Humour in British First World War Literature : Taming the Great War

This book explores how humorous depictions of the Great War worked to familiarise, domesticate, and tame the conflict. While well-known examples of First World War literature often emphasize enormous emotional disruption and the war’s extremes, other writers used humour to encourage a gentle, mild amusement, drawing on familiar, popular genres and forms used before 1914. In humorous portrayals of the war, tameness outdoes the unmanageable and the temperate exceeds the extraordinary. Humour in British First World War Literature is based on little-known primary material uncovered from detailed archival research, as well as works that, though written by celebrated authors, tend not to be placed in the canon of Great War literature. Each chapter examines key examples of literary texts, ranging from short stories and poetry to theatre and periodicals, in doing so investigating the complex representational, political, and social significance of the tame strand in humorous Great War literature. Acknowledgements Contents List of Figures Chapter 1: Introduction: ‘[A]s in most war fiction, humour predominates’ Defining Humour Humour in the Field of Great War Studies The Scope of Humour in British First World War Literature References Chapter 2: Humour and Britishness During the Great War: ‘If a man brings us a joke, we require to be satisfied of its durability’ The Roots of British Wartime Humour ‘Jokes Should Be Taxed in England like Opium in China’: The Britishness of Humour as a Minor Feeling The Boundaries of British Humour References Chapter 3: The Domestication of Death: ‘There are lots of jokes’ ‘What Did I Say About That Face?’ Death Comes Home in A Well-Remembered Voice ‘There Once Was a Man in a Trench’: Death in Trench-Newspaper Limericks and Nursery Rhyme Parodies ‘Let Us Be Our Ordinary Selves, Won’t You?’: Conclusions References Chapter 4: Class and Social Structure: ‘It is not taken seriously’ ‘It’s a Great Leveller This Army’: Class, Revolution, Oblique Joking ‘I’ve Only Learnt Things Like Greek and Latin and French and Spanish’: Upper Class Women in War ‘It Turns Out to be No Bomb [...] Recommended for License’: Conclusions References Chapter 5: War and the Depiction of Gender: ‘Let us hope for the best and assume that he is dead’ ‘You’ll Find Him Different’: Wartime Masculinity and Male Relationships ‘They Are Having the Time of Their Lives, Probably Being Quite Useful too’: War and Roles for Women ‘We Must All Do More: It Being War time and All That’: Conclusions References Chapter 6: The War and the Domestic Sphere: ‘That perpetual sense of the ridiculous’ ‘Ladies of the Burtonbury War Relief Fund Committee Crowded Round Her’: The War at Home ‘All Bowling’s More or Less Alike on a Pitch Full of Shell-Holes Like This One’: At Home in War ‘Squad Drill, Sir’ | ‘O-o-h! I Thought You Said “Quadrille”’: Conclusions References Chapter 7: Parody and Pop Culture in Trench Newspapers: ‘Let’s whistle ragtime ditties while we’re bashing out Hun brains’ ‘I Ain’t No Bloomin Kipling’: Parody and Familiarity Charlie Chaplin and the Reproducibility of the Clownish Serviceman ‘This, While the Unknown Stalked and Fear Was Chilly [...] “Couldn’t I Do some Beef and Piccalilli”’: Conclusions References Chapter 8: Short Fiction and Service-Author Heroes: ‘You can’t expect glory and accuracy for a half-penny’ Service-Author Stories: ‘I Wonder if the Chap Who First Thought Out This Shell Business Realised the Extraordinary Inconvenience it Would Cause’ Pre-War Continuity: ‘The Humour of Tommy and Jack Is Proverbial’ ‘Look! A Man with a Lamp Is Signalling to us | That’s a Light in a Cottage Window, Sir’: Conclusions References Chapter 9: Conclusions References Index