How to Paralyze Someone with Laughter A British expatriate searches for his Anglo-Saxon identity in the comedies of yesteryear.

It was my eighty-six-year-old mother who put her finger on it.

“I’m not surprised you feel a bit lost and have trouble making friends,” she said. “I imagine people here are a bit wary of you. You’re not like everybody else, are you? Your accent isn’t right. You’re just a little … strange.”

Two years before, in 2021, I had returned to live in England after ten years in Argentina and twenty years in the United States, the latter a country of which I had proudly become a citizen. My time away from the UK had mangled my accent upon my return, at least judging by the occasional question if I was a Kiwi or an Aussie. But that was not all I had lost, I was to learn.

English by birth, I was raised in a southern town renowned for its conservative residents writing letters to the national press and signing them “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.” At the ripe old age of sixty, I thought I knew what I was in for, that I would fit right in. Dare say it, even be welcomed back into the fold.

Not quite.

Over the last two years I have realized that all the unspoken rules that govern social conduct in this country, that were once second nature to me, were no longer at my beck and call. When I tried to make small talk, people stared at me. When I went to introduce myself in social gatherings and offer my first name with the confident expectation of reciprocation, people looked at me aghast at my social faux-pas and quietly sidled away like disdainful crabs. Which was when I remembered a cardinal rule: Never offer your name unless asked.

There were a few moments when I thought I had made a breakthrough. Standing on a street corner in my newly adopted English southeast coast seaside town while waiting for workers digging up the pavement—sidewalk—to let me pass, I exchanged pleasantries with a stranger about the weather.

“Looks like it might rain,” I said, glancing at dark clouds, always a safe gambit to commence conversational negotiations.

“Chance would be a fine thing,” he muttered.

And so he and I danced for a few minutes about drought and sun, rain and shine, the curious English obsession with the weather so deeply coded with the rigidity of the ages that even to a foreigner like myself—is that really what I was?—it felt like sinking into a warm, familiar bath. I laughed that disillusioned, English-weather-jaded chortle as we parted–a key rule of social behavior in English life is never to be earnest–but glancing back for a moment at his retreating back, wondered just how good a performance I had given.

My mother waited expectantly for me to respond to her jab at my national identity. I thought she was ribbing me–utterly unlike her but at that point I was clutching at straws–and started laughing.

“Good god, Stephen,” she said. “This isn’t funny. I don’t recognize you. Even your sense of humor isn’t …” she gave a tiny shrug, “ours.”

Now that hurt. What English person does not pride himself on his sense of humor? But since it was my mother, I inevitably fell back into doubt. Had something happened to my sense of humor? After twenty years working as a social issues and criminal justice reporter, hanging out with people on both sides of the law, I had developed an appreciation for gallows humor. Did I still understand the English humor I had been marinated in for the first thirty-six years of my existence?

My question was underscored by King Charles III. He reflected in an October 2023 speech that, “The British sense of humor is world-renowned. It is not what we do. It is who we are,” he said. “Our ability to laugh at ourselves is one of our great national characteristics.”

… who we are …

It is not that I wanted to be accepted. I have always taken a certain pride in being an outsider. Rather it was that I wanted to understand why I felt so disconnected from my roots. Might this be a way of coming to terms with feeling so unmoored from my birth country: journeying on a cultural tugboat up the largely English comedy river in search of the TV shows and comedians that had once influenced and shaped me? If I dipped my toe in the dimly remembered comedies of my childhood and youth, would I discover who I once had been?

The greatest humor in the world?

In Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behavior (Hodder & Stoughton, 2005), Kate Fox argues that “there’s an awful lot of guff talked about the English sense of humor, including many patriotic attempts to prove that our sense of humor is somehow unique and superior to everyone’s else’s.” After conducting her pop-anthropological study of the English, she found “the real ‘defining characteristic’ is the value we put on humor (…) in English culture and social interactions.” Humor threads through every conversation, however slight. “We can barely manage to say ‘hello’ or comment on the weather without somehow contriving to make a bit of a joke of it, and most English conversations will involve at least some degree of banter, teasing, irony, understatement, humorous self-deprecation, mockery or just silliness,” she wrote. It is innate to the English to the point where, “we cannot switch it off.”

Our sense of humor is also utterly personal. My love for scatological and toilet humor is certainly not for everyone. When on a whim I go off on an absurd flight of fantasy around the simple act of one’s daily constitutional to my younger brothers, I can usually depend on “corpsing” them–the theatrical no-no where a performer unintentionally or not paralyzes another with laughter.

My eldest daughter shares my passion for such humor, in particular the art of belching, something that my wife and youngest daughter find distasteful and not in the least funny, resulting in an intervention at dinner one night after my eldest belched out her appreciation of Coca-Cola. My youngest chastised me for having cultivated and let loose this stomach-gas Godzilla on the world.

“She’s only doing it because you do it,” she said angrily.

“We sow the seeds and gather,” ran the old English hymn, although perhaps the author had not had gastro-intestinal gas in mind when they penned that classic.

Writer and journalist David Stubbs, who wrote Different Times: A History of British Comedy (Faber, 2023), argued that “One of the pleasures of English comedy is a love of the language. Its idioms, its soaring elegance, its playful turns of phrase, its thudding bathos, its profanity, its puncturing and piss-taking.”

Such melodic raptures led to a sense of humor-superiority, comparable to the pride in isolation (and defiance) that bore the Blitz spirit. As Stubbs wrote, “It can feel at times like the British take refuge in the assumption that, as in 1940, we stand alone, sole bearers of humor, evidence of our stoicism or pluck in the face of whatever life bombards us with.”

Stuffy old England no more

The coastal town I live in is part of a string of seaside resorts known affectionately as “God’s waiting room,” towns where retirees, typically wealthy and conservative, spend their last years. This curious corner of England, with its piers and fish ’n’ chips, its stony beaches, and bold, white cliffs, features prominently in British comedy history, particularly in the first show I decided to return to. The Goon Show (1951-1960) was a BBC radio series I listened to as a teenager that marked a before and after in innovative British comedy.

Originally called Crazy People, the core group of The Goon Show were Spike Milligan, who wrote most of the scripts, comedians Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe (along with writer and comedian Michael Bentine in the first series). Its impact on comedy rippled through the rest of the twentieth century, opening the doors not only for the equally if not more influential icon of comedic surrealism, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, but also what was called “alternative comedy” in the 1980s, a movement that for a while seemed to feed on the flames of both Milligan’s anarchic vision and the working-class rage of punk.

Milligan said he and Sellers saw themselves as “comic Bolsheviks. We wanted to destroy all that went before in order to create something totally new.” With Monty Python and Fawlty Towers John Cleese thought they succeeded. “The Goon Show challenged the stuffiness (of England) with joy. They created a sense of liberation which went beyond laughter.”

While influences linked to Milligan’s mercurial genius ranged from Aristophanes and the Marx Brothers to Tom and Jerry cartoons and the English music halls his biographer, Humphrey Carpenter, pointed to Edward Lear and his nonsense poems and Lewis Carroll and Alice in Wonderland. Carroll for supplying “models of logic run wild,” and Lear for the brutal and varied deaths of his characters. And then there was war trauma, Milligan having been wounded by artillery fire and hospitalized for shell shock. His scripts were littered with the whistle of falling bombs, and the maiming and killing of characters who bounced back to life the following week.

“The Dreaded Batter Pudding Hurler (of Bexhill-on-Sea),” series 5 episode 3, is a good example of some of Milligan’s obsessions. He was stationed at Bexhill-on-Sea during the war and set the story there of an anonymous assailant pursuing the elderly Minnie Bannister (Milligan) and Henry Crun (Sellers) over the cliffs with lumps of freshly cooked batter. Inspector Neddie Seagoon (Secombe) attempted to hunt the fiend down. The first assault upon poor Minnie (3:18-7:17) captures perfectly Milligan’s obsessions.

