Bloganuary Day 7: okay, I think I’ve got this…

What makes you laugh?

Just as our musical preferences tend to become established by our late teens, so I think it is with our tastes in humour. As a teenager in the late sixties and early seventies, in comedy terms I grew up largely on a diet of BBC radio.

I’m sure this explains why the comedy that I appreciate most is stuff that involves punning and wordplay – the kind of humour that’s ideal for radio.

Surrealism – absurdity – also went down very well with me. My first introduction to that would have been The Goon Show. Later, I remember that the Sunday lunchtime comedy slot featured, in rotation, series such as ‘I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again’, ‘The Ken Dodd Show’ (Doddy’s humour, although usually thought of as quick-fire gagging, certainly had its weirdnesses at that time) and, towering above them all, ‘Round The Horne’. Much of this could certainly be classified as, at the very least, just plain daft.

I appreciate that little, if any, of this will mean a darned thing to non-Brits or, indeed, the youth of today. Trust me, though: have a dig around on Youtube for some of these shows; they have aged surprisingly well.

After my radio-based initiation into weird wordplay, there came a phenomenon that will be familiar to a much wider audience: Monty Python. First there were the TV sketch shows and then came the films. I still find most of their output hilarious, even though I could probably recite a lot of it verbatim. However, if there is one thing that Monty Python did that never fails to have me in stitches, it’s this: