Kitchen-Sink Laughter: Domestic Service Humor in Twentieth-Century Britain

The idea of domestic service as a realm suitable for jokes and laughter has had a long cultural heritage. Carolyn Steedman and Jane Thaddeus have written of eighteenth-century domestic servant jokes and ‘Mollspeak’, the pretentious and colloquial language put into their mouths that made servants so funny to their employers. Jokes and laughter at the expense of employers and servants were equally prominent and persistent in late nineteenth and twentieth century British society. Victorians had for the most part regarded their jokes about servants as harmless, or even as a healthy way of ensuring that servants knew their place. But from around the turn of the century, reformers habitually talked of the comedy value of servants as a major problem, indicative of the lack of respect and dignity afforded the profession. The widely debated ‘servant problem’ was often recast as a ‘humor problem’, a damaging tendency to laugh at all involved with domestic service. A 1919 government enquiry into domestic service described how the press represented servants as “comic or flippant characters… held up to ridicule”, while the domestic difficulties of employers were also commonly portrayed as “ignoble and laughable”. Investigating the humor problem captures the deep socio-cultural significance of domestic service in Britain, and reveals the significance of laughter and comedy in delineating class and gender identities.