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Struggling to see the point of your lengthy rant. You start it by slagging off someone who has taken breaks when he's given them and moved himself "up" in the world, it seems to me that your almost saying he should know his place and not hobnob with aristos and royalty. Then you finish it off by decrying how the current shower of cunts are trying to kill off social mobility and use your mum's work as an example.
Bobbo-
Bollocks.
You start it by slagging off someone who has taken breaks when he's given them and moved himself "up" in the world
I didn't think much of your joke and I didn't like it when he told it either. I criticised him for telling the joke, not for having made something of himself. I can see why he would feel the need, class attitudes being what they are (particularly where he came from) and him having become famous for being the funny mouth of the ordinary working man, but it's still a shit joke. It (his version) could have been could have been a riff about culture clash and the amusing eccentricities of his new pals - all of which is in his story but unfortunately isn't the point - and I would have been laughing. But instead that's all window dressing for the same shit joke you told. So...
it seems to me that your almost saying he should know his place and not hobnob with aristos and royalty.
No.
It's a shit joke (both versions) because it's wilfully blind to the reality and complexities of British class culture and because it claims to be calling out an unpleasant aspect of that class culture while actually embodying just that kind of pettiness.
itsbruce
It's an absolutely fucking atrocious description of class. Reminds me of Billy Connolly's Tobogganist routine, which is mostly him making excuses to his traditional audience for the fact that he spends so much time now hobnobbing with aristocracy and minor royalty. Same basic story, same bollocks.
It's true that actual aristocrats are usually more relaxed about their sense of identity than anybody below them on the social ladder, it's even true that some of them, if by some circumstance they found themselves in a pub, would be relaxed about talking to people at the lower end of that ladder. Doesn't make them a wonderful and uncomplicated group of people. There are also plenty of rungs on that scale, with many of them very aware of where they rank, just how much aristo blood they have compared to others, who has more standing with the royal family and so on. And plenty with the rankest views on society you could ever encounter, who would get out of that imaginary pub as fast as they could manage.
Grades of social distinction have also long been a thing in the British working class - it's a class based society up and down. My family was mostly farm labour or mill workers on one side, dock workers and shop workers on the other. I can tell you those societies were full of grades - people who cleaned their front step and people who didn't, people who kept a nice front room that the minister could visit (and those who didn't), people judged by where they bought their clothes, the quality of their china, when they drank tea and how they drank it, who they talked to, people who used the phrase "no better than she should be" to condemn people who probably just had a harder life than them but didn't observe "proper" form (and may not have had the resources to have any choice about it). Some of them even drank sherry.
And again the same grades in the middle classes (probably a bit more sherry, admittedly). But in the post-war decades you also found there a huge number of people who had stepped up the ladder a few rungs from the working class, enabled by the new welfare state and free education. That's where most of the new teachers, lawyers, social workers and so on came from. Most of that new infrastructure, the public transport, new schools and so on was built and staffed by such people.
All that post-WWII expansion and services is now being dismantled. Whose doing that? Well, it's mostly the old upper classes and the worst of the social climbers (who are now happily dismantling the ladder they climbed and pretending it was never worth anything).
My parents were in one of those post-WWII generations. My mum became a principal teacher (means a different thing up in Scotland than down here) and spent much of her time giving career advice and support to the children of farm workers, working with social workers to rescue children from abusive situations, setting up the first playgroup in the area, setting up the first women's refuge. But she probably drank a glass of sherry at some point, so obviously she's scum.
Take that idea and fuck right off with it.