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Where Does British Humour Come From?

Understatement, sarcasm and surrealism are all elements associated with Britain's brand of humour.

From Shakespeare's comedies to Billy Connolly's command of an audience, Gavin & Stacey's taste of Welsh whimsy to Derry Girls' earthy look at life in the 1990s, humour has been central to the history of storytelling across the UK for a long time.

But where does our humour actually come from, and is it tied to a quintessential idea of Britishness? We've asked one teacher of comedy to give us his thoughts.

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Monty Python is often cited as a perfect example of the British sense of humour

Can we pin it down?

People all over the world laugh, but we don't all find the same things funny. While some gags might seem universally hilarious (slipping on a banana peel, anyone?), humour normally depends on the cultural norms of a people, their history and shared experiences, as well as what the mechanics of their language allow.

If you've ever tried to crack a joke based on a pun or a play on words to a non-native English speaker, and the punchline was followed by deafening silence, you'll know what we mean.

But is it possible to point to a map and know for sure what will cause some LOLs over there?

Dr Ian Wilkie, a lecturer in performance at the University of Salford, explains: "Having taught younger American students, they take the British sense of humour to be Monty Python, by which they mean a sort-of slightly erring towards the surreal, very iconoclastic in terms of attacking the big targets, very silly."

However, he says that, while those traits can become shorthand for 'the British sense of humour', he doesn't think "that cuts the mustard."

'Port cities'

Dr Wilkie points out that there are already differences in popular humour in the four home nations. It diversifies even more between the major cities, making it difficult to pinpoint a blanket 'British' humour.

One example is the Scottish brash-with-a-twinkle style of Billy Connolly or the more gentle approach of his compatriot Susan Calman: "[Scottish people] like witty jokes, there is a lot of respect for learning and that it likes quite hard-hitting jokes, ones of mockery."

While he notes there are similarities between Glaswegian humour and that found in other port cities, such as Liverpool, that Scottish style might not necessarily translate into a Welsh sense of humour, or a broader English one.

Attending a comedy night, with many different acts, would show how difficult it is to categorise humour along geographical lines:"You may laugh at different aspects of their schtick, but it would then be difficult to say, 'well, there's a British sense of humour' because of the disparate kind of approaches and world views coming across."

Influences from overseas

Another element worth considering is how much the humour of other countries has influenced British comedy.

If you've sat and enjoyed the exaggerated characters in Fawlty Towers, the characters and scrapes they find themselves in reflect the sketches of the Commedia dell'arte, a form of theatre from 16th Century Italy. Among other elements, it involved a series of recognisable characters from all aspects of society engaged in witty dialogue.

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There are elements of Italy's commedia dell'arte in something like Fawlty Towers

Surrealism, long considered a staple of British humour – think Monty Python, Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer – was, as Dr Wilkie puts it, performed by: "Dadaists from countries that we may choose not to think of as particularly funny, such as Germany.

"They were doing surrealism to the nth degree, quite deliberately as a performative art, in the early part of the 20th Century. I think it's something we like to appropriate in a way and imagine that we're the custodians of it, but it's not culturally specific at all."

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Surreal comedy was hugely popular with Germany's Dadaist movement

When nostalgia meets humour

With Monty Python held up as a good example of leftfield humour from the UK, the Carry On… series of films suggests a national affection for a less sophisticated bawdiness loaded with double entendres.

While they did enjoy popularity outside the UK (Carry On Nurse ran in Los Angeles for more than two-and-a-half years on its initial release), Dr Wilkie doesn't see the humour contained within the 30 titles of the franchise as something that defines a nation. If anything, it's a comfort blanket.

Dr Wilkie explained: "Carry On… kind of made fun of itself in its day, it was already slightly self-consciously old-fashioned and seaside postcard, but people could enjoy it because they could say, all bets are off really, we're going to see something that's sexist, end of the pier and a bit silly and that was fine."

Image caption,

Surreal comedy was hugely popular with Germany's Dadaist movement

The jelly explanation

It's these different styles and presentations of comedy by British performers which Dr Wilkie believes make it impossible for an academic to point, with confidence, at various elements and state categorically that they alone make up the nation's famed sense of humour.

Image caption,

There is such variety in British comedy, it can be difficult for an academic to pin down one element which defines the national humour

"No, I wouldn't say there is a British sense of humour," he concluded. "I think the best you can hope for is some big, beacon terms (eg. Sarcasm, understatement, self-deprecation), that maybe, over a fair amount of time, might hold water.

"Comedy and humour is always so completely open to counter examples that you can never really pin anything down.