As Carpenter noted, what made The Goon Show so pleasurable, beyond the violent, surreal chaos and anti-authoritarianism, was the humanity of their best characters, such as Milligan’s Eccles and Sellers’ Bluebottle.

Sellers’s reading of Milligan’s description of Eccles gives a flavor of the character. Sellers drew upon a personal encounter to create Bluebottle. Here an American listens to a classic Eccles and Bluebottle sketch.

After weeks of listening to Goon Show episodes on a Radio 4 podcast, I only came to realize just how much The Goons had invaded my consciousness while attempting to cross a street in my hometown, only to have to jump back as a police car roared by. Unbidden, the nasal squeak of a Bluebottle catchphrase sprung to my lips. “You rotten swine, you.”

Locked in a dressing room

In my quest to understand the comedy that had influenced my sense of humor, I could not ignore Welsh comic Tommy Cooper. During the 1960s and 1970s the masterful magician who made comic gold out of pretending to be the opposite was a bedrock of British comedy. My father loved him as did all our fathers it felt like. A friend and fellow writer recalled how her policeman father only had to clap eyes on Cooper’s multi-story carpark of a face on TV for him to corpse.

Cooper’s catchphrase was “Just like that,” but his routines were anything but. With his imposing, ungainly build, his heavy, rubber lips and wide eyes, and the Frankenstein brow crowned by his trademark fez, what his massive hands could do with magic routines was never less than genius. Much like his idol, comic and juggling genius W.C. Fields, Cooper went through his magic routines as if he were the shambolic fool that as a child he most certainly had been when he had unintentionally made workers at a shipyard canteen cry with laughter at his ineptitude at magic. It was a lesson he never forgot.

Right from the opening of his stage act, you knew you were in safe, if unpredictable comedic hands. Cooper friend, fellow comic and writer Barry Took recalled Cooper’s opening act as stunningly original. The house band would play his signature tune “The Sheikh of Araby,” and he would not come on. “I repeat, he wouldn’t come on,” Took wrote. “After a deathless pause, the audience would hear the disembodied voice of Cooper muttering that he was locked in his dressing room.” He was on a mic behind the curtain. “It was one of the funniest openings to an act I’ve ever seen,” Took wrote.

His comedic peers were in awe of him, even if his many foibles irritated them. “The bugger just has to walk on [stage] and they laugh—I have to start working,” comedian Eric Morecambe told Took.

His two-line jokes and one-liners were known as Cooperisms. Many of his jokes, despite the way he seemed to idly throw them aside almost before he reached the punchline, have been voted some of the best jokes in comedy, with thirteen of them voted in the top 50 “funniest jokes of all time” in one poll. When you read one of his jokes, you can hear his voice in the phrasing, right down to the beat: “I said to the gym instructor: ‘Can you teach me to do the splits?’ He said: ‘How flexible are you?’ I said: ‘I can’t make Tuesdays’.”

Stubbs called Cooper an “un-man”–a sobriquet he also extended to other comedians of the period, such as Les Dawson and Ken Dodd–meaning a male performer who in some sense never grew up. Separate from the world, unencumbered by its daily dramas and needs, by issues of justice and hunger, all that mattered to performers like Cooper was the act, the applause, the love the audience showered on him. Here is the magic cloak trick, one of his classic routines.

Dr. Louise Peacock, who teaches popular performance at Montfort University in Leicester, admired his physical comedy, “the way that he’s making mistakes with the magic, and the kind of laugh that he has and the gestures he uses.” His comedy, she said, “is much more about being in the long haul because of the number of callbacks and references back to material that he makes. He’ll set something up and 10 minutes later he’ll return to it.”

