Can we ever fully understand what made people in the past laugh? L. P. Hartley famously described the past as “a foreign country: they do things differently there”.^[1] Humour makes that distance especially clear. As the historian Vic Gatrell observes,

The subjects which people think it appropriate to laugh at…all vary with time, sex, class, place, and culture…for all these reasons studying laughter can take us to the heart of a generation’s shifting attitudes, sensibilities and anxieties.^[2]

Gatrell was writing about eighteenth-century London, but his point applies more broadly: what people found funny could reflect a generation’s shifting attitudes, sensibilities and anxieties. For historians, jokes offer a glimpse of those attitudes—but not a transparent record of what every reader believed.

This post looks at pictorial humour from early twentieth-century Britain to ask what its jokes can reveal about contemporary understandings of gender and sexuality. The examples below use different kinds of humour—physical comedy, satire and sexual innuendo.[3] The question is not just how each joke works, but what assumptions about gender and sexuality made it funny.

“The Art of Going One Better”: Punch (1930)

Humour turned up in all sorts of places in twentieth-century Britain. In the Edwardian music hall, performers such as Marie Lloyd and Max Miller relied on double entendre to get a laugh.[4] Punch cartoons—and, from the 1960s, Private Eye—used satire and wit. By the 1930s, saucy seaside postcards had become popular, with Donald McGill’s cards drawing on familiar comic figures: priests, large women and put-upon husbands. Later, the Carry On films and Spitting Image brought slapstick, satire and wit to cinema and television. The formats changed, but humour remained a way of playing with—and sometimes reinforcing—ideas about sex, gender and social types.

In the summer 1930 issue of Punch, the Romanian-born artist David Louis Ghilchik (1892–1970) drew a crowded beach where women swim with inflatable animals.[5] One woman has gone one better: her inflatable is a man. As she struggles to carry him towards the water, the other beachgoers appear to watch.

The physical joke is clear enough. The woman is slight, and the inflatable man is too much for her to manage. That contrast also plays on the fashionable interwar silhouette, which emphasised a slim figure rather than the breasts or waist.[6] But the cartoon may be doing more than making fun of an awkward beach accessory. Its title, “Leader of Fashion”, invites us to see the woman as an independent trendsetter—and then makes her carry a man with her after all.

That reading fits a wider tension in the interwar years. Women had gained some political rights, including the vote on equal terms with men in 1928, but there was also a backlash that renewed the emphasis on traditional femininity and motherhood.[7] The cartoon can be read as gently puncturing the idea of female independence: this woman may have come to the beach alone, but the joke gives her a man in tow, even if he is only inflatable.

A single cartoon cannot tell us exactly what its readers thought. But it shows how humour could make women’s independence a subject for laughter—and how a joke could bring the idea of a woman who needed a man back into view. In that sense, the image may reinforce the patriarchal relations of power in which men dominate women.[8]

“The Master Cometh”: Donald McGill’s Saucy Postcard

The second example is an undated Donald McGill postcard, probably from the 1930s. The dating is tentative, but the woman’s silhouette may offer a clue: by the middle and later years of the decade, fashionable ideals of female beauty had shifted towards broader shoulders and a more defined waist.[9] McGill was known as the “king of the seaside postcard.”[10] This card shows a woman in pink lingerie sitting on a bed beneath a sign reading

Be Prepared for the Master Cometh.[11]

The wording echoes the Gospel of Mark:

“Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh” (Mark 13:35).

Here, though, the biblical warning becomes a sexual double entendre: “the master” is the expected man, and “cometh” points to male ejaculation.

The joke centres the man’s sexual gratification. The woman is waiting for him; her own pleasure barely enters the picture. That framing recalls the influential nineteenth-century view that women had little sexual desire. William Acton, whose views were not shared by every doctor, claimed that

The majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind.[12]

By the late nineteenth century, campaigners such as Elizabeth Blackwell were challenging this assumption, arguing that female desire was natural. Yet McGill’s postcard can still be read as drawing on an older, patriarchal script: the man arrives for sex, and the woman is expected to be ready for him. That is a reading of the joke’s assumptions, of course, rather than proof that every buyer shared them.

But how did readers actually respond to these jokes? We cannot know simply from the images themselves. As Michel de Certeau argued, audiences are not just passive consumers: they interpret what they see and read in their own ways.[13]

The popularity of Punch and Donald McGill’s postcards tells us that these images reached a large audience, but not that every reader accepted their assumptions. Punch ran until 2002, and the Daily Mail reported that McGill’s postcards had sold more than 200 million copies by the time of his death in 1962.[14] People might have bought a postcard because they found it funny without agreeing with everything the joke implied. Stuart Hall’s idea of “negotiated reading” is useful here: readers may recognise a text’s preferred meaning while also resisting or adapting it to fit their own experiences.[15] The same image could prompt different responses from different readers; we should be wary, though, of reducing those responses to simple categories such as “feminist” or “conservative”.

