The British do not expect happiness. I had the impression, all the time that I lived there, that they do not want to be happy they want to be right.

Crisp contrasts two cultural priorities: the pursuit of personal contentment versus the pursuit of correctness—moral, social, or argumentative. The line suggests a national temperament he experienced as emotionally restrained and duty-bound, where being “right” (proper, principled, respectable, or winning the point) can matter more than feeling good. Coming from Crisp—who spent much of his life as a conspicuously nonconforming gay man in mid‑century England—the observation also reads as social critique: a society invested in propriety may police behavior and opinion so tightly that happiness becomes suspect or secondary. The humor sharpens the point: righteousness can become a substitute for joy.