Part One — As Everyone Knows, I Am Hilarious

As everyone knows, I am hilarious.

I am very funny. And I have had a lifelong interest in comedy.

I thought it best to establish those facts at the outset, lest there be any misunderstanding.

My earliest memories of comedy go back to the late 1950s, when I was a small boy watching television at my grandmother’s house.

There was Phil Silvers as Sergeant Bilko. There was Jack Benny. There were British comedians such as Charlie Drake and Tony Hancock. And there were the Marx Brothers.

Groucho, Harpo, Chico, Karl and Zeppo.

I was particularly fond of Karl, although his material was rather political.

There was something wonderful about discovering that words could be funny. Not merely the things people did, or the faces they pulled, but the words themselves. A sentence could begin in one direction and end somewhere entirely unexpected.

A misunderstanding could become a joke. A perfectly ordinary phrase could be turned upside down.

And sometimes the funniest thing was what wasn’t said.

I liked slapstick well enough, but it was verbal comedy that fascinated me.

I suppose I was becoming a wordsmith, although I doubt I would have described myself that way at the time.

Indeed, having now described myself as a wordsmith, I find myself struggling to think of any words.

Comedy was everywhere on television, but it came from several different traditions. American sitcoms, British variety performers, old films, radio comedians and the increasingly familiar television personalities all competed for our attention.

There was The Dick Van Dyke Show. There was Bewitched. There were the old Marx Brothers films, which seemed to belong to another age but were still extraordinarily funny.

And behind much of British television comedy lay an older world of music halls, variety theatres and touring entertainers.

A comedian might spend years travelling from Sunderland to Norwich to Bradford, delivering essentially the same ten-minute routine to audiences who might not have heard it since the previous year.

That was perfectly sensible when entertainment was local and temporary.

Television changed everything.

A joke delivered to a few hundred people in a theatre could now be heard by millions on the same evening. A routine that might once have lasted a comedian for years could become familiar almost overnight.

Television didn’t merely give comedians a bigger audience. It changed the nature of their work.

Some adapted brilliantly. Others found that their familiar routines were becoming rather too familiar.

And a new generation was waiting in the wings.

But before we get to them, we need to spend a little time with the old variety performers.

You lucky people!

To be continued.