Which is more grating, constant punning or permanent snarkiness? We examine the hierarchy of humour in order to determine what is, indeed, no laughing matter.

In this podcast, we consider whether humour value can be objectively measured, and if so, whether it is a separate concept to that of wit. We also look at why we bother to attempt humour in the first place. Finally, we engage in a slightly awkward exercise to determine whether we are good judges of our own funniness.

A few things we mentioned in this podcast:

• The eleven kinds of joke according to The Onion’s founder
• The Atlantic: What Makes Something Funny?
• Do animals have a sense of humour?
• Humor ability reveals intelligence, predicts mating success, and is
• higher in male
• Walter Nash’s ‘The Language of Humour’
• ‘Biggus Dickus’

For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email [email protected]

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts, we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Chris Wragg, Nick Hare, and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights, and this week we're discussing what is the lowest form of wit? Peter, yeah, when I think of the lowest form of wit, I think of you, so let's start off with this. Tell us, what do you think is the lowest form of wit?

Well, okay, so the reason for this was a recent family Zoom call, my sister organized a big Zoom call with all of her in-laws and all of our side of the family.

That sounds like a bit of a nightmare.

Well, okay, but yeah, so made worse, this nightmare made worse by a member of the family who should remain nameless, but they'll know who they are, and I don't think they listen to the podcast, it's fine, but they have an almost sort of unavoidable compulsion to constantly make puns about everything that people are saying, even when you're trying to have a relatively sort of serious conversation, they'll drop puns in all the time. Sounds totally pun reasonable. So my objection with puns, I don't have an objection per se with puns, but they're not particularly clever puns, they're kind of the puns that you buy in a book and are just really old, cliched, pretty terrible puns, but it's obviously kind of built this habit up over many years and it's, he just knows all these puns by rote and just drops them in the conversation. I bet it's a male. He thinks it's, well, I did say he, didn't I? I do understand that. He thinks it's hilarious and everybody else just groans, but it got me thinking like this, the fact that... Are you related to Nick? The fact that puns can actually make you sort of physically groan. They're physically just painful sometimes when they're dropped in conversation. I started wondering when I wasn't listening to this family Zoom because it was horrible, but is there a hierarchy of wit where you can manifestly put things on a list of how good or bad a type of humor is? They got me thinking like people often say sarcasm is the lowest form of wit. Personally, I don't think it is. I think it's puns.

I think you're just being homophonic. This is going to be a long half hour. Okay, let's have... So there's our vote. So we've got, we've cut straight to the chase here. So, you know, what's the lowest form of wit? We've got a vote there from Peter for puns. Who wants to pick this up, Chris?

Well, yeah, so I think, you know, wit is quite an interesting thing because if you sort of think about what constitutes wit or certainly our understanding of what wit means, you know, originally it was more about sort of intellectual capacity and, you know, coming from old sort of Germanic, old English, you know, the wit to know. And if you think of the phrase unwitting, you know, not knowing. And so I think there's a dual sort of meaning within wit, which is not just, you know, humorous, but also about the extent to which it required intellect. So from that perspective, if you look at something like sarcasm, you know, sarcasm, I think there's actually a truth in that, that sarcasm is certainly a lower form of wit because all it requires you to do is negate your meaning. So it's like, it's a really simple. It's a not joke sort of thing. Yes, it's a really sort of, it doesn't require, you know, a great cognitive leap to turn out sarcasm. So I think from that point of view, sarcasm is very formulaic and so is a low form of wit. Punning, actually, unless, as Peter was saying, you know, this guy sounds like he's just got a stock set of puns and he's just waiting for one of them to pop up. But in general, punning spontaneously is quite difficult because you've got to match a whole load of things together.

Well, yeah, although you say that, right. So I think it's great to have a good pun bank and I'll tell you for why. I was on Facebook, I'm part of a Facebook group called something like Pathetic Things on Sale in Facebook and it's all these really rubbishy things that people put up for sale and one of them was a pair of silicone breast implants. Now, for about 20 years, I've been waiting. I was sitting there poised. So my comment was a sale of two titties and I got the most likes of any comment I've ever left on Facebook. So, you know, I thought at some point in my life, I'm going to be able to use this pun and there it was.

