Exuberant victimhood

IN his columns for the Irish Times, Fintan O’Toole has been one of the most astute commentators on Brexit, and here he offers his analysis of the forces in the English psyche that brought it about. Nor does he pull any punches, diagnosing a national epidemic of self-pity which settled in after the Second World War: a sense that it would have been better to have been invaded by Hitler than to stand by and watch far more battle-scarred economies faring so much better in peacetime. “In the imperial imagination, there are only two states: dominant and submissive, coloniser and colonised,” he writes, suggesting Brexiteers have projected the role of coloniser onto the EU so they can bask in “the exuberant victimhood of anti-colonial resistance”, a glow fanned by the peculiarly English cult of heroic failure. He writes to devastating effect, his framing of Brexit as a “weird psychodrama” raising some uncomfortable questions.

Inspector Maigret’s melancholy Christmas morning mood is interrupted by news from across the street of a girl being visited in the night by Santa Claus, who gave her a doll and prised up some floorboards. Unusually this is an investigation he can conduct from home, which he seems to regard as a satisfying way to spend Christmas. There are three seasonal stories in this 1951 collection, but only the first features Maigret himself. In the second, a police telephonist is pushed out of his usual auxiliary role into the thick of the action. In the last, a man shockingly shoots himself in the head in a restaurant. Two witnesses are interviewed by police, leading to a more traditionally uplifting festive conclusion. Simenon is masterfully economical, telling us volumes about Maigret’s home life with the most minimal strokes, and, even though the inspector barely leaves his flat, the author conveys the flavour of Paris on Christmas Day.

Drawing on the 15 years he’s spent lecturing on the subject, Jeremy Dauber delves into the rich, complex and continually fascinating history of Jewish comedy, tracing the evolution of various strands of humour, including irony, vulgarity, bookish wit, folksiness and joking as a response to persecution. His exploration of how a distinctive voice developed in a closed, largely self-regulated community reaches back as far as the plot twists of the Book of Esther, the earthiness of the Book of Judges and centuries of Talmudic debates, taking in satirical rabbinic poetry from the Middle Ages and the cultural fusion of 11th-century Spain, all the way to Curb Your Enthusiasm. In a work of substantial, scholarly research that nevertheless has room for some excellent jokes, Dauber provides much insight into how Jews have regarded themselves and each other down the centuries, and how Jewish comedians, having come to define American comedy, are still at the cutting edge.