Believe me: comedy is no laughing matter

There was a bloke at my school who had a cruel but often hilarious capacity for one-liners. On hearing that an ex-girlfriend had taken an overdose of aspirin, his immediate response was, "Well, at least she won't die of a headache." Vicious, but typical of Dave, as I'll call him.

Dave could also remember anything up to 50 jokes at any one time, and as old jokes faded from exhaustive re-telling so he replenished his stock with new ones. Unsurprisingly, he had a particular flair for the sick joke, examples of which I'll refrain from repeating as they never made, or make, me laugh. Dave's father was an alcoholic and given to beating Dave and his brothers on a fairly regular basis. Was this the basis for Dave's rancorous humour?

Very possibly, but not necessarily. At university I had a lot of very funny pals from Manchester and Liverpool, most of whom were fairly well-adjusted fellows, but all of them capable of telling any number of jokes very hard on the heels of some recent tragedy, such as the IRA Bull Ring bomb in Birmingham.

Odd, where this darkness comes from. Is it perhaps related to the species of hysteria that often emerges at funerals? I knew a girl who, at the funeral of her grandmother - of whom she was extremely fond - chose to murmur, "Bye bye, Sooty, bye bye," as the lamented relative's coffin was lowered into the grave.

As Christopher Hitchens has observed, we as a species are afraid of the dark as much as we are afraid of dying. Embracing the darkness with laughter is perhaps a way of keeping it at bay. Rather like Mowgli waving a flaming brand in the faces of recalcitrant wolves or his inveterate foe, Shere Khan.

One of the things that strikes me about Jim Holt's Stop Me If You've Heard This (Profile, £8.99) is that jokes, like us, are mortal. Those awful, galumphing Roman comedies no longer make us laugh, but is there not a case for saying that their humour lives on in the films of, say, the Farrelly brothers?

Death and sex. They are humour’s eternal handmaidens

Give old jokes new clothes and up they sprout, as fresh and bright as crocuses. The wife warming certain parts of herself in order to provide her husband with dinner is as old as Methuselah, but watch how it bounces back with every generation, while the clod-hopping tropes of Terence and Plautus are as dead as mutton - as indeed are many of the jokes in Shakespeare. How far would one be prepared to run to avoid seeing or hearing the drunken porter in Macbeth?

Death and sex. They are humour's eternal handmaidens. They are also the bedrocks of psychoanalysis. Holt points out that Freud was notable amongst philosophers and thinkers in devoting some time, and indeed a whole book, to the analysis of jokes. Not, as Holt tells us, that he was exactly 'Henny Youngman' when it came to telling them.

Here's an example of Freud's patter: "An impoverished individual borrowed 25 florins from a prosperous acquaintance, with many asseverations of his necessitous circumstances..." One isn't exactly left gagging for the punchline.

We also hear of the rib-tickling propensities of other seminal thinkers. Apparently Spinoza only laughed when watching spiders fight to the death, and Newton only let rip when asked about the usefulness of Euclid. So, no Only Fools and Horses DVDs for them at Christmas.

Holt also deals with the darker forms of humour. It's right that we should shy away from jokes about the Holocaust - my pal Dave was always making them, unsurprisingly. But what does one do in way of response to jokes that Jews make about it, such as Sarah Silverman's "The Holocaust isn't always funny"?

There are other surprises. The absinthe and opium-ravaged Charles Baudelaire could be as priggish as the Puritans. In his De l'essence du rire, he denounced laughter as springing from "the idea of one's superiority - a satanic idea, if ever there was one".

Holt's book has left me thinking about my own sense of humour. What makes me laugh? One of my earliest memories of humour was my reaction to the name of the journalist, Nancy Spain. The name just made me laugh. I don't know why; I can't really apply much logic to what makes me laugh.

I like verbal comedy mostly, but then I must admit to being one of the few people, as far as I can tell, who likes, and liked from a very early age, the comedy of Charlie Chaplin. I especially liked the big angry man with the eyebrows who was already simmering with rage before Charlie proceeded to torment him. I love the bit in Easy Street when Charlie pulls the lamp down over someone's head to lull him to sleep with the gas, and my absolute favourite is in The Cure - I think it's called The Cure - when Charlie laces the spa water with gin. This is a masterpiece of farcical slapstick, like Feydeaux on amphetamines.

