I went to my friend Sid’s house yesterday and knocked on the door, his wife answered. “Hello,” I said “is Sid at home?”
“No,” said his wife “I’m afraid that Sid died last night.”
“Oh,” I said “did he say anything about a tin of paint?”

This is an example of  British ‘black’ humour, also known as ‘gallows’ humour, and underpins much of the comedy you find in the UK, from the Elizabethan plays of William Shakespeare to the most recent comedy sketches on today’s television.

When you take most of the parts that make up British humour you get quite a disturbing image of the average British mind: smut, innuendo and bullying are all regular features of what makes a Brit laugh, along with heavy doses of sarcasm and irony.

But please don’t judge too harshly. This type of humour may be unpalatable to some but it raises a huge laugh around much of the world too. You only have to look at the unfathomable global popularity of Benny Hill to see that.

Although there is something slightly odd about the way that we all laugh at the sight of a man being slapped around the head, there is a certain amount of social commentary going on as well. It isn’t just gratuitous, comedy is found where there is conflict and by looking at the conflicts that have plagued Britain you find the sources of much of the local humour.

A lot of British humour tends to come from our rigid class structure, the downtrodden working man having to suffer the pompous rich buffoon, the exasperated upper class schemer having all his work destroyed by the incompetent working class idiot. And finally the middle class social climber desperate to appear of a higher class than they are, only to look foolish to those above and below them.

In a land where, up until very recently, you were born into a certain social class and then told to ‘know your place’ it is unsurprising that so much of our comedy is rooted in the difficulties of having to live out your life under these man made social constraints.

But the UK is not the only country in the world to have had an oppressive class system, there are other factors at work too.

A need to bury our emotions beneath layers of dark humour, as seen in the joke above, comes from an uneasiness at open displays of sentimentality. The British don’t like too much emotion, it tends to bring out a cynical side in them, immediately dismissing it as ‘cheesey’, meaning slushy and over emotional.

This is where the cruelty in British humour comes from: If something you are watching is making you feel too emotional then puncture it with a joke – this often misleads people into thinking that the British are cold, they are not; they just find that a slap around the back of the head works better for them than a cry and a group hug (Urgh!).

You will also find that the British like to talk themselves down,  this is known as self-deprecating humour. This is natural for a country that “owned” two thirds of the world’s surface then lost it, it’s an easy way of dealing with the disappointment, and gives the impression that they don’t really care, even though deep down most of them really do, especially considering the amount of railway tracks that we put down and never got back.

Morals and religion have played a big role in developing the British taste for smut and innuendo. During its history Britain has been a battleground between the prim and proper Christian values of good taste and decency, versus the more Anglo-Saxon paganism of bad taste and  indecency. This is often characterised as a battle between the town and countryside.

Cities had always been seen as immoral places by pious people from the countryside. This would invariably lead to the comedians of the theatres of London mocking the hypocrisies of deeply moral types who pretended to be immune to their more basic needs.

This is where innuendo and smut comes from (the Benny Hill stuff) – saying one thing and meaning another. It was started as far back as the 13th century as a reaction to Puritanism and continues throughout our history.

Examples of this can be seen everywhere in British culture from the rude sea-side postcards sold to holiday makers in the 19th century to the Carry On films of the 1960s and 70s. Even Britain’s most recent comedy export, Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat, relies on many of the same principals of smutty innuendo that were used by William Shakespeare’s actors on the stages of London in the 16th century.

But like the English language, humour changes constantly. Each generation produces their own comedians that add to the rich layers of hilarity that already exist in the UK, and as more and more cultures intermingle, and the reality of globalisation takes effect, the British already seem to be taking on different traits – although hopefully not too many, some of us like the cynicism, it’s what keeps us warm at night (only joking).

By John Hillman