Nothing
to sit down on – nowhere to put it
U 3.89-95: —Uncle
Richie, really...
—Sit down or by the law Harry I'll knock you
down.
Walter squints vainly for a chair.
—He has nothing to sit down on, sir.
—He has nowhere to put it, you mug. Bring in
our chippendale chair.
“Nowhere to put it” became something of a
favourite punch-line for jokes in the second half of the nineteenth century,
and Joyce alludes to one which would only just have been in place in the
drawing-rooms of the period. I am grateful to Harald Beck for his suggestion
that Joyce’s “nowhere to put it” might refer to a traditional joke.
There
are at least three stories that utilize the punch-line. In 1851 the Mayor of
Bristol gave an after-dinner speech following the annual ploughing-match
organized by the Bath and West of England Society for the Advancement of
Agriculture & the Arts:
He remembered an
anecdote of a little girl, who, at an examination of a school, had to spell the
word "chaos", and, upon being asked to define what chaos was, she replied, "a
great heap of nothing, and nowhere to
put it" (laughter).1
The
second involves a cab-driver and his passenger (or sometimes just a passer-by):
Cabby: Hev a cab,
sir? Passer-by? Awfully good of you, old man; but I’ve really nowhere to put it. Cabby growls
unprintably, and the episode is closed.2
But
the most popular joke is the one to which Joyce alludes. It was typically
associated with “The Size of the House”, the fact that in the mid nineteenth century
MPs often struggled to find an available seat in the debating chamber of the
House of Commons, and this was compared to struggling to find a seat in an
over-crowded train. In 1866 the Pall Mall
Gazette offers its version:
"A Seat in 'The
House'" […] [A member of Parliament] has got as it were a ticket for a seat in the
House of Commons; but a ticket, as Mr. Darby Griffith pointed out on Monday
night, is a very small thing to sit down upon. Talk of a member taking his
seat! Unless he is a somewhat distinguished personage in one party or the
other, he had better take a camp-stool […] The actual accommodation is barely
sufficient for a very full House, so that many members might be in plight to
reply [..], like the bishop in the overcrowded railway carriage, "They have
plenty to sit upon, but nowhere to put
it".3
The
joke turns, of course, on the fact that the speaker has a perfectly adequate
“seat” (posterior, backside), but nowhere adequate to sit it down upon. Picture courtesy of Aida Yared
The
Speaker of 1893 presents a variation
of this parliamentary conundrum:
The Size of the
House… New members who have never before entered the precincts … are astonished
at nothing in the legislative palace so much as the smallness of the chamber…
When they do arrive, they find themselves in the position of the late Father
Tom Burke when his hostess asked him hadn’t he god a seat. (May we venture the
citation? It will harm nobody.) "Haven’t you got a seat, Father Tom?" said the
lady. "Bedad, I have, ma'am," said Father Tom, "but I have nowhere to put it."4
A
slightly earlier explanation for the origin of this possibly apocryphal story
occurs in the Fortnightly Review of
1898:
In 1856, it will be
remembered, the Queen made Sir James Parke Lord Wensleydale for life. The peers
resolved that the life baron could not sit among them. The question was asked
in society, "What would be Lord Wensleydale’s position?" The reply of Charles
Villiers or of [Sir Francis] Doyle, as the case may be, was: "Very much that of
the fat lady at the crowded concert. 'I am afraid, madam,' said a gentleman, 'you have nothing to sit upon.' 'No, sir,' answered the lady, 'it is not that;
but I have nowhere to put it.'"5
By
now the joke had passed into popular folktale, and often lost its original
parliamentary context, and begins to appear in the “comical” columns of
newspapers and magazines:
Some Cycling Stories
[…] A certain fat man was riding a bicycle, and obscured the saddle by reason
of his hugeness. A facetious friend meeting him observed, "Hullo, old man, you
have nothing to sit on." "Nay," quoth he, being in no wise disconcerted, "I have
plenty to sit on, but nowhere to put it."6
Retrospection. "What! Didn’t you have a seat for the Jubilee, Mac?" Mac. – "Yes, I had a seat all right, but nowhere to put it."7
The
joke made it on to the London stage in the Drury Lane boxing-night pantomime The Forty Thieves of 1898:
The one joke that
really made the audience laugh is when [Herbert] Campbell, in a wearisome
school-scene, says: "I’ve nothing to sit on," and [Dan] Leno replies, "Yes, you
have, but you’ve nowhere to put it."8
The
writer adds laconically: “But we’ve heard this before somewhere.”
One
further version was doing the rounds in 1904:
Nowhere to Put It – A
brawny Scot, a private in a Highland regiment, was standing in a crowded
tramcar in Southampton, when an old lady said:
"Have you nothing to
sit on?"
"Oh, yes," replied
the soldier, "I’ve plenty to sit on, but nowhere to put it."9
The
allusion is hidden away in Ulysses
and does not seem to have attracted the notice of commentators. But it had an
extended and colourful history before Joyce’s day.
John Simpson
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1 Bristol Mercury (1851), 10 May p. 4. The
joke is repeated, as in the magazine Boys
of England (1882), 29 December p. 256: “Fun […] No dictionary can equal the
child’s definition of chaos. “It is a great pile of nothing,” she said, “and
nowhere to put it.”
2 Leicester
Chronicle Supplement (1985), 5
December p. 1. Repeated (for example) in the comic magazine Fun (1900) 25 December p. 207: “Cabby. – “Hev a cab, sir?” Passenger. – “Awfully good of you, old
man; But I’ve really nowhere to put it.” Cabby growls unprintably, and the
episode is closed.
3 Pall Mall Gazette (1866), 11 April p.
11.
4 Speaker (1893), 11 February p. 153.
5 Fortnightly
Review (1898), July p. 125. The Review is here paraphrasing a passage
from Sir [Sir] Henry Taylor’s Autobiography (London: Chapman, Green
& Co., 1885), vol. 2 ch. 20 p. 272.
6 Hampshire Telegraph (1895),
13 July Supplement p. 11.
7 Fun (1897), 6 July p. 3.
8 Horse and
Hound (1898), 1 January p. 3.
9 London Journal (1904), 24 September p.
276.
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