A magnificent malt worthy of Burns

The bleak midwinter. Actually, since I wallowed in curmudgeonly complaints about dreich days, everything has improved. Clear blue skies, pleasing sunsets: perfect shooting weather. It is cold, admittedly, but that holds no terrors for those of us well insulated. The rest can wrap up. At least pro tem, we have moved to midwinter spring.

In that spirit, over a pre-Burns supper, a few merry gentlemen were discussing humorous verse. Which is the funniest poem in English? A million years ago, when I was slogging through ‘The Knight’s Tale’, a school-fellow alerted the class to ‘The Miller’s Tale’, which follows on (not to be confused with English batsmen). Chaucer obviously felt his readers deserved light relief, and provided it.

Decades later, I listened while some actors talked about their craft. One had trod the boards in northern working men’s clubs, which he insisted were the most demanding audiences north of La Scala. But, he said, there was a way out. Just say the word ‘bum’. Then everyone would cackle, including blue-rinsed wives — or perhaps especially them.

‘The Miller’s Tale’ began a long and vulgar tradition in English comedy, running through Ben Jonson, Tom Jones, Donald McGill, Benny Hill, et al. One might term it brawling English bawdry. Like the clowns in Shakespeare, it is an antiphon to the grander aspects of the English character.

Burns was no foe to bawdry, either in words or deeds. But it does not appear in his candidate for humour’s laurel leaves, ‘Tam O’Shanter’. Those roistering verses begin with a paean to drunken fellowship. Tam is in an ale-house with his closest companion, Souter Johnie: ‘they had been fou [drunk] for weeks thegither.’ Outside, the elements are doing their worst. ‘That night, a child might understand/ The Deil had business on his hand.’ At home, Mrs Tam, ‘nursing her wrath to keep it warm’, was ready to remind her husband that he was ‘a skellum,/ A bletherin, blusterin, drunken blellum.’