Whatever happened to laughter?

About the daftest thing this year was a poll conducted by a TV Channel to find the ‘greatest stand-up comedian of all time’. Not the greatest now, or the greatest in UK, but the greatest of all time anywhere.

So who did they come up with?

Why the Big Yin, Billy Connolly!

Not Jack Benny. Not Bob Hope. Not Bob Monkhouse. Not Les Dawson. Not Tommy Cooper. Not Will Rogers. Not Ken Dodd, undoubtedly not just the best but the only truly funny man in Britain today.

Of the four runners-up I had never heard of three of them and the fourth was a fat, ugly female who is neither a stand-up nor remotely funny.

And being a devotee of schadenfreude, I was tickled when he flounced off stage twice in one week after being heckled.

The Big Yin was funny 40 years ago. Now his act consists of poncing about on stage telling old gags and the f-word. He is about as funny as genital herpes.

One lesson I have learnt about blogging is that there is definitely a humour deficit. I wrote one that was an account of some of the funny things that had happened in my career. Immediately I got a comment from an ancient harridan who would be sacred in India which was nowt but bile and abuse. I took it down to deny her the satisfaction of reading her own nastiness.

I blogged the effable Rod Liddle’s piece in the Speccie about the  conversation between Barack Obama and the French dwarf.

The few comments variously described it as ‘nasty, vicious gossip’ etc, and I achieved the distinction of having it ‘moderated’ i.e. taken down by the censors. What’s more, the Speccie also took it down, although, of course, it had long since been circulated in hard copy.

So I scored a double whammy there!

‘Whatever happened to laughter? There used to be so much of it about’.