Someone who very definitely wasn’t cool was Tommy Cooper

Buster Keaton, on the other hand, leaves me completely cold; I simply find his po-face irritating. However, he doesn't irritate me as much as Laurel and Hardy, two of the unfunniest men ever to have drawn breath, in my opinion. I'm sure they were delightful company, especially Stan; I just wish they'd chosen to pursue another calling. Why is it that for me they are utterly unfunny? I don't really know, although I suspect it's because their humour is so slow and laboured.

Am I being unfair? I actually did a radio play with Robbie Coltrane, in which I played Stan to Robbie's Ollie, in an attempt to cure me of my dislike of the bowlered duo, but without any success. I think I ended up finding them even less funny than before. Robbie found my dislike of them astounding. As did Hugh Laurie. I can actually remember the look of horror on Hugh's face when I confided my dislike to him. He simply couldn't believe what he was hearing and has, I think, regarded me as something of an alien being ever since.

Which British comedians first took my fancy? For me the absolute king of British comedy was Michael Bentine. His delightful flea circuses and trips up the Thames in Chinese junks left me helpless.

America couldn't offer anything like this, except for the Marx Brothers, and as far as I was concerned, the Marx Brothers had one little problem. Only one of them was funny. Groucho Marx was like Jack Benny or Bob Hope, emitting an endless stream of gags. The only problem was that his three gruesomely unfunny brothers kept interrupting him - and them. They were, as it were, the Johnny Craddock to Groucho's Fanny, if you follow. Or perhaps the Sonny to his Cher.

Sellers and Milligan struck me as cold, angry comedians

Yes, a little sprinkle of Groucho had definitely fallen onto the head of Michael Bentine. I was too young for the Goons and only partially got them when I caught up, but I was interested to know that Bentine was one of their number. He had a warmth to him that I never found in Sellers or Milligan. They both struck me as cold, angry comedians, both undoubtedly gifted but adumbrated by their demons in a way that Bentine wasn't.

What Bentine had was delight, a very rarely cherished quality. He made laughter a delightful experience, free of rancour and score-settling. Bill Bailey has that quality today, as does Peter Kay. There's a joy at the root of their work that isn't always there these days. And there's one word Bentine would have found anathema to comedy. Cool.

Someone who very definitely wasn't cool was Tommy Coooper. With him, the dividing line between physical comedy and gags didn't seem to exist. He plumbed the area where comedy operated beneath the level of language. Here's an example:

In one of his routines he came on to the stage holding a miniature five bar gate. He then set it down and proceeded to do his routine while completely ignoring the gate. At the end, he turned and just looked at the gate. The audience was on the floor at this, but then Tommy finished with a flourish. He picked up the gate, turned to the helpless audience, and said, "That's enough of that," and exited with the gate under his arm.

What makes that so funny? I simply don't know. All I know is it did it for me. In the same way, I don't really know why The Visitors is for me the funniest Monty Python sketch. Wearing a tightly fitting suit and a wide-brimmed hat, John Cleese introduces himself: "My name's Lequator. Brian Lequator. As round the earth, only with an 'L'." That for me is the funniest moment in Python's funniest sketch.

Is there any sort of logic to comedy? Jim Holt cites many types of joke, most notably "the great spontaneous counterexample", a worryingly self-important phrase that strikes me as being inimical to comedy. Holt provides an example from the lips of Ronald Knox, the great English priest and wag:

One day Knox was being bored by a notoriously pedantic Oxford don:

"There is only one aspirated s in English," declared the don, "in the word sugar."

Knox: "Are you sure?"

I have to say that this strikes me as being clever rather than actually funny - a criticism that has often only too rightly been lodged against me. I have also to say that many of the jokes cited in Jim Holt's book are either cloacal or yellow from age. That, though, is part of comedy's Faustian compact.

Will Brian Lequator still make them laugh in 50 years' time? I'd like to think so, but time is a cruel master. Will the future still have room for the likes of the delightful Michael Bentine? I hope so, because without joy, laughter can be a hollow business indeed. ·