the military academy at Saint-Cyr: a favourite was drilling a hole in the victim's chamber pot. Such ‘humour’ has frequently been taken so far that its butts would identify it as nothing short of bullying. As an officer cadet, Montgomery thought it amusing to set a fellow cadet on fire.

Dismissive humour is used to deal with unpopular groups, like the REMFs (Rear Echelon Mother Fuckers) in Vietnam, or individuals, like the testy WW I general Allenby. He was nicknamed ‘The Bull’, and when he left his headquarters his helpful staff would signal in Morse code BBL, for ‘Bloody Bull Loose’ to warn units that might be visited. During the Italian campaign of 1859 the French intendant-général, who seemed only able to supply ground maize to the troops, was christened duke of Polenta by the disgruntled soldiery as a play on MacMahon's title duke of Magenta. The latter, not the brightest of officers, was himself known, in an untranslatable pun, as mac-bête. There are simple plays on words, as in ‘duty burglar’ for ‘duty bugler’, ‘company ordures’ for ‘company orders’, and ‘camp comedian’ for ‘camp commandant’.

Humour often takes the form of avoidance joking, where combatants, faced with laughing or crying, try to laugh. The WW I war correspondent Philip Gibbs thought that the more dreadful the situation, the more likely soldiers were to shout with laughter. ‘The war-time soul’, he wrote, ‘roared with mirth at the sight of all that dignity and elegance despoiled.’ One soldier complained that the severance of an arm protruding from the trench had left him nothing to hang his equipment on, and another observed that the accidental shelling of the regimental aid post during morning sick parade (killing the doctor and many of his patients) had done wonders for fitness as nobody subsequently reported sick. A WW II British soldier air-struck by friendly forces in Burma asked whether the Japanese had been lent the RAF ‘to make it fairer?’ An American soldier who had lost a foot in Vietnam quipped that he was actually a general, tasked with inspecting the hospital, who had blown his foot off as a convincing disguise.

This sort of humour rarely travelled. The WW I cartoonist Bruce Bairnsfather depicted his two characters, the gloomy and moustachioed Old Bill and the young and innocent Young Bill, contemplating a ragged hole in a ruined house. ‘What made that 'ole?’ asked the youngster nervously. ‘Mice, ’ retorted Old Bill. When the cartoon was reproduced in a German military pamphlet which sought to explain British humour, its editor felt constrained to add: ‘It was not mice. It was a shell.’ In WW II the American cartoonist Bill Mauldin served as NCO in 45th Infantry Division. He described his two characters: ‘Joe is in his early twenties and Willie in his early thirties—pretty average age for the infantry.’ They point up many of the eternal truths of combat. An edgy Willie, unhappy (as soldiers often are) about facing air attack aboard ship, suggests to the crew: ‘You guys oughta carry a little dirt to dig holes in.’ The pair are in a trench in the rainy darkness, with Joe playing his harmonica. ‘Th' krauts ain't following ya so good on “Lili Marlene” tonight, Joe, ’ says Willie. ‘Ya think maybe something happened to their tenor?’ Willie, bearded and filthy, confronts the company medic, who proffers him a medal. ‘Just gimme a coupla aspirin, ’ he retorts. ‘I already got a Purple Heart.’

The military's formalism and self-regard has often made it the butt of civilian humour. William Hogarth's March to Finchley shows the Guards marching out to confront the Jacobites in 1745, struggling with little success against the lure of women and drink, and Gillray and Rowlandson, painting a little later, focus on pompous militia officers, waistcoats and breeches bulging, leading ill-assorted yokels to the assault of the local dunghill. After the Allied occupation of Paris in 1815, French cartoonists lampooned the alleged indecency of Highland dress, showing French ladies swooning as kilted Scots stoop to ground their muskets. In Britain, once the French invasion scare of the 1860s had ceased to be a real concern, cartoonists had fiercely bewhiskered rifle volunteers pursued by urchins offering to ‘Wipe the blood off your sword, general?’ In 1865 Fliegende Blatter mocked military education. ‘I want a globe, ’ demands a hussar officer. ‘Terrestrial or celestial?’ enquires the shopkeeper. ‘Oh, no!’ responds the officer. ‘Don't you have any globes of Prussia?’ A generation later, German cartoonists ridiculed the Reich's obsession with uniforms. In 1899 Ulk depicted an elderly gentleman in cape and wide-brimmed hat on a street where everyone—from schoolchildren to cab drivers and passers-by—is in uniform. ‘A civilian! A civilian!’ they cry.

Authors have trodden the same path. A Dorset yeoman in Thomas Hardy's The Trumpet Major grows increasingly confused as he discusses whether he would use sword or pistol against an invading Frenchman. Hašek's Good Soldier Schweik mercilessly satirized the Austro-Hungarian Army, and in Joseph Heller's Catch 22 we have the drill-obsessed Lt Scheisskopf. Film and television has continued the process, from Phil Silvers's portrayal of the archetypal military fixer (few QM stores are without one) in Sergeant Bilko, through the blimpish (a word itself deriving from David Low's cartoon character Col Blimp) Capt Mainwaring in Dad's Army, to Gen Melchett, Capt Blackadder, and Pte Baldrick in Blackadder Goes Forth. Clips from the latter are widely used to enliven lectures in the British army, and bases in the Gulf were named after its characters. The use of humour to highlight political concerns found its clearest expression in the film M*A*S*H. Made in 1969, its portrayal of the Korean war was a thinly disguised reference to the contemporaneous conflict in Vietnam.

— Jon Robb-Webb/Richard Holmes