Like a pedal bin. He would spy it on the stage, minding its own business. He would sidle over to examine it, circle it, curious, then puzzled, then bemused. He would gently nudge the pedal down, his face lighting up with joy as the lid popped open.  As the act continued, he would return to the bin, “sometimes with his back to it, sometimes sneaking up on it to surprise it,” Took wrote.

In the middle of his magic cloak act in April 1984, televised live on ITV’s Live from Her Majesty’s, Cooper abruptly slumped to the floor against the curtain. At first the audience thought it was part of the act, but then he fell backwards and comrades ran to his aid. He died of a heart attack, at age sixty-three.

For Stubbs, that children cannot see Tommy Cooper today in a world where the endless diet of streaming content allows nothing older than a year or two to enter their lives, “is a great sadness.”

Stiff upper lip jingoism or anti-colonial lampoon?

In the 1970s, Stubbs argued, comedy may well have helped change the country’s political culture thanks to what he felt was an often latent reactionary politics in the English psyche.

At first blush, the Carry On film series, one of the more beloved institutions of comedy that I grew up with, bore little relation to the world of politics. Between 1958 and 1992, thirty-one Carry On films were made with largely the same cast and the same formula of bad puns and double-entendres, some of which have not aged well, particularly when it came to sexism and racism.

As a cross-section of the series’ reliance on puns, quips, and low-brow humor the following five jokes offer some insight.

Carry On Up the Khyber (1968) is regarded as probably the best of the series, in part for its lampooning of Britain’s colonial past. In this scene, Major Sydney Ruff-Diamond (Carry On stalwart Sid James), Captain Keene (Roy Castle) and a few civilians try to maintain decorum in northwestern India as the Khasi of Kalabar’s loyal army of burpers shell their building while they are served dinner (Carry On scriptwriters never found a bad pun they did not like).

But if I thought that this scene mocked everything from military etiquette and colonial arrogance to then-recently released films about Britain’s colonial “adventures,” such as Zulu (1964) and Khartoum (1966), Stubbs viewed it differently. “I think that’s meant actually to be a tribute to the stiff upper lip.”

Stubbs pointed to No. 22 in the Carry On canon, 1971’s Carry On at Your Convenience (convenience as a noun in British English is one of the many words for the restroom) as underscoring what he called “permissive reactionary” politics. The film was set at toilet manufacturers, W C Boggs & Son, (a bog being slang for the toilet), and the battles of its employees to push back against their trade union rep’s insistence they go on strike. Since much of the Carry On bedrock audience was working class, its poor showing at the UK box office was attributed to its blatant anti-trade unionism. Yet similar political sentiments could also be found on TV with impersonators like Mike Yarwood, who parodied Arthur Scargill, then-leader of the Yorkshire mine workers and Len Murray, leader of the Trades Union Congress. Stubbs felt that such comedy, “helped pave the way for Thatcherism, which I think was really born out of a sense that the unions had gone too far. And nothing has changed since Thatcher came in. It’s been a permanent shift to the right.”

One aspect of Carry On’s humor, however, remained golden, at least for the cast of The Great British Bake Off. Its two judges and two comic hosts often display a passion for double-entendre that would have made Carry On actors’ toes curl. One example in September 2023 made the national UK press, when judges Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith, and comic Alison Hammond made gentle, eye-watering “fun” of a contestant’s unfortunately dry cake in the shape of a beaver.

Salt ’n’ vinegar with your fish ’n’ chips?

While some shows when you return to them after decades puzzle you as to why you ever felt they were funny, Dad’s Army, about a platoon of volunteer Home Guard stationed in the fictional Walmington-on-Sea during the Second World War, retained its ability to corpse me, as it does apparently the nation. Mark Lawson in The Guardian called it “the BBC’s single most durably valuable programme.” It started in 1968, ended its run in 1977, but by 2018, “repeats still top the BBC Two ratings.”

