'The Value of All Vulgar Notions'

On Friday a friend sent me a photograph of two plastic pink flamingos standing on their steel legs on the lawn in front of someone’s house. At this point, we are expected to snort at the philistinism, the unapologetic vulgarity of such a display, except that both flamingos wear white surgical masks over their bills. I told my friend I think of such gestures as a form of folk poetry. On the one hand, it’s simple silliness; on the other, an implied thumbing of the nose at public-health pieties. On this date, March 21, in 1908, G.K. Chesterton published “Popular Jokes and Vulgarity” in the London Illustrated News:

“I believe firmly in the value of all vulgar notions, especially of vulgar jokes. When once you have got hold of a vulgar joke, you may be certain that you have got hold of a subtle and spiritual idea. The men who made the joke saw something deep which they could not express except by something silly and emphatic.”

Erudite wit and a finely calibrated sense of irony are to be prized but don’t overlook the genius of what Tom Wolfe celebrates as “this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, hog-stomping, Baroque country of ours.” Humor mutates with every humorist. It’s no stretch for one man or woman to uncontrollably laugh with Alexander Pope and W.C. Fields. It’s useful to remember (as Chesterton surely did) that vulgarity is rooted in the Latin vulgāritas, meaning the masses or multitude or, more disapprovingly, the mob. Chesterton goes on to distinguish himself somewhat from the wittiest of all writers, Max Beerbohm, by referring to the latter’s essay “The Humour of the Public”:  

“In order to understand vulgar humour it is not enough to be humourous; one must also be vulgar, as I am.”

Beerbohm was the least vulgar of writers. In his discussion of England’s music halls – an object of snobbish scorn that Beerbohm dearly loved -- he observes: “The quality of the joke is of slight import in comparison with its subject. It is the matter, rather than the treatment, that counts, in the art of the music-hall.” And in the art of masked flamingos.