Yeah, but it's a high risk strategy, isn't it? You could have died never having the opportunity.

Yeah, that's true.

You're appealing to a particular kind of audience there, I think.

I mean, so I think this is really hard because first of all, you know, well, Peter's ambition is to create some kind of hierarchy of, I guess, well, I've got things to say about humour is the right way to think about this, but I can't find anything I'm satisfied by which purports to be a kind of taxonomy of types of humour. So there are things online which there are some commonalities. So they include things like irony, character, you know, observational reference. So observational comedy, Michael McIntyre, he's my vote for the lowest form of humour, shock, parody, hyperbole, deadpan. They're not very satisfying to me. They don't carve what I consider to be humour very neatly at the joints, as it were. But I was just thinking actually about what Chris was saying about hard versus easy. And I think that is orthogonal to funny versus unfunny. And I think we probably want to get onto like what things are funny. But I wonder if the so I would say that puns and I love puns. Good ones, you know, that what they are is is hard, but not funny. They're definitely not funny. You'd never laugh out loud at a pun. Easy and unfunny would be sarcasm. And then I think hard and funny. This is we probably want to get onto this. What's actually funny? Personally, I think there's a sort of incongruity. Essentially, we can probably give some examples of that. But the things that actually make you actually laugh, which puns don't. Fair enough. Things actually, if you think of the funniest lines in films and those kinds of things, there is something about incongruity as absurdity. Now, that leaves this one this one sort of missing quadrant, which is funny and easy. And there's nothing there. And I think that's because there's no I don't think it's easy to be funny. There is no such thing as an easy, you know, the Royal Road to funniness. And and perhaps we can touch on why that might be. But I mean, I just my first thought is being so humorous. There's something anti inductive about it. So that's Scott Alexander's term for kind of systems where when you get an example of something, you can't really replicate it. And his example, one of the examples he used was kind of fascism. You know, the first time fascism rocks up, it looks like the Nazis. And so you then you're on the lookout for that again. And but the thing is that the next time it appears, it won't look like the Nazis. It'll sneak in, you know. And I think with humor, you know, if you found something funny, you can't just go and keep doing that. And for it to be funny, it stops being funny as soon as you discover funny, funny once, never twice. Well, exactly.

Yeah.

Chris, you're going to say something.

Yeah, well, I think that's I think that's true. I think novelty is a great, great part in humor. And there's an evolution. So I think the fact that humor is not funny, it may well have been quite easy to come up with loads of jokes, you know, at the point at which we were sort of wandering around the savannah and there was no comedy. But now you can't you can't repeat it. You can't repeat a joke. And children do this all the time, right? You know, like young children, you know, they do something that makes all the adults laugh, like put the, you know, napkin over their head or something. And then and then they, you know, repeat it. But it ceases to become funny. And, you know, and at some point you realize that. But yeah, there's clearly an element of novelty. And having to create novelty all the time is obviously taxing.

Well, look, so I'm not sure where we are with this. I mean, how do we go at this? What are we attempting to do? Are we attempting a hierarchy? Are we trying to work out what is funny? A few interesting facts about humor. Yeah, first of all, so first of all, according to an article in The Atlantic, referencing research, I couldn't find only something like 10 to 20 percent of remarks that people laugh at day to day. You know, people laugh a lot, like tens of times a day. People people laugh at things, but only about 10 to 20 percent of them are actually funny, you know, like so we laugh a lot more than we are presented with actually humorous things there. There is obviously a thought that that humor is has some kind of evolutionary purpose. So we don't really know, might not be able to say how it works, but it but it has an evolutionary purpose. There's some evidence that animals crack jokes. I've found one example, Coco, the gorilla who learned sign language. You remember? Remember Coco? Yeah, well, apparently a clown. She yes, she. Oh, I see. I see what you mean. Yeah. So it's because it's spelled K-O-K. I'm trying too hard. I'm trying too hard. Yeah. So apparently she reportedly signed the word chase after tying her trainer's shoelaces together and made laughing noises at his clumsiness. That's brilliant. So she sounds like an arse to me. But anyway, so she she she made. That's a that's a gorilla gag. Hilarious.

