Making jokes is hard, and is certainly no laughing matter

The most valuable people on earth are those who can make you laugh. Laughter is the great restorative and rejuvenator. I’m surprised more philosophers have not written about it: only boring Bergson. In recent years the people who have made me laugh most — ‘shriek’, as Nancy Mitford called it — are Carla, Leonie and Taki. Nothing can beat the running gags of life with intimate friends. But I like the professionals, too, who sweat at it, and whose only object is, as they say in Leeds, to ‘prise open them grim jaws of yours with a crowbar’. Query: why are Yorkshiremen so reluctant to laugh? Eric Morecambe from North Lancs used to tell jokes on the point, such as ‘Ee, lad, thou wert so funny I almost laffed.’ Or ‘Ees quite good, this lad, isn’t ’ee?’ ‘Aye, if you like laffing.’

I have been rummaging about in my copy of the Domesday Book to find an entry under Berdic, who held lands in Gloucestershire and is described as joculator regis. A sturdy fellow, I imagine, since making William the Conqueror laugh cannot have been easy, Normans being the French equivalent of Yorkshiremen in this respect. All English mediaeval monarchs had their ‘fools’. Sir Thomas More had a household fool who figures in the Holbein family drawing and was called Henry Pattenson (a distant forebear of Sir Les Patterson, perhaps, assuming the family altered the spelling of their name when they emigrated to Melbourne circa 1840). During the last decade of Henry VIII’s life, his fool, Will Somers, was closer to him than anyone else. Elizabeth I had a clutch of creatures who drew wages and clothing allowances, including Robert Grene and his son, ‘Jack Grene our foole’, Thomasina, a dwarf or muliercula, ‘Ipolyta the Tartarian’, ‘a lytle Blackamore’ and a funny Italian called Monarcho.