The McGill postcard, for instance, can be read as making male sexual pleasure central and leaving the woman’s pleasure aside. But a buyer might instead have imagined the woman and her expected visitor as a loving couple. That reading fits with what Steven Seidman calls the “sexualisation” of love: by the early twentieth century, erotic desire was increasingly understood as one of the things that could sustain a loving relationship.[16]

We cannot establish that this was how most buyers read the postcard. The point is that an image does not have only one possible meaning, and its popularity cannot tell us which meaning its audience chose. Humour can reveal the assumptions a joke draws on, but reconstructing what readers made of it is much harder.

Conclusion

Humour can show historians which subjects people considered fit for jokes. That gives us a glimpse of a period’s mentalité—its habits of thought and feeling, which also have a history.[17] This is especially useful when studying gender. Women made some gains in political rights and sexual freedom during the interwar years, but those changes met a backlash that reaffirmed traditional femininity.

Historians have often traced that backlash through laws, institutions and advice literature. Cartoons and postcards offer another kind of evidence: they show how ideas about gender and sexuality appeared in popular visual culture.[18] Their circulation tells us that many people encountered the jokes, though it cannot tell us whether readers agreed with them or how they interpreted them. Read alongside official and academic sources, humour can bring into view assumptions and anxieties that those sources may leave harder to see.     

References

[1] L. P. Hartly, The Go-Between, quoted in John Tosh, The Pursuit of History, 4^th edn (New York: Longman, 2006), p. 10.

[2] Vic A.C. Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth Century London (London: Atlantic, 2006), p. 5.

[3] For definitions of humour see the following: Oxford English Dictionary, ‘Humour’ (2013) http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/humour [accessed 26 December 2013]; Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Slapstick’ (2013) http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/548077/slapstick [accessed 26 December 2013]; Alison Ross, The Language of Humour (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 60 and p. 111; Charles A. Knight, ‘Satire, Speech and Genre’, Comparative Literature, 44.1 (1992), 22–41 (p. 22); Oxford English Dictionary, ‘Joke’ (2013) http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/joke [accessed 26 December 2013].

[4] A.N. Wilson, The Victorians (London: Hutchinson, 2002), p. 522.

[5] David Louis Ghilchik, ‘The Art of Going One Better: Leader of Fashion Appears with the Perfect Bathing Animal’, Punch, or the London Charivari, Summer Number (1930) http://punch.photoshelter.com/image/I0000OCyFX8Z3hUU [accessed 2 January 2014].

[6] Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘The Body and Consumer Culture’, in Women in Twentieth-Century Britain, ed. by Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska (London: Longman, 2001), pp. 183–97 (pp. 186–87).

[7] June Hannam, ‘Women and Politics’, in Women’s History: Britain, 1850–1945: An Introduction, ed. by June Purvis (London: UCL Press, 1995), pp. 217–46 (p. 234).

[8] June Purvis, ‘From “Women Worthies” to Post-Structuralism? Debate and Controversy in Women’s History in Britain’, in Women’s History: Britain, 1850–1945: An Introduction, ed. by June Purvis (London: UCL Press, 1995), pp. 1–22 (p. 8).

[9] Zweiniger-Bargielowska, p. 187.

[10] Denis Gifford, ‘McGill, Donald Fraser Gould (1875–1962)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004) http://www.oxforddnb.com [accessed 26 December 2013].

[11] Donald McGill, ‘Look at that now! What’s a poor girl supposed to do?’ (c. 1930), Donald McGill Museum and Archive http://www.saucyseasidepostcards.com [accessed 2 January 2014].

[12] Quoted in John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 144.

[13] Peter Burke, What Is Cultural History?, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), p. 80.

[14] ‘Saucy Seaside Postcards Banned More than 50 Years Ago for Obscenity Go on Sale for the First Time’, Daily Mail, 16 June 2011 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2003783/Donald-McGill-obscene-seaside-postcards-banned-50-years-ago-sale-1st-time.html [accessed 2 January 2014].

[15] Daniel Chandler, ‘Semiotics for Beginners’ (2013) http://www.users.aber.ac.uk/dgc/Documents/S481sem08c/html [accessed 2 January 2014].

[16] Steven Seidman, ‘The Sexualisation of Love’, in Gender: A Sociological Reader, ed. by Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott (New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 225–29 (p. 227).

[17] Anna Green and Kathleen Troup, ‘The Annales’, in The Houses of History: A Critical Reader in Twentieth-Century History and Theory, ed. by Anna Green and Kathleen Troup (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 87–109 (p. 92).

[18] Frank Palmeri, ‘The Cartoon: The Image as Critique’, in History Beyond the Text: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources, ed. by Sarah Barber and Corinna Peniston-Bird (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 32–48 (p. 33).