Apparently rats like being tickled. I remember seeing going back to the primates. I remember an asimper or some other wildlife program. They were following some some gorillas, I think they were. And the young juvenile males would deliberately imitate the limp of the senior of the sort of most senior member of the tribe to get a laugh from other members and then immediately stop when he looked because they'd be in big trouble. But they were they were deliberately correct. They were taking the piss out of the guy. That is excellent.

Yeah. Well, and then apparently humor ability is correlated with intelligence and and predicts mating success. So there you are. So it clearly has an evolutionary role, but we're not quite sure why.

And I think it's the classic, you know, GSOH, isn't it? In in all kind of, you know, dating, dating profiles, you know, and I think I think there is something to that. In fact, you know, there has has, as Nick alluded to, you know, being a sort of body of research on the on the, you know, the function of humorous nurse. And and if you think about it, it makes sense if it is difficult to create humor. You know, it requires spontaneity of thought and creativity. You know, that may well correlate to mate quality, you know, and the way of intelligence,

I think. Yeah, well, that's right.

The ability to, you know, if you know, if something happens that you have to spontaneously react to, you know, humor might be a good a good tell of that as well as, you know, I think there is a that humor plays a role because not all people share a, you know, this notion of a sense of humor. You know, people find different things funny and it may well be there's an element of it being a good signal of social compatibility. You know, you can tell a lot about a person's personality by their sense of humor. And so, you know, it's a rapid way of communicating what kind of person you are.

By the way, talking about GSOH, along the same lines to Nick sort of been saving this a pun for 20 years or so, something I've wanted to I've wanted to be single just so that I could put in an advert, a Lonely Hearts advert, A-S-O-H, right? Because I thought I wanted to have T-S-O-H meaning terrible sense of humor. Right. But then people might think, oh, it's terrific. So, you know, but if I put A-S-O-H and people go, what's A-S-O-H? And so that either they would work it out or when we're in the restaurant meeting, it means awful sense of humor. Right. But by putting that, you know, and sort of separating myself from the pack, one, but showing I've got an amazing sense of humor. Well, you don't have to be single. You don't have to be single to try putting that on Tinder and seeing if you get any hits. Yeah. I predict you wouldn't. I don't think it sounds like the rip roaring route into someone's bedroom that you think it that you seem to think it is. But, you know, the empirical study is yet to be done. But I think the problem would be with the audience, with millennials. But actually, it's probably millennials I'd want to sleep with. I don't know. But anyway, that's. This podcast has gone in an unusual direction. So, look, where are we? What? Sorry, I've kind of lost track. Where are we? We are going. Yeah, no, I was going to say, I think the problem here is when we're trying to attempt a hierarchy is what is the what is our up and down? Right. Because I don't think it's fair to judge puns on, you know, using the criterion of does it make you laugh out loud because of what we talked about? I think the role of a pun is to is to impress you, is to impress people and for people to go, oh, yeah, that's clever. I don't think it's to it's to make people, you know, wet themselves laughing. So so to me, it's a bit like sort of saying, I don't know, like saying that an egg is a type of bread and then trying to judge it against other bread on how nicely it toasts or something. It's like it's not it's not there to make. So what are we? What are we putting it? I mean, I suppose what I'm saying is puns don't even belong in the same bracket as kind of other kinds of jokes. I don't think they're they're doing the same job.

Yeah, I think I think that to me highlights the difference between wit and and humour per se. You know, if you think about, you know, famous wits, you know, sort of Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward and so on, you know, what what they say is is witty. But, you know, you don't read it and necessarily, you know, it doesn't cause you to laugh. But there's something sort of humorous and wise about it, you know, but it's well, I've got a great example. Go on.

Do you want to hear it? Do you want to hear the great example?

So the great example?

