Funny Ha Ha

In 1967, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Marty Feldman, Graham Chapman, and John Cleese wrote and performed a sketch that has since spawned a plethora of copycat gags. ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ features the eponymous characters swilling port and chomping cigars, bragging about how miserable their childhoods were and outdoing each other with increasingly absurd boasts: “A hundred and fifty of us had to live in a small shoebox in middle of t’road”; “A cardboard shoebox? You were lucky.” The cardinal sin that the four characters commit is to ignore the key British virtue of understatement: the irony — another British trait — is that they are boasting not about how successful they have become (as, say, four Texan oil millionaires might), but about how little they once had. One form of humour that the British have esteemed for centuries is wordplay. We love playing with language, from Spoonerisms to crossword clues; malapropisms to double entendres; Cockney rhyming slang to the tortuous puns in Christmas crackers. It helps that English is a strapping mongrel of a language, with roughly twice the vocabulary of an etymologically ‘purer’ language, and it is fertile ground for wordsmiths of a mischievously humorous persuasion. Shakespeare, for example, relished a good pun. In the final scene of The Merchant of Venice, Gratiano threatens to “mar the young clerk’s pen”, then vows “while I live I’ll fear no other thing / So sore as keeping safe Nerissa’s ring”. In Elizabethan English, the words “pen” and “ring” had decidedly anatomical alter egos: the Bard, like all great comic writers, knew his audience. Bawdy English wordplay predates even Shakespeare — witness Chaucer’s Wife of Bath — and it is alive and well. Take I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue, the ‘antidote to panel games’ that has been part of the BBC’s radio schedules since 1972. A (wholly fictional) character in the show is the scorer, Samantha, whose exploits are related by the host — originally Humphrey Lyttelton, now Jack Dee — in blithely deadpan fashion. For example (and bear in mind that this is taken from a daytime broadcast on the somewhat staid Radio 4): “Samantha has to leave now as she’s hosting a traditional Cockney music-and-dance night with a pearly king and queen at a nearby pub. All the locals are saying they can’t wait to see her knees up round the King’s Head.”

The deadpan delivery here is vital. The audience can snigger, but the host needs to keep a straight face, or the innocent reading of the line is lost. Deadpan and the double entendre are comic techniques forged in the furnace of censorship; from 1737 until 1968, the Lord Chamberlain could close down a theatre or a music hall with one thump of his white staff. Music hall comic Max Miller — ‘The Cheeky Chappie’, a huge star in the 1930s and 1940s — was a master of the double entendre. When, inevitably, his audience started sniggering, he would chide them: “You wicked lot! You’re the sort of people who get me a bad name!” Sailing close to the wind was Miller’s roaringly successful stock-in-trade. Where, you might ask, did women fit into our national sense of humour? The answer, until the 1980s, was that they didn’t. If women appeared in comedy at all, it was as unflattering stereotypes: dolly birds and mothers-in-law, battleaxes and drudges. The satires and spoofs of two female double acts — Victoria Wood and Julie Walters, then Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders — proved that women could be just as adept as men at making us laugh, and the way was paved for Jo Brand, Ruby Wax, Caroline Aherne and many others. Fans of British humour are not confined to these shores, moreover. John Cleese recalls that when he and Michael Palin were due to perform Monty Python’s ‘Dead Parrot’ sketch on NBC’s Saturday Night Live, they couldn’t remember their lines, and considered stopping a passer-by “since everyone seemed to have it memorised”. And the line, “He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy”, from Monty Python’s Life of Brian, frequently tops polls of the funniest lines in cinema history.

Some of our comic exports, however, are more puzzling. Take the curious affair of the drunken butler. Every New Year’s Eve, millions of Germans and Scandinavians ritually watch a 10-minute comedy sketch called ‘Dinner for One’. Filmed in 1963, it features a birthday dinner party with imaginary guests, hosted by the 90 year-old Miss Sophie and attended by her butler, James, who becomes increasingly drunk as the dinner progresses. As Miss Sophie tells him to serve each course, he asks: “Same procedure as last year, Madam?” Each time, she replies: “Same procedure as every year, James.” Finally, as Miss Sophie announces she is retiring to bed, the butler lurches behind her up the stairs. They repeat their ‘procedure’ exchange and, with a sly wink to the audience, James says: “Well, I’ll do my very best.” But the ‘Dinner for One’ sketch remains more or less unknown in Britain. Various reasons have been advanced for this, including the notion we are so obsessed with class that we find it uncomfortably subversive.

This, of course, is palpable nonsense, as we can see from the richly comic relationship between Mainwaring and Wilson: the real mystery is why, to this day, this whiskery (if faintly amusing) sketch enjoys such lasting, even cult, popularity overseas. As festive viewing goes, it does at least have the virtue of being 164 minutes shorter than The Sound of Music. So what of ‘British’ humour today? Was it the product of a simpler age than our own, now vanished, along with music halls and end-of-the-pier variety shows, Norman Wisdom films and seaside postcards? The cloth of modern, multicultural Britain is woven from so many different strands, how can it possibly represent a national sense of humour? But, happily, it does. The deadpan, self-deprecating comedic style of Romesh Ranganathan, the near-the-knuckle humour of Four Lions; the chutzpah of stand-up comedian Rosie Jones, who has cerebral palsy (“As you can tell from my voice, I suffer from being Northern”); the mockumentary wit of People Just Do Nothing... Our sense of humour may be drawn from a wider pool of talent than once it was, and we are not in wartime Walmington-on-Sea anymore, but its DNA is the same. As a national comfort blanket, as our own, irreverent commentary on the many travails of everyday life, poking at the pompous and delighting in the absurd, British humour can still be taken seriously — or not.