"It's like trying to nail jelly to a wall."

What Are Britain's Oldest Jokes?

Why do we whoop at wordplay? And why are we such suckers for double entendres? Here, Ian Hislop sets out why he's hunting down the earliest examples of enduring British humour in Ian Hislop's Oldest Jokes on BBC Radio 4.

When was the earliest recorded British joke? That was the question I wanted to answer in Ian Hislop's Oldest Jokes and I have been travelling around the country visiting libraries and museums and cathedrals searching for the first examples of British humour.

The "Bullion" Stone, Invergowrie, Angus. Now in the Museum of Scotland.

After interviewing academics and historians who directed me towards amusing Anglo-Saxons and medieval mirth-makers, I ended giving the award to the Venerable Bede (writing in the 8th Century) even though it was technically Pope Gregory who made the joke - and he made it in Latin. However, it was written in England by Bede and it was a pun on the word Angli meaning that the slaves that Gregory saw in the market place were both English (Angli) and looked like Angels (Angeli). It is of course a first-rate gag and Bede follows it up with two more zingers about Britain which I am not going to reveal since you will have to listen to the programme to hear the learned monk on a comic roll.

To be honest, it is quite difficult to find humour in these early periods since the Church controlled most of what was recorded for posterity. And jokes were not high on their agenda. Given that the Church believed that their flocks were in mortal peril and constantly under attack by the Devil, there was not much time for jollity or light-hearted banter. The secular authorities who wielded temporal power were also suspicious of jokes since they might easily become subversive and lead people to question their rulers' authority. So between them these two forces tended to erase the evidence of any humour.

"Laughter-smiths"

However, to my relief I discovered that if you know where to look – or you ask people who know on a BBC radio programme- there ARE jokes hidden away in the most unlikely places. And the types of jokes are exactly those that have continued to make us laugh for the next thousand years. There is a reassuring continuity in the material of what the Anglo-Saxons called "laughter smiths" (like blacksmiths but crafting jokes) and what comedians today are still doing jokes about in the 21st century.

So, I spoke to various present day "laughter smiths" about wordplay and double entendre and laughing at drunkenness and using animals to be funny about humans and making up comic songs and parodying people in authority and visual comedy and cartooning.

In the series we have panto stars comparing innuendo in Snow White with some rather rude rhymes in the Exeter Book of Riddles in the 10th century. There is Paul Whitehouse talking about his wonderfully incoherent comic drunk Rowley Birkin QC from the Fast Show and comparing it to Billy Connolly's routines about pubs in Glasgow and then going right back through the mists of time to the Bullion Stone, a 9th-century carving of a drunken Pictish Knight.

The ventriloquist Nina Conti and her Monkey are quizzed on anthropomorphism, and Monkey in particular gives philosophical answers that link him to the Medieval Bestiaries which describes Apes as designed for human amusement. Comic musicians Flo and Joan talk about their songs and Victoria Wood's classic songs and then move back to popular Restoration ballads. The charming "My thing is my own" may surprise a few listeners.

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The Anglo-Saxon word for "laughter-maker" suggests that jokes existed in medieval times.

And the links in the comic chain of British humour become more and more clear in the series. The 15th-century Heege Manuscript contains the only description of a live comedy performance from the period by a minstrel or a jester and records a series of comic routines. And guess what – it contains a parody sermon which is the obvious antecedent of all the music-hall silly vicars, and Ronnie Barker's vicar, and Alan Bennett's comedy sermon in Beyond the Fringe. It also has a description of A Killer Bunny that is straight out of Monty Python.

A medieval misericord

I have always thought that continuity in humour is immensely comforting and reminds us that we are all human and that through the ages we have tended to find the same things funny.

Mercy seats

And this guided journey into the comic past was a great way to confirm this. And our perception of early British history as simply a land of grim monasteries and endless bloodshed is not the whole picture.

In a chapel at New College I was shown some carvings which are hidden underneath the seats. They are called "misericords" and I had always thought they were something to do with misery. In fact, they are just the opposite. Misericord is the Latin for mercy seats and they are put there to allow you to rest and perch on them during a long service. But guess what? Underneath your bottom there are a series of immensely rude and grotesque visual jokes. Humour – it's always there somewhere.

What Is British Humour Anyway?

Anglophiles abroad love the British sense of humour – but what does that actually mean? In a recent review for the paper, Jonathan Coe takes a scalpel to the satire boom and its aftermath to find out what, if anything, sets British comedy apart. He joins Malin for a serious chat about comedy and its double-edged role in British political life.

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