Benefits of being a shy fantasist for humour

English comic imagination of describes one of Pritchett’s characters as a ‘shy fantasist’, a phrase which brilliantly captures something of the essence of the English comic imagination from Dickens to Monty Python. It is a combination of gauche public submissiveness and savage private dissent which can be found everywhere in English fiction from Jane Eyre to Lucky Jim. Compare and contrast this fare to the late television comedians and the Bill Mahers.

There is a delicate  delicate precision in the above observation, it gets a little bit of hand, if then with some  patriotic flourish the English start making claims about the ‘Englishness of metaphor’