Yeah, well, so Jonathan Swift was at a party once, right? And a lady who was wearing a sort of big poofy gown walked past a table on which there was a violin. And the violin fell to the floor and was smashed. And he immediately, quick as a flash, came out with Mantua, Vi Miserae Nymium Vecina Cremonae. You don't seem to all be laughing yourself senseless. Well, it's from Virgil's Ninth Eclogue, isn't it? Surely you recognise. Alas, Mantua too close a neighbour to wretched Cremona. Right. You know, you still don't get it. It's obvious, isn't it? Well, Mantua was a type of dress. No, sorry. Hang on. This is brilliant. This is comedy gold. Sorry. Yeah. So Mantua is a kind of dress. And Cremona is well known as the home of Antonio Stradivari, violin maker. So look, I mean, the thing is that you've got to admit that's a bit of a corker. It's, you know, but I suppose you have to be there. But anyway, it's a good example of I don't think that was designed to be funny so much as he probably had that in his pun bag. He probably put the violin in there, hoping that someone would knock it onto the floor so he could walk this one out. But no, that is actually my all time favourite example of an incredibly well constructed, complicated pun. Where are we? But there's a lot of them. I mean, now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York. Hilarious pun by Shakespeare. Is it meant to be funny? I don't know. And I mean, you know, you go back far enough and you've got Jesus saying, you know, thou art Peter and upon this rock, I will build my church, making a pun on Petros and, you know, Petra. So puns, they've got a good legacy.

Yeah, I think you're right in that puns can be used in a non-humorous context. I suppose they've probably evolved to being funny. But yeah, they do have a history of not necessarily being humorous, but being word, you know, in oratory, just being clever, clever wordplay to make a point.

But also we've got to recognise that we're seeing this through our own cultural lens, right? Because I mean, famously, you know, rightly or wrongly, in the UK, we're meant to appreciate wit, right? And that sort of fast sort of moving sort of quite linguistic verbal kind of side of things, right? Whereas I think in Germany, they are a big fan of puns over there. Okay. And but then something I've noticed in Eastern European countries, for example, when I lived in Poland was they like a bit of slapstick, you know? Well, Norman Weston was famously extremely popular in Albania. Yeah. And I would say that in the US, they quite like their gags. I don't know if you know, The wisecrack, I'd say is the archetypal US type of humor. You know, the kind of the kind of wise guy who's got one over on everyone else. There was this quite interesting point made by Stephen Fry once about the difference between British and American humor. And I don't, I think it's good. It feels right to me. But he said, you know, that scene in Animal House where John Belushi is walking past this guy who's playing, he's like a really annoying, weedy folk singer type guy playing guitar and singing, I gave my love a cherry. And he just picks up the guitar and smashes it and walks on. And Stephen Fry said, if that had been a British comedy, the hero would have been the guy with the guitar. But in the American comedy is the John Belushi character. It's the kind of the outsider, you know, wise guy who's getting one over on the kind of sappy, you know, mainstream. But yeah. Look, there's a couple of things I want to move on to round things off because we're already 20 minutes in. Anything, look, before I go on to the questions, anything you want to chip in with? Well, I wondered if we should share what we think the things are in e.g. films or something. What are the things that we personally think are the funniest things? Well, that's kind of what I want to use. That's what I want. Great. That's kind of what I want to go on to. One of them sort of similar to that. The first thing is, look, I don't know if we want to do this, if it's going to start destroying relationships. But I thought we could get we could rank ourselves in terms of who's funny or who's witty, whichever way we want to put it. Do we want to do that?

Or maybe how funny you are versus how funny you think you are?

Yeah. So should we do that? Do you want to do that quick ranking? What are we what are we trying to rank on? Like, just make it really simple how funny you are, how much you think you can make other people laugh intentionally. We up for that? I, the trouble is, I just think it's really contextual. Like, I feel like it doesn't matter. The four of us say when we get together that we've got different comedy roles. I mean, like Fraser, you're the straight man, for example. I'm not. Now, now he's the fool.

He's the fool.

I think I just think that's, you know, so Eric Morcom said, you know, used to. I mean, he said, you know, it couldn't work without someone like Ernie White. You've got to have the straight man. It doesn't it doesn't work unless you have that kind of relationship. So I don't think you can pin the gags on any one of us. We can give it a go. I don't mind giving a go. Honestly, I don't know if I can answer because I just think Chris and Peter are funny in different ways. I mean, you know, look at Peter's hair. That tells you everything you need to know about in what ways he's funny. What scale are we using? Oh, OK. I guess we could give ourselves and each other a scale of one to ten. Do we not do that? What? So this is this is frequency of producing laugh out loud gags. You're over complicating this. Is it frequency or is it quality? If someone comes out with one hilarious gag a day and someone else comes up with 20 mildly amusing comments. Both. It's both. There you go. Both. And so zero is not funny at all. Ten is fucking hilarious. Right. So let's say I'm going to spend ten minutes with one of one of you guys. And the question is, how how how many times do I lose control of my bladder? No, no. We've all known each other for years. We can give it an instinctive kind of zero to ten on this. Right. Let's just do that.

