50 min listen
My guest in this week's Book Club is Joel Morris, an award-winning comedy writer whose credits run from co-creating Philomena Cunk to writing gags for Viz and punching up the script for Paddington 2. In his new book Be Funny Or Die, he sets out to analyse how and why comedy works. He tells me why there are only three keys on the clown keyboard, what laughter does for us in neurological terms, and why Laurel and Hardy could get away with anything.
Alan Partridge is back, and this time he’s restoring a lighthouse. The third volume of the Norfolk microstar’s faux autobiography is a meticulous parody of the celebrity-in-search-of-a-televisable gimmick genre, blending fan-friendly, behind-the-scenes tales of his more recent public adventures (This Time, Scissored Isle, From the Oasthouse) with a classic midlife lurch for purpose, part Griff Rhys-Jones rescuing threatened buildings, part Clarkson’s Farm. Though Steve Coogan’s id-slaying monster started out as a media satire, Alan Partridge has become a vital national mirror in which middle-aged, middle English, middleweight, middlebrow man (let us call him Homo Partridgensis) can watch himself weather and crumble.
The British sense of humour is a source of power, soft and otherwise. The anthropologist Kate Fox observed that our national motto should be ‘Oh, come off it’, and a patriotic raised eyebrow has been cited as our chief defence against demagogues. We see ourselves through a comic lens, a nation of Delboys and Mainwarings, Brents and Leadbetters, Gavins and Staceys. But despite comedy being as central to British culture as music, books on it have few equivalents to Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming (on punk), Rob Young’s Electric Eden (folk rock) or Simon Reynolds’s Energy Flash (rave). A nice fat volume about our national comic self-image by an astute music writer is exactly what the funny business needs.