As journalist and That’ll Be the Day scriptwriter Ray Connolly wrote about the series, co-creators Jimmy Perry and David Croft’s genius as writers was to take “the very essence of Britishness (class, a sense of history and small-town self-importance) and by setting it in the heightened atmosphere of wartime held a mirror up to national attitudes and characteristics which prevail eternally.”

In “The Deadly Attachment,” season 6 episode 1, Captain Mainwaring (played by Arthur Lowe) and his men guard a captured German U-boat crew (one of the very few times they faced the enemy). The U-boat commander keeps a list of perceived violations of the Geneva Convention. Later in this scene, he attempts to exert influence on how his fish ’n’ chips should be prepared.

Such was Dad’s Army’s perceived alignment with the British psyche—its constant presence “like an old fort abutting a small-town shopping precinct,” Stubbs wrote—it was perhaps inevitable that during the political mud-slinging in the 2010s in the runup to the referendum over Brexit, “Leavers” would claim it as a symbol of how Britain can go-it-alone without Europe, while “Remainers” criticized the BBC for not pulling its repeats, claiming its tea-cozy nostalgia for “The War” convinced voters to back those demanding to leave the European Union.

Stubbs quoted Perry in a 2009 article in The Times. “It does worry me that many young people today aren’t interested in the wider issues connected with Europe,” he said. “For example, I think anyone who lived during the war appreciates the European Union, if only because it’s much better to be trading with each other than blowing each other’s heads off.” As it happened, Stubbs continued, “it was the younger generation who voted for Remain in droves, who understood all too well what generations of Dad’s Army watchers preceding them failed to–but not its co-creator.”

“Going for an English”

As a callow youth working his first job at a trade magazine located just off Fleet Street, part of my friends’ drinking culture was to go for a late-night curry. That involved after a bout of beer-swilling, ordering lots of curries in an Indian restaurant, then doing “a runner” without paying the bill, an act I hasten to add I never took part in, if only because I knew I would probably not make it to the door without either collapsing in laughter or throwing up.

That memory came back to me when I started watching Goodness Gracious Me. In the world of the late twentieth century, English comedy still dominated by white males in search of themselves, the emergence of voices of color, of members of minority communities guiding their own visions of humor was still painfully lacking.

Goodness Gracious Me was one of the first shows to look at life through the eyes and the words of British Asians. I listened to its radio show in the early nineties before I moved abroad. It then ran on TV from 1998 to 2001. Both Stubbs and Peacock lauded it as a comedy sketch series that did what comedy does best: hold up a mirror to society to see for itself its flaws, foibles, and what Stubbs called “fishbones,” (homophobia, sexism, racism) and laugh uneasily in the process.

“It reverses assumptions, particularly around race and the stereotypes and expectations that sit with being Asian or being White British, taking in what it means to be Asian and British or what it means to be more British,” Peacock said.

Through its sketches and satire, Goodness Gracious Me explored the integration of British and Asian cultures. It nailed its colors to the wall in the first season, as in this skit where a group of employees at the Indian Broadcasting Company criticize their English minority affairs employee for demanding more measured coverage of his community.

Peacock highlighted one of their most famous skits, “Going for an English,” series 1 part 1, where a group in Bombay go to an English restaurant, “in the same way that English people go to a “curry house” in the UK. It reverses all the expectations about the stupid things that Brits do when they’re ordering Indian food.” In the skit, the diners laugh at the English waiter, mock his culture, make gauche requests for food, and end up in a fight. “Going for an English” holds up an uncomfortable mirror to every White viewer who has ever had a curry and insulted, intentionally or not, the staff.  It is a reminder of how powerful comedy can be to make us look deeper at our own world.

“That’s a really, really clever show,” Peacock said.

