If there was one phrase guaranteed to have an immediate chilling effect on my behaviour as a child, it was not the classic “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed” line, but a much crueller and more stinging put-down. “You’re overtired,” an adult would say, “and you’re showing off.”
Oh, how my cheeks would burn! The joy I had been taking in whatever it was I had been doing would evaporate from my whole being, replaced by utter humiliation and shame (it didn’t help that the adults in question seemed always to deploy this mortifying line in front of an audience). “Showing off”, I was taught, was a vice that must not be indulged in.
I was reminded of this particularly British aversion to showing off last week, during a ski trip. One friend had just taught herself how to take the long, diagonal ice-skating-esque glides required to move on flat snow, and was feeling, quite rightly, chuffed about it. “Look, look! I’m doing that ski-walking thing!” she said, before quickly apologising.
As far as I was concerned, she needn’t have said sorry. I love a good show-off. It pleases me greatly to see someone celebrating themselves openly and joyfully, with no sense of false modesty. There is a purity of motive to the show-off — we know exactly what they’re up to: delighting in themselves, and hoping we join in and delight in them too. I consider the act not just an invitation to compliment the other person, but to indulge in a spot of showing off myself (highly enjoyable).
Showing off is an expression of vulnerability, as well as a compliment to whoever is being shown off to: we only indulge in this behaviour with those we respect or care enough about to value a favourable opinion of us.
There is surely no clearer sign that showing off is not something to feel ashamed of than the fact that — as anyone with a pet will know — animals appear to do it. A study published in 2022 in PNAS, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, found that “in highly specific social conditions, wild chimpanzees, like humans, may use referential showing gestures to direct others’ attention to objects simply for the sake of sharing”.
“Simply for the sake of sharing” is a nice phrase: there is no ulterior motive in what the show-off does. Showing off is often lumped together with bragging, but it shouldn’t be. The bragger deliberately selects information to share about themselves that is intended to make the person they are bragging to feel small, jealous or insecure, whereas the show-off hopes — whether rightly or wrongly — that you are going to enjoy their showing off just as much as they are. Theirs is an innocent and spontaneous expression of joy in themselves.
Even worse than bragging, though, is smugness: that silent, self-satisfied sense of superiority that seems to just ooze out of some people.
Smugness is a characteristic that politicians should be particularly careful to guard against veering into — or at least giving the impression of doing so — as it often accompanies a fall. In the early 2000s, when then prime minister Tony Blair’s popularity was plummeting, it was his smugness that the public seemed most united in disliking: six in 10 Britons said Blair was smug in a 2002 YouGov poll. These days, when critics of Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer want to take a jab at him, it is often by accusing him of the same thing.
Similar criticisms have been made of Joe Biden’s vice-president Kamala Harris. This is a problem for the presidential team: the utter lack of moral grandstanding from the Democrats’ only current rival, Donald Trump — the product of his utter lack of a moral compass — makes him somewhat immune from accusations of smugness. (He is an undisputed class A braggart, however.)
Showing off might be preferable to bragging, but it is not a behaviour that all cultures are taught is socially acceptable: the British tend to feel far less comfortable than Americans when it comes to celebrating ourselves. Part of this is about a lack of self-confidence: in a 2015 YouGov study, just 16 per cent of Brits described themselves as “very confident”, compared with 35 per cent of Americans, while 18 per cent of Brits described themselves as “very funny”, relative to 31 per cent of Americans.
But part of it is to do with our repressed nature as a nation. “It is not that the Englishman can’t feel — it is that he is afraid to feel,” EM Forster wrote in 1926. “He has been taught at his public school that feeling is bad form. He must not express great joy or sorrow, or even open his mouth too wide when he talks.”
I was moved, recently, when a cousin of mine said the most difficult part about having lost both of her parents was that there was no longer anyone to show off to when she achieved something. We should take a leaf out of America’s book and get better not just at sharing our achievements, but also making the space for others to do the same.
jemima.kelly@ft.com