Deskside manners

Twice in the last few months I've suggested Stephen Potter's One-Upmanship to friends (hello those friends, if you're reading) and a little farther back I quoted from it, with great satisfaction, and that quotation was also a recommendation at large, because if you like this blog then you are probably going to really like Stephen Potter. Or are you? This book, it's poised in a very strange and particular space recommendation-wise. I love it, love it so, I know it by heart, but I am just never sure whether other people are going to find it funny or if it's just going to strike them as lame, stale, laboured attempts at humour pinned to a rather sad view of human relations.  In the event I haven't had the nerve to find out what my friends might think of it. I haven't been game to insist on loaning out my own copy and it's out of print, so I can't make a present of it without it all becoming way more complicated than should ever happen with the sharing of pleasure in an obscure fragment of comic genius.

I thought of Potter today, and his excellent advice on Patientship gambits carefully designed to counter 'the natural one-downness of the unclothed' when I found myself, yet again, unexpectedly and not particularly enthusiastically standing semi-naked in a small room with a man I barely know for company. Well, I suppose I asked for it by going to the GP; last night, while completing my evening ritual of staring searchingly into the bathroom mirror and wondering who I am, I noticed a change in the shape and colour of a patch of pigmentation on my left cheek.

The blob has been there since I was pregnant but it has definitely grown

Surprisingly enough, to me at least, the doctor said it's not cancer, and all this only took about two and a half minutes and the consultation was going to cost $75 so he suggested I take off almost all my clothes and he tied a magnifying glass to his head and looked at every bit of my body, using a torch to spotlight one section at a time. It was altogether a really great experience.



I hadn't had the foresight to plan a counterattack but I'm quite proud that I did locate the presence of mind, while being checked out, to talk at length about my cousin who has had many skin cancers removed from the skin of his bald head, all the while keeping my eyes firmly fixed on the likewise very bald head of the doctor. Not a refined ploy but a good deal better than nothing.

So, in the twenty years that this book has been a part of my life, Potter has repeatedly been useful to me in what I am not afraid to describe as a spiritual capacity: at times when people were being shits, when I have felt that I am being got at, when someone was unpleasantly winning at whatever petty contest was implicitly going down, and they were doing it at my expense, I have now and then been able to use the material in this book to think my way back to a different vantage point, and from there see the deep, rich, full absurdity of the scenario -- and that perspective is always available --  and then has been me who wins, and because my victory occurs on a higher plane it is conclusive.

And yet I do not know if or how this book can be recommended to other readers. Will it work on other people the way it has worked on me? Do they have to possess not only the same sense of humour, but also the same cultural field, mapped out of materials basically acquired from reading all of the British paperbacks published between 1935 and 1960 and retrieved decades later from the bookshelves of a damp fibro sleepout behind a suburban Australian house?

Considering this question I'm all the more grateful for and impressed by the courage of the person who introduced me to the book; this was a member of the group of men who lectured in English at La Trobe who were magnetic, brilliant, hilarious, wonderful teachers, and he was always the one who had the infallible knack of putting together the most interesting collections of books to read. One-Upmanship he put into his subject on modern comedy, and I remember him somewhat anxiously saying in a tutorial more or less what I've just said to you, i.e. that it was not an altogether settled matter in his mind that the book is in fact funny. With hindsight now, having been in his position, I wouldn't have had either the gumption to require fifty students to read it, nor, I'm actually very ashamed to say, the confidence in said students' capacity to make sense of the book let alone find it satisfying and hilarious.