A bolt for the door

Within the fabric of great comedy so often lies threads of melancholy. It is part of the genius of the son’s endless attempts in the 1960s Steptoe and Son’s to escape his father and his own destiny in the rag-and-bone trade to be forever caught there, of the melancholy horror of the ending of Blackadder Goes Forth as the scatalogically-obsessed hero and his cohort go “over the top” into a machine-gun oblivion, and it is at the very heart of Bruce Robinson’s beloved cult study of artistic failure and embitterment, the disillusion of friendships and deep-heat ointment in the film, Withnail and I.

The story of two “resting actors,” in 1960s Camden Town, London, both seemingly stuck in an alcoholic and drug-fueled tailspin of despair at their lack of work, is full of bon mots, quotable lines (“We want the finest wines available to humanity. We want them here, and we want them now!”), as well as veering into uncomfortable and even offensive gay stereotypes with Withnail’s predatory Uncle Monty. And yet at the core of its vision of lives spiderweb-caught in a world of hangovers, dingy bedsits, and invective-spewing rebellion against failure that searches desperately for an escape, lies the tenderness of two young men’s friendship. It always reminds me of a doomed, drunken marathon I took with my soon-to-be-married friend Simon (where are you?) at university, as we proclaimed our friendship through the vapors of whiskey, striding through the countryside towards dawn’s first light and some Valhalla of male friendship, only to give up and return to our decidedly ordinary and separate fates.

Which is perhaps why it is the ending that has haunted me the most, as a sober and clean-cut Marwood (Paul McGann), departing for a part in a production of RC Sherriff’s Journey’s End, leaves a drunk and melancholy Withnail (Richard E. Grant) in the rain by a suitably dismal zoo. Withnail declaims to the camera with an angst-fueled if desolate fire over a wrought-iron fence a soliloquy from Hamlet—“What a piece of work is a man … ”—but halfway through Robinson cuts to a long shot of him drunkenly reciting as a rain-bedraggled wolf looks on. You do not know whether to laugh or cry.

As the film ended after yet another viewing, I was left to ponder whether this tale of, as one writer put it, “endings” was also an end for my meanderings through my comedic past. After this potpourri of comedy, I still had not figured out if my mother’s surgical strike had exposed a singular truth, or missed its target. And did it even matter?

So I went in search of wisdom from one of my cousin’s husbands, eighty-year-old Frank Rodens. He and his wife met at a London dance hall back in the early 1950s and ever since then she has been struck at his natural talent for joke-telling. One evening on top of a London bus, Frank Rodens and a stranger they had run into at the pub threw one-liners at each other, with Rodens always coming out ahead.

We met up over a fry-up—fried eggs, bacon, sausage, beans, fried toast, mushrooms—to watch a football match on TV, although Rodens is partially blind and had to rely on the commentators.

The game was a few minutes old and he looked up from his artery-clogging breakfast to offer an opinion in his gentle, streets-at-dusk north London brogue.

“Three minutes in.”

He waited a beat. “No goals yet.”

Another beat.

“Not much of a match.”

Born and raised on “The Callie,” as locals call the north London to central London thoroughfare, Rodens grew up in a part of London where the memory of music hall star Marie Lloyd was still vivid, both for her love of innuendo and her droll wit, for which, he said, she ran into problems. One of her songs was “She Sits Among the Cabbages and Peas.” That was banned, he said, so she changed it to, “I Sits Among the Cabbages and Leeks.”

Would I ever aspire to such heights of wordplay I wondered aloud. Rodens kindly did not answer.

“I call my dog Carpenter,” he said.

I asked why.

“I kicked him up the arse and he made a bolt for the door.”

He has that cheeky English sense of humor that cannot resist a prank or teasing. “I went into (the UK book chain) Waterstones and asked if they had any books on shelves,” he told me. “They thought about it for a moment and then it clicked. ‘Very funny,’ they said.”

“Where did your sense of humor come from?” I asked.

He cited watching Groucho Marx at the Saturday morning cinema. Who else I asked? “Your mom or your dad?”

He paused for a second, as if savoring his response. “Well, I haven’t found it yet.”

I sat back. Damn, I thought, there is hope for me yet.