A German I know will on occasion tell you his father died in the concentration camps. He waits for the concerned and properly sympathetic faces and then adds that he got drunk and fell out of a watchtower. Europeans find that boorish, faintly crass and rather tasteless; the English love it. It’s a proper joke, and a German doing it is double bubble. The surprise is that neither the Europeans or the English realize that it’s not a joke at all, his father really did fall out of a watch tower and it’s poignant and sad because his son never knew him, never met his dad.
A.A. Gill, The Angry Island: Hunting the English, p. 112.
March 2, 2011
QotD: Humour
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