The Dyers Hand and Other Essays

Were the situation one in which the future of the whole community is at stake, as on the field of Agincourt, the speech would strike an unsympathetic note, but the situation is one of civil war, a struggle for power among the feudal nobility in which the claims of both sides to be the legitimate rulers are fairly equal—Henry IV was once a rebel who deposed his King—and a struggle in which their feudal dependents are compelled to take part and risk their lives without having a real stake in the outcome. Irrespective of the speaker, the speech is a comic criticism of the feudal ethic as typified by Hotspur. Courage is a personal virtue, but military glory for military glory's sake can be a social evil; unreasonable and unjust wars create the paradox that the personal vice of cowardice can become a public virtue.

That it should be Falstaff who utters the speech increases its comic effect. Falstaff has a fantastic conception of himself as a daredevil who plays highwayman, which, if it were true, would require exceptional physical courage. He tries to keep up this illusion, but is always breaking down because of his moral courage which keeps forcing him to admit that he is afraid. Further, though he lacks courage, he exemplifies the other side of the warrior ethic, personal loyalty, as contrasted with Prince Hal's Machiavellian manipulation of others. When Falstaff is rejected by the man to whom he has pledged his whole devotion, his death may truly be called a death for the sake of his wounded honor.

The Banal

The human person is a unique singular, analogous to all other persons, but identical with none. Banality is an illusion of identity for, when people describe their experiences in cliches, it is impossible to distinguish the experience of one from the experience of another.

The cliche user is comic because the illusion of being identical with others is created by his own choice. He is the megalomaniac in reverse. Both have fantastic conceptions of themselves but, whereas the megalomaniac thinks of himself as being somebody else—God, Napoleon, Shakespeare—the banal man thinks of himself as being everybody else, that is to say, nobody in particular.

verbal humor

Verbal humor involves a violation in a particular instance of one of the following general principles of language.

O Language is a means of denoting things or thoughts by sounds. It is a law of language that any given verbal sound always means the same thing and only that thing.

Words are man-made things which men use, not per­sons with a will and consciousness of their own. Whether they make sense or nonsense depends upon whether the speaker uses them correctly or incorrecdy.

Any two or more objects or events which language seeks to describe are members, either of separate classes, or of the same class, or of overlapping classes. If they belong to separate classes, they must be described in different terms, and if they belong to the same class they must be described in the same terms. If, however, their classes overlap, either class can be described metaphori­cally in terms which describe the other exacdy, e.g., it is equally possible to say—the plough swims through the soil—and—the ship ploughs through the waves.

4) In origin all language is concrete or metaphorical. In order to use language to express abstractions, we have to ignore its original concrete and metaphorical meanings.

The first law is violated by the pun, the exceptional case in which one verbal sound has two meanings.

When I am dead I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

For the pun to be comic, the two meanings must both make sense in the context. If all books were bound in black, the couplet would not be funny.

Words which rhyme, that is to say, words which denote differ­ent things but are partially similar in sound, are not necessar­ily comic. To be comic, the two things they denote must either be so incongruous with each other that one cannot imagine a real situation in which a speaker would need to bring them together, or so irrelevant to each other, that they could only become associated by pure chance. The effect of a comic rhyme is as if the words, on the basis of their auditory friendship, had taken charge of the situation, as if, instead of an event requiring words to describe it, words had the power to create an event. Reading the lines

There was an Old Man of Whitehaven Who danced a quadrille with a raven

one cannot help noticing upon reflection that, had the old gentleman lived in Ceylon, he would have had to dance with a swan; alternatively, had his dancing partner been a mouse, he might have had to reside in Christ Church, Oxford.

The comic rhyme involves both the first two laws of language; the spoonerism only the second. Example: a lec­turing geologist introduces a lantern slide with the words: "And here, gendemen, we see a fine example of erotic blacks."