Lords of laughter

What do the following comedians have in common? Morecambe and Wise, Ronnie Barker, Frankie Howerd, Bob Monkhouse, Peter Sellers.

They’re all dead, yes. But something else. None of them was knighted. Instead they were all made OBE, an honour Michael Winner once charmingly described as ‘what you get if you clean the toilets well at King’s Cross station’. Still, they did better than Les Dawson, Tony Hancock, Tommy Cooper and Peter Cook. Those four got nothing.

I find this curious. In most cases, at least. Hancock died a bit too young (suicide at 44), and accepting anything from the honours system would have turned Cook from satirist to court jester, in two ways a fool. But the rest? These men entertained millions, and yet the automata in charge of doling out titles apparently treated them as though they were cheery amateurs rather than masters of their art. Perhaps the automata, being automata, have no sense of humour, a suspicion reinforced by the knowledge that in 1999 they awarded the CBE to Lenny Henry.

When the New Year’s Honours were announced, no one expected a knighthood for Bruce Forsyth, Billy Connolly or Eric Sykes (all CBE), or a damehood for Victoria Wood (also CBE). Consider how rarely the higher honours go to comedians, and how often they go to dramatists and non-comic actors. Sir Arnold Wesker, Sir David Hare (establishment-savaging left-wing playwrights do love a title), Sir Ronald Harwood, Sir Peter Shaffer. Or Sir Ben Kingsley, Sir Anthony Hopkins, Sir Derek Jacobi, Sir Antony Sher…

Enough lists. We see the problem. The automata are evidently under a common intellectual delusion: that humour is frivolous, and that the serious must be taken seriously.

Where does this delusion come from? Presumably to the humourless, laughter seems an unworthy, trivial response to the miseries of life.