It takes foreign colleagues and clients a while to realise that when the English say 'Oh really? How interesting!' they might well mean 'I don't believe a word of it, you lying toad'. Or they might not. They might just mean 'I'm bored and not really listening but trying to be polite'. Or they might be genuinely surprised and truly interested. You'll never know. There is no way of telling: even the English themselves, who have a pretty good 'sixth sense' for detecting irony, cannot always be entirely sure. And this is the problem with the English irony-habit: we do sometimes say what we mean, but our constant use of irony is a bit like crying wolf - when there really is a wolf, when we do mean what we say, our audience is not surprisingly somewhat sceptical, or, if foreign, completely bewildered. The English are accustomed to this perpetual state of uncertainty, and as Priestley says, this hazy atmosphere in which 'very rarely is everything clear-cut' is certainly favourable to humour. In the world of work and business, however, even one of my most staunchly English informants admitted that 'a bit more clarity might be helpful,' although, he added, 'we seem to muddle through well enough.'
An Indian immigrant, who has been valiantly trying to do business with the English for many years, told me that it took him a while to get to grips with English irony because although irony is universal 'the English do not do irony the way Indians do it. We do it in a very heavy-handed way, with lots of winks and raised eyebrows and exaggerated tones to let you know we are being ironic. We might say "Oh yes, do you think so?" when we don't believe someone, but we will do it with all the signals blazing. In fact, most other nations do this - give lots of clues, I mean - in my experience. Only the English do irony with a completely straight face. I do realise that is how it should be done, Kate, and yes it is much more amusing - Indian irony is not funny at all, really, with all those big neon signs saying "irony" - but you know the English can be a bit too bloody subtle for their own good sometimes'.
Most English workers, however, far from being concerned about the difficulties it poses for foreigners, are immensely proud of our sense of humour. In a survey conducted by a social psychologist friend of mine, Peter Collett, experienced Euro-hopping British businessmen perceived the business climate in this country to be more light-hearted and humorous than in any other country in Europe, except Ireland (it was not entirely clear whether we felt the Irish had a better sense of humour, or just that we found them funnier). Only the Spanish even came close to matching us, and the poor Germans got the lowest humour-score of all, reflecting the popular stereotype in this country that Germans have absolutely no sense of humour - or perhaps that we find them difficult to laugh at, which is not quite the same thing.
THE MODESTY RULE - AND THE 'BUMPEX' SCHOOL OF ADVERTISING
A further potential impediment to the successful conduct of business is the English modesty rule. While the English are no more naturally modest or self-effacing than other cultures - if anything, we are inclined to be rather arrogant - we do put a high value on these qualities, and have a number of unwritten rules prescribing at least the appearance of modesty. Perhaps the modesty rules act as a counter-balance to our natural arrogance, just as our courtesy rules protect us from our aggressive tendencies? Whatever their source, the English rules forbidding boastfulness and prescribing a modest, unassuming manner can often be at odds with modern business practices.
During my research on the world of horseracing, I was once asked, as the official anthropologist of the racing 'tribe', to talk to a group of racecourse owners and managers about how they might generate more business. I suggested that they could perhaps do more to publicize the unique social attractions of racing - the sunny 'social micro-climate' of racecourses. With a look of horror, one of the racecourse managers protested, 'But that would be boasting!' Trying to keep a straight face, I said, 'No, I think nowadays it's called "marketing",' but the modesty rule proved stronger than any of my arguments, and he and a number of his colleagues remained unpersuadable.
That is an extreme example, and most English business people would now laugh at this old-fashioned attitude, but there are still traces of this mindset in the majority of English businesses. While most of us would not go to the extreme of rejecting any kind of marketing effort as 'boasting', there is a near-universal distaste for the 'hard sell', for 'pushiness', for the sort of brash, in-your-face approach to advertising and marketing that the English invariably describe, in contemptuous tones, as 'American'. As usual, this stereotype reveals more about the English than it does about the maligned Americans: we like to think that our approach to selling things is more subtle, more understated, more ironic - and certainly less overtly boastful.
And so it is. As I have said before, we do not have a monopoly on these qualities, but they tend to be more pervasive here than in other cultures, and we take them to greater extremes, particularly in our approach to advertising. There was recently, for example, a series of television advertisements for Marmite41 in which people were shown reacting with utter revulsion - to the point of gagging - to even the faintest trace of a Marmitey taste or smell. It is well known that Marmite is something one either loves or hates, but an advertising campaign focusing exclusively on the disgust some people feel for your product strikes many foreigners as somewhat perverse. 'You couldn't get away with that anywhere else,' said an American informant. 'I mean, yes, I get it. People either love Marmite or find it disgusting, and as you're never going to convert the ones who find it disgusting, you might as well make a joke out of it. But an ad with the message "some people eat this stuff but a lot of people can't even bear the smell of it"? Only in England!'
The humorist George Mikes claimed in 1960 that 'All advertisements - particularly television advertisements - are utterly and hopelessly un-English. They are too outspoken, too definite, too boastful.' He suggested that instead of 'slavishly imitating the American style of breathless superlatives' the English should evolve their own style of advertising, recommending, 'Try your luck on Bumpex Fruit Juice. Most people detest it. You may be an exception.' as a suitably un-boastful English way of trying to sell a product.
This was clearly intended as a bit of comic exaggeration, a caricature of a stereotype, and yet, forty years on, the avoidance of breathless superlatives is now the norm in English advertising, and the makers of Marmite have produced a highly successful advertisement with precisely the same message as Mikes' fictitious Bumpex brand. The resemblance is uncanny: the ad agency might have taken their brief directly from Mikes' book. This suggests to me that his main point, that advertising itself is essentially un-English, and would have to be radically re-invented to comply with English rules of modesty and reserve, is also much more than just an amusing exaggeration. He was quite right, and spookily prophetic. Advertising, and by extension all forms of marketing and selling, is almost by definition boastful - and therefore fundamentally at odds with one of the guiding principles of English culture.
For once, however, our self-imposed constraints have had a positive effect: advertising does not fit our system of values, so, rather than abandon our unwritten rules, we have twisted and changed the rules of advertising, and developed a form of advertising that allows us to comply with the modesty rule. The witty, innovative advertising for which the English are, I am told by people in the trade, internationally renowned and much admired, is really just our way of trying to preserve our modesty.
We English can blow our own trumpet if we have to; we can put on displays of heartfelt, gushing enthusiasm for our products or services, but the anti-boasting and anti-earnestness rules mean that many of us find this unseemly and acutely embarrassing, and we tend therefore to be somewhat unconvincing. And this problem is not just a feature of the higher echelons of English work - I found that workers at the bottom of the social scale are no less squeamish or cynical about trumpet-blowing than the educated middle- and upper-middle classes.