What makes you laugh?
Mostly I laugh at what has no agenda and is mainly silly. Always punching up, heavy on the puns and wordplay with a side order of deserved frustration.
This will be why I love Taskmaster, Morecambe & Wise, Bob Mortimer, Airplane!, Ghosts, Eddie Izzard, Monty Python and Stewart Lee.
You could include Terry Pratchett, though the elevated level of silly hides sharp commentary and anger.
An inherited sense of humour
I think my sense of humour has remained unchanged since I was a teenager. My dad had a wicked sense of humour, one that four of the five of us1 have inherited. One of my fondest memories is when four of us were sitting at the dining room table with our parents. Someone said something (wish I could remember what) which set dad and three of us off in fits of laughter. My oldest sister had to leave the room. Mum and other child were left bemused.
To get some flavour of his sense of humour, his favourite joke was the Headstone joke.
Does time change a sense of humour?
Things I enjoyed in the 80s are still funny. Red Dwarf, the film Clue, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, the Morecambe & Wise Andrew Preview sketch…
The other day I went down a bit of a rabbithole about George Formby. This triggered the memory of the revelation that Formby – not Bob Dylan – is the original author of Subterranean Homesick Blues. This is from The Day Today, broadcast in 1994, where we also saw Alan Partridge for the first time.
A lot of this is skewed towards older stuff, but that’s not to say there’s nothing new I like. We saw Bill Bailey last year2 and Mrs S was in pain laughing at the ‘cappuccino in Amsterdam’ story.
To finish, here’s an extended dose of silly from Andrew O’Neill in 2023.
If you need the Baker Street joke explained, leave a comment.
- I’m the third of five children. ↩︎
- We’ve seen him at least four times, first time in 1991, as part of the double act The Rubber Bishops. ↩︎
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