How to be an Alien: A Handbook for Beginners and More Advanced Pupils

This is affectionate mockery of British (really, middle and upper class London) life, observed by a Hungarian who’d been living here for eight years before publishing this in 1946. It’s illustrated by Nicholas Bentley (whose father invented the Clerihew, a form of comic verse). The first half comprises short pieces about being a “general alien”; the second part looks at specific types of (male) Brits, including Bloomsbury intellectual, playboy, and civil servant.

Image: "The national passion... An Englishman, even if he is alone, forms an orderly queue of one."

Oxymoronic Wildean observations

“In England everything is the other way round.”
The richest people have the scruffiest and most peculiar dress; Brits rarely lie, but show more would not dream of telling you the truth; introductions are a way to conceal a person’s identity, and while bargaining is bad and Continental, compromise is British and therefore good. For example:
“It is all right to have central heating in an English home, except in the bath room, because that is the only place where you are naked and wet at the same time, and you must give British germs a fair chance.”
And you must discuss the weather, but never contradict anyone about it. There’s even sample dialogue to practice!

Image: “The weather. This is the most important topic in the land.”

My favourite piece was the section on towns “designed for inconvenience and to confuse foreigners”: inconsistent house-numbering; houses with names instead of numbers; over 60 synonyms for “street”; lots of variants in close proximity (Belsize Park/Road/Green); the exact same name in different areas of the same town (dozens of Warwick Avenues, none of them near Warwick); street names printed on big signs but put too high, low, or in shadow to see them, and roads that have different names on opposite sides because they back onto different squares (diagram included!).

Quips

• “The British meteorologists forecast the right weather - as it really should be.”

• “Continental people have sex life; the English have hot-water bottles.”

• “It’s bad manners to be clever, to assert something confidently.”

• “The Labour Party is a fair compromise between Socialism and Bureaucracy.”

• “On the Continent people have good food; in England people have good table manners.”

Image: "The English have no soul; they have the understatement instead."

Joking about national stereotypes

I read this book alongside Eddo-Lodge’s Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race, which is an excellent, serious, and up-to-date book about black British history and structural racism in the UK today (see my review HERE).

The combination made me very conscious that this is humour rooted in caricatures of difference. As it’s a minority person making jokes about the majority, that’s fine, as when people make jokes about their own groups:

Me: What do you call a blonde who flies a plane?
Someone else: I don't know. What do you call a blonde who flies a plane?
Me: A pilot, you sexist pig!

As a fair-haired woman, I can make that joke (adapted from one of Manny’s). But if I replaced “blonde” with, for example “black man”, it would be more problematic - even though the whole point of the joke is to call out other people’s prejudice.

Although an alien, Mikes was white, so had the possibility of blending in more than Black Britons born here - if he could just sound English enough. He was once told:
“You really speak the most excellent accent without the slightest English.”

But there was a personal cost, despite his wit. He highlights the word “naturalised”, and says:
“Before you obtain British citizenship, they simply doubt that you are provided by nature.”
And after being granted it:
“You must pretend that you are everything you are not and you must look down upon everything you are.”
Note “are”, not even “were”.

Nevertheless, the book is more amusing than I’m making it sound!

Image: English tea is horrible, but you will always be offered it and must never refuse it, not even “if it is hot; if it is cold; if you are tired; if anybody thinks that you might be tired… if you have just had a cup.”

The start of something

George Mikes came to England in 1938 as the London correspondent for two Hungarian newspapers, switched to working for the BBC, and stayed. He discovered that he’d been an alien all his life (as all non Brits are), that he didn’t really understand the nuances of the language that he spoke fluently, and that there was no escape:
“He may become British; he can never become English”.

The title is poignant because Mikes was interned on the Isle of Man as an “enemy alien” in 1940. This was his first satirical collection, and it contrarily claims to be:
“For xenophobes and anglophobes… Specially recommended to all supplicants for naturalisation”.

If it feels a little unoriginal, that’s only because it’s been copied so often since, including by Mikes himself. After this in 1946, he wrote How to be Inimitable in 1960, How to be Decadent in 1977, and all three were combined into How to be a Brit in 1986.

In a similar vein:
• Bryson’s Notes from a Small Island. See my review HERE.
• The How To Be British Collection
• Kate Fox’s Watching the English. See my review HERE.
• Very British Problems: Making Life Awkward for Ourselves, One Rainy Day at a Time

And what about the Monty Python skit, Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook, that Wikipedia thinks was inspired by English as She Is Spoke: Being a Comprehensive Phrasebook of the English Language, Written by Men to Whom English was Entirely Unknown? You can watch the Pythons here.

Back to this, it includes a comparison of how an incident would be reported in The Times, the House of Commons, the Londoner’s Diary of the Evening Standard, and the Oklahoma Sun - surely an inspiration for these famous lines from Yes, Prime Minister in 1986 that are still broadly true:

“Hacker: Don't tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers.
The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country;
The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country;
The Times is read by the people who actually do run the country;
The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country;
The Financial Times is read by people who own the country;
The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country,
and The Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.

Sir Humphrey: Prime Minister, what about the people who read The Sun?

Bernard: Sun readers don't care who runs the country, as long as she's got big tits.”

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For a book published in 1946 you should expect all the obvious stereotypical examples of what foreigners expect the British to be like;
The quaint customs of greeting an acquaintance then asking how they are, to which only the formal reply 'I'm fine. How are you' should be given regardless of circumstance.
The English obsession with discussing the weather; and the social protocol of never contradicting anyone in polite conversation.
Then there is the ultimate British crime of having taken a delicate and refined beverage of tea, and through generations of ignorance and bad taste transformed it into the colourless and tasteless gargling-water we know today as English Tea.
Not to mention queuing, long awkward silences, buses and taxis, the show more list goes on and on.

You would expect a book published eighty years ago to now appear very dated and inaccurate.
I only wish to God it were...

(Nicolas Bentley's line drawings are a perfect accompaniment to the text.) show less

This is a very "nice" story about the behaviour of the English. This story was written by the Hungarian writer George Mikes who lived in England from 1945 to the end of his life in 1987. He wanted to write a rude story about the behaviour of the English, but they considered his story as nice and funny. He wrote about many topics, for example about the weather, the buses, but the funniest for me was really short chapter 7 about sex: "European men and women have sex lives; English men and women have hot-water bottles". Ha ha! I can recommend this book as a fun read!

George Mikes immigrated to England from Hungary, and wrote this slim book in 1946 as a satirical attack on the English way of life and culture, and their arrogant paternalism towards foreigners or "aliens". To his surprise it was enormously popular, and continued in reprints for many years. Nicolas Bentley provided cartoon drawings for illustration.
Dated but still funny.

Amusing account based on the author's experiences as an alien (refugee) in England --very funny illustrations

First Published by Andre Deutsch 1946

George Mikes says, 'the English have no soul; they have the understatement instead.' But they do have a sense of humour - they provide it by buying over three hundred thousand copies of a book that took them quietly and completely apart, a book that really took the Mikes out of them.