How to Be a Brit

Hungarian journalist George Mikes arrived in London to cover the Munich crisis in 1938, and somehow never got around to going home again. In 1945 he got together with the up and coming publisher André Deutsch (a former classmate of his younger brother in Budapest) and the illustrator Nicolas Bentley (not a Hungarian at all, but G K Chesterton’s godson, which seems to be the next best thing) to publish a little satire on the British character called How to be an alien. The British, predictably, loved being made fun of, so Mikes and Bentley turned the formula they had established into a cottage industry, helping Deutsch to go independent and become one of the big names of London publishing.

This collection — delightfully marketed as show more a “minibus” — brings together three of the little books Mikes wrote about the British: the original, Austerity-era How to be an alien, together with How to be inimitable from the “you’ve never had it so good” days of 1960, and How to be decadent from the “British disease” era of 1976. The first is the funniest — like most of us, Mikes seems to have become convinced as he got older that things really are getting worse year by year, and of course that makes it a little harder to be detached and funny. But he did his best to keep the jokes up — his famous chapter on “Sex” in the first book, reads in full: “Continental people have sex life; the English have hot-water bottles.” In the later books he took care to point out that a correspondent had reminded him that we now also have electric blankets.

Less happily he includes a section on “homosexuals”, where he claims to have nothing against us apart from our inability — unlike women, Jews, Black people, the Irish, foreigners, etc. — to take a joke against ourselves. Mikes, in print at least, wasn’t in the habit of telling the kind of nasty jokes about minority groups that were still very current elsewhere in 1976, but there must have been some incident that sparked this isolated and rather mean-spirited comment. Maybe he was less restrained at the dinner table than in his books.

This is gentle humour, for the most part, and it won’t directly tell you much about the 21st century British, but it does pick up a lot of the perceptions about Britishness that the British have internalised over the last hundred years or so and take care either to live up to or to avoid — understatement, talking about the weather a lot, never lying but hardly ever telling the truth, belonging to any class in society except the unfortunate lower-middle-class that everyone despises, avoiding any risk of seeming to “show off” by pretending to be lazy, amateurish, or ignorant in public, etc. show less

Five stars for How to Be an Alien, which is early George Mikes. But, after decades in London, late George Mikes got a bit cranky, devolving to two stars for the stuff he wrote in the 1980s when he was starting to sound a bit like White Van Man.

Consists of How to be an Alien (first published in 1946), How to be Inimitable (1960) and How to be Decadent (1977). Playful, gentle satires about the English (or rather, Londoners); the third probably less good than the first two (which it occasionally regurgitates).

This in a omni minibus comprising:
How to be an Alien, 1946
How to be Inimitable, 1960
How to be Decadent, 1977

Gentle humour from a Hungarian immigrant that inspired many others. See my detailed review of How to be an Alien, HERE.

This in a omni minibus comprising:
How to be an Alien, 1946
How to be Inimitable, 1960
How to be Decadent, 1977

Gentle humour from a Hungarian immigrant that inspired many others. See my detailed review of How to be an Alien, HERE.

A masterpiece of self-deprecation, funny, witty and at times hilarious. Even though somewhat dated (the first part 'How to be an alien' was published in 1946), the author appears to go straight to the heart of quintessential Britishness.