Victor Sawdon Pritchett (1900-1997) was a British literary critic, biographer, and fiction writer. He was known less for his novels than for his short stories, which can be found in several collections, and all together in the twelve-hundred page Complete Collected Stories. “Sense of Humour” was was first published in 1937 and would appear in a few anthologies. The narrator, some sort of traveling salesman named Mr Humphrey, meets a girl, Muriel, who works at the cash desk of a hotel. She has an eager boyfriend named Colin who works at a garage, but she’s bored with him so the narrator starts taking her out. Colin follows them on their driving excursions on his motorbike, including to Mr Humphrey’s parents’ house, and then has a fatal accident nearby. Mr Humphrey’s father is an undertaker, and he suggests Mr Humphrey should drive the hearse with Colin’s remains back to his mother. Muriel insists on driving with him in the hearse.
The narration and the dialogue in “Sense of Humour” have the same brusque, elliptical manner. “She’d a cup of tea steaming on the register,” Mr Humphrey writes, then, “‘I’m TT [teetotal],’” I said. “‘Too many soakers on the road as it is.’” The subject “It” is often dropped as in "Took me ten minutes to ram the idea into his head”, or “Struck me as being a pretty thin joke.” Mr Humphrey will say or write no more than is needed to get the basic sense of things, and Pritchett makes us hear the gaps and pauses. The scene is somehow quiet and restrained (by the author) even when the narrator’s frustrated and says things like “One minute! Not so fast!” When a conversation falters as someone either doesn’t respond or gives a negligible answer, Pritchett shows it thusly with a new line from the same speaker:
“I got the new bike, Muriel,” he said. “I’ve got it outside.”
“It’s just come down from the works,” he said.
This is Colin, whom the narrator calls “that half-wit at the garage”. Muriel looks at his new bike but gets rid of him soon after. There are forlorn and fidgeting looks here that go unnarrated; one literally reads between the lines. The story is not sentimental but a great deal of sentiment is there unstated in the silences. After Colin’s death Muriel’s and Mr Humphrey’s feelings do flower, but in melodramatic terms which are not to be trusted. Mr Humphrey is not a half-wit but Pritchett has made his narrator about as unsophisticated as any writer not working in satire would dare. He tries to enlist us in his contempt for Colin, calling him “Slow,—you know the way they are in the provinces”, but later we will feel that we see what’s going on with Muriel better than he can with his groping enthusiasm. Pritchett finds the comedy in his nocturnal progress with Muriel, and also in his bare comprehension of the situation with Colin.
He had come in. He had a cape on, soaked with rain and the rain was in beads in his hair. It was fair hair. It stood up on end. He’d been economising on the brilliantine. He didn’t wear a hat. He gave me a look and I gave him a look. I didn’t like the look of him. And he didn’t like the look of me.
In the last three sentences, the terseness and repetition is the lumbering thought of one animal sizing up another. The titular phrase, “sense of humour”, starting when Muriel explains that she’s Irish and that’s why she laughed when Mr Humphrey said his dad was an undertaker, becomes a recurring joke in the story. The old man associates the Irish with a sense of humour, Muriel says hers allows her to indulge Colin’s stalking, and near the end Mr Humphrey shuts up her laughing, and tells her to keeps hers to herself. It’s not exactly that we laugh along with Muriel and Pritchett at Mr Humphrey, but the story keeps us at a remove from him from which we can watch with amusement. Mr Humphrey has a “funny feeling” in bed with Muriel as she sobs over Colin, and later tells us that hearses are “funny things to drive”. You have to drive slowly past houses, his father has taught him, out of respect for everyone involved, but you can speed up in the country when no one’s watching, and with the coffin unloaded you can go all the way up to seventy miles an hour. Humphrey may not be amused by this image of a hearse racing along the motorway, but he sees that something’s “funny” about the whole business. He finds it “funny” too, “her saying “Colin!” like that in the night”, and how he becomes Colin to her in those moments, but surely funny in yet another way. The story may be funny, but “funny” is also a makeshift cover behind which sex and death can be heard consorting. Pritchett is a master of partial discretion, his own and that of his made up people.