Gallows humour: from François Villon to Tom Lehrer
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Gallows humour does not necessarily evoke any kind of gallows but the first one I came across (a four-line poem by François Villon, in the translation of Gyorgy Faludy), did — literally. I was in my early teens and impressed by the new experience of finding swear words in literature. The poem in question was Villon’s quatrain that he wrote as a chronicler of the Parisian underworld, a vagabond, a vagrant, an outcast, after being condemned to death by hanging for killing a priest in a drunken brawl. Here is the poem:
Je suis François, dont il me poise,
Ne de Pais aupres Pontoise,
Et de la corde d’une toise
Saura mon col que mon cul poise.
In a free prose translation:
I am Francois, born in Paris
Lying just next to Pontoise.
Soon from a piece of rope
My neck will learn
What my arse weighs.
Villon was worried about his own predicament. Three centuries later Tom Lehrer was worried about all three billion of us (the Earth’s population when the Cold War started). He thought a nuclear war would soon erupt and he described the consequences in graphic terms. However, after several decades without a nuclear holocaust, we somehow assumed that the danger had passed — that we have been reprieved.
And then came Mr Putin. He has said not once, not twice, but many times that he would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons. The stage we are at is no longer the Cold War. The war in Ukraine is a hot war — potentially of the hottest kind. What can we do? Nothing. So unfortunately, Tom Lehrer’s rather pessimistic prediction in verse is well within the realm of possibilities.
Here it is:
We will all go together when we go.
All suffused with an incandescent glow.
No one will have the endurance
To collect on his insurance,
Lloyd’s of London will be loaded when they go.
Oh, we will all fry together when we fry.
We’ll be french fried potatoes by and by.
There will be no more misery.
When the world is our rotisserie,
And we will all bake together when we bake.
There’ll be nobody present at the wake.
With complete participation
In that grand incineration,
Nearly three billion hunks of well-done steak.
Oh, we will all char together when we char.
And let there be no moaning of the bar.
Just sing out a Te Deum
When you see that I.C.B.M.,
And the party will be “come as you are”.
Oh, we will all burn together when we burn.
There’ll be no need to stand and wait your turn.
When it’s time for the fall out
And St Peter calls us all out
We’ll just drop our agenda and adjourn.
We will all go together when we go.
Ev’ry Hottentot and ev’ry Eskimo.
When the air becomes uranious,
We will all go simultaneous.
Yes we all will go together
When we all go together,
Yes we all will go together when we go.
My next and last example of gallows humour is that of Edi Rama, the Prime Minister of Albania. In a recent lecture he gave in Slovenia, he mentioned the difficulties the Russians have with their seven time zones. What time it is depends on where you are. President Putin still needs to get used to the new system of unified time and not unnaturally he makes occasional mistakes. An example the Prime Minister gave was a message delivered by President Putin to Mrs Prigozhin, saying: “I am so sorry for your loss.” He realised only later that the plane had not yet departed.
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