The death of Ian Carmichael is a reminder of how changes in class attitudes over the past decade have also altered how we laugh. Although not born into the upper classes – he was the son of an optician in Hull – Carmichael was an actor who perfected the look and the sound of a toff of very little brain.
No doubt, on some grim university campus, a thesis is being written on the dialectics of class prejudice within the English comic tradition, but out here in the sane world we can admit it is difficult not to love the character played down the years by actors like Carmichael, Jonathan Cecil and Hugh Laurie. Yet the silly ass, personified by Bertie Wooster and others, should represent everything for which we now have contempt.
The silly ass will have had, in his unwritten biography, a predictable upbringing. Born into a family whose preference for marrying first cousins has, down the centuries, severely impaired its genetic health, he will have been dropped on his head by a clumsy nanny within months of being born. What little brains that remain will have been knocked out on the rugger pitches of chilly, miserable prep and public schools. Pretty much ignored by his emotionally dysfunctional family until he could carry a 12-bore, he will have grown up to be socially inept, hopeless with girls and hardly able to tie his shoelaces without the help of a member of staff.
None of this, strangely, undermines our affection for him. When, in his twenties, he comes into money, lives in a large house with his butler and is set up for a life of work-free, goofy ineffectiveness, we simply enjoy the joke. That fairy-tale world of clubs and croquet lawns is oddly reassuring.
Of course, the upper-class fool can only belong to the past. In these prim days, it would be impossible to create such an innocent, value-free character. Over time, class has become too freighted with resentment to be entirely amusing. Perhaps the toffs themselves were to blame. In the early 1960s, Harold Macmillan played the upper-class duffer for political effect. Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who once confessed – boasted, perhaps – that he could only do sums with the help of matchsticks, was the real deal.
Since then with every decade, the joke about the sweet, privileged Englishman has been tarnished by reality. The famous and influential "Upper-Class Twit of the Year" sketch from Monty Python set the comic agenda. Since then, the toff has been portrayed in comedy either as pathetic (Ralph, the landowner in love with his gardener, in The Fast Show), venal (Alan B'Stard) or depressingly thick (Harry Enfield's character Tim Nice-But-Dim).
These days, when figures in public life play the class card, they do it in a knowing, untrustworthy way. No one will fall for Boris Johnson in the way that a previous generation was charmed by Macmillan.
The upper-class fool, as a staple of innocent English comedy, now belongs to the past. It is rather sad.
Bernard-Henri's lesson in surviving a hoax
One of life's small treats is to see a philosopher being made to look slightly foolish. When the public pratfall involves a smooth, high-profile French philosopher, the pleasure is particularly acute.
Bernard-Henri Lévy is a philosophe engagé who takes himself very seriously. Known in the French media simply as BHL, he can be relied on to add a knowing, gnomic gloss to the day's news, whether it concerns the war in Afghanistan or the Roman Polanski case. His website declares that he is, "dedicated to the struggle for human dignity", and compares him to Sartre, Camus and Malraux.
The struggle for human dignity has just become tougher for BHL. In a new book, he cited as an authoritative source the 20th-century thinker Jean-Baptiste Botul.
Unfortunately Botul was a well-known hoax, the invention of Frédéric Pages, a journalist. The school of Botulism, said to have been created by Botul, was part of the prank, as were his books, which included The Sex Life of Immanuel Kant and The Metaphysics of the Feeble.
Gamely, BHL has praised Pages for his work, arguing that truth is truth, whether it is meant as a parody or is entirely sincere. No doubt Botulists everywhere will agree.
The otter or the angler? We can’t have both
The next time the Government pleads poverty, it is perhaps worth remembering the £3m it has wasted on a futile campaign to eradicate the ruddy duck.
Over the past five years, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs has sent out its sharpshooters to blast away at the ruddy duck, a species which, because it interbreeds with the rare white-headed duck in Spain, has been the subject of an EU directive.
More than 6,000 birds have been shot but almost 700 remain, and numbers are now rising sharply. The ruddy duck population is in particularly rude health across the Channel. Interestingly, the white-headed duck has been doing better too, although that development might just possibly have something to do with a ban preventing Spaniards from shooting them.
Expensive species-wide culls are almost always a waste of time and money, and quite often do more harm than good. The Government would do well to remember the ruddy duck when considering a recent request from the Angling Trust. Since being re-introduced to the rivers of England, the otter has been so successful that it is now being claimed that it threatens coarse fishing across the country.
According to one fish farmer: "Angling will be dead within five years if nothing is done." The otter or the fisherman: our rivers, it appears, are not big enough for both. It is a ticklish situation but, as any politician will know, an official cull of the otter is not an option.
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