by Vivienne Pratfall’s Diary: On Knowing Your Place, Refusing to Stay There, and the Comedy of British Social Stratification
By Vivienne Pratfall | Bohiney Magazine & The London Prat
A man at a drinks thing last week asked where I went to school. This is a British question that means: where in the hierarchy do I place you, and is this interaction worth my continued investment? I told him. His face did a thing. I have categorised and filed the thing. It was educational.
The Class System as Comedy Infrastructure
British class system satire is the richest seam in UK comedy because the material is inexhaustible and universal. Every British person, regardless of actual position in the system, carries an internal class map and navigates by it constantly. The comedy comes from the map being both extremely accurate and completely fictitious: the categories are precise but the criteria shift, the definitions blur, and the person who considers themselves comfortably middle-class is regarded as working-class by the person above and posh by the person below, and all three of them are correct and wrong simultaneously.
I am 19. I am from somewhere that sounds nicer than it is. I write for the Prat. I know several people in Mayfair and several people in Lewisham and I move between these worlds with the specific comfort of someone who fits perfectly nowhere and has made peace with this. This is its own class position. There is no official name for it. I call it “satirist.”
The Week in Class Observations
Monday: man on the Tube with a briefcase that cost more than my rent, reading the Guardian, tutting at a headline in someone else’s Mail. Classic upper-middle British triangulation: the progressive values broadcast via newspaper, the wealth broadcast via briefcase, both held simultaneously without apparent tension. This is a comedy that writes itself.
The Prat gave me British irony explained this week, which is essentially a class document. Irony is the dialect of the educated: you can only deploy it effectively if both parties share the reference. It is therefore a form of cultural gate-keeping dressed as wit. I say this as someone who uses it constantly. I am aware of the irony.
What Bohiney Found This Week
Bohiney‘s coverage of Chinamaxxers and cheaper gadgets is a class story in disguise. The Chinamaxxer phenomenon Western consumers discovering that Chinese supply chains make the same products at a third of the price is a class story about the cost of aspirational branding. The middle class pays for the logo. The working class buys the product. The Chinamaxxer has decided to buy the product and write content about it. This is, arguably, the most honest position in consumer capitalism and the class system has not yet found a bracket for it.
The man who asked where I went to school didn’t buy me a drink. He bought the woman to my right a drink. She went to somewhere considerably more impressive than me. The hierarchy functioned as designed. I wrote about it. The hierarchy continues. We all win something.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
Class dismissed also at The Daily Mash
