Politics & Power Quote by Ronald Knox

American comedy, Knox suggests, doesn’t just tolerate ignorance; it performs it. “Pose” is the loaded word here: a deliberate mask, a cultivated drawl of misspelling and malapropism that signals, paradoxically, competence. The joke is that the speaker is “too plain” for book learning while demonstrating razor timing, social perception, and rhetorical control. Illiteracy becomes a costume the comic can put on to disarm an audience, dodge accusations of pretension, and take shots at power with plausible deniability: I’m just a rube, don’t mind me.

Knox is writing as an English cleric and man of letters, so the barb carries class and cultural friction. Early-20th-century America was busy inventing mass entertainment - vaudeville, radio, newspaper strips - where legibility and polish were less valuable than immediacy and voice. A “pose of illiteracy” fits a democratic marketplace: you win by sounding like everybody, or at least like everybody’s neighbor. It’s also a stealth critique of American anti-intellectualism, the suspicion that education is a kind of vanity. If the crowd wants authenticity, the comic offers authenticity-as-theater.

There’s irony in Knox himself making a highly literate claim about illiteracy. He’s half-admiring the technique, half mourning what it implies: that in America, wit often has to launder itself through self-deprecation before it’s allowed to be sharp.