And rate yourself as well.

How funny do you think you are? I also say like a professional comedian who always makes everyone laugh, always makes you laugh. Yeah, they don't though. If you've got professional comedians in real life are often quite dour. In real life they are. I'm sorry, but it's my job to pick your question apart if it doesn't make sense. No, you're being difficult. You're being difficult. You're not being you're not making me laugh, Fraser. You've just gone down on my list. I'm not making you laugh because I don't want you to laugh right now. That's why.

Thanks for bearing with us, listeners. We're nearly there.

This is scintillating stuff. Yeah, it really is. Edge of your seat. I think you should keep the silence in but cut the other stuff out.

Yeah, the magic of radio. It'll appear, you know, to have only taken 12 seconds.

Are we ready?

Yeah, why not?

So who wants to go first? Let's go for how funny we think we are first. So I put myself on a four. I think I can crack a joke.

All right, I'm a six. I give myself a six. Chris, what did you give yourself?

Uh, a three.

Okay, I gave myself an eight. Wow. Just a raging egomaniac sort of narcissist. Okay, so now, Peter, if you read out, you know, everyone else what you gave them.

Okay, in reverse funniness order then. So I reckon Chris is really difficult because he does crack some big ones when they are, but they're infrequent. So I give him a four. Right. Fraser, you're a five. What? Nick, you're a six. Okay, that's not bad. Did you give yourself a four? Yeah, I gave myself a four. So I put myself on par with Chris in terms of overall funniness.

Okay, okay.

Uh, Chris? Yeah, I gave everybody threes. I just I, I, I, I, I, I... Really got into the spirit of it. Yeah, I find almost nothing actually, actually funny.

Just very jaded, very jaded. Absolutely. Almost nothing. Two vs something funny. I almost not all got a three from Chris.

I'm like, I'm like, um, Barak Spinoza. The only, yeah, the only thing that makes me laugh is, uh, is is watching spiders fight to the death.

Nick, Nick. So I've gone, I've said, much like Peter, because of the quality, because Chris is quite selective about his gags, but they usually hit the mark, is I've given him seven, then I've given myself six, Peter five, and I'm afraid you're bottom of the heap with four. That in itself is a joke, I presume. As I said to you, I do honestly think you are a great person to play off. I think you're a brilliant straight man. No, I reject this. No, no, no. I'm not the straight man. This isn't the way Fraser saw this going when he gave himself an inch, when he set this exercise up. Hey, I've got this great idea, just, you know, just, yeah. Fraser, let's have your ratings then. It's just, it's just outrageous. I think we need to stop the podcast for now. He's furiously scribbling, scribbling out now, Nick minus seven. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So as you're actually quite ably demonstrating, Chris, I do struggle because it's exactly as the other two said, and I agree, is that you don't often sort of, you know, crack a joke, but when you do, I think it's worth the wait. So I gave you a six. I gave Peter a four. And I gave Nick an eight, and I gave myself an eight as well. Okay. Wow. Um, but I think Nick, you're quite good at the rapier sort of wit type stuff. You're quite quick and, and Peter, you don't often crack jokes, do you? I don't know. You're not, I don't know. I mean, I think you ranked yourself. No, but Peter's got, see, I think Peter's got a comedy persona, which is not necessarily his to do with cracking jokes. I think it's more of his, you know, he's, he plays, he plays up to the stereotype of the kind of dour, kind of Scott frustrated with, with the world, how stupid it is. And I wouldn't, it's not, it doesn't manifest itself in gags.

It's a piece of whole life performance art. Exactly.

But also, I'm quite worried by this because as you, as, as evidenced by this, I think I'm hilarious. Right. Um, now that's one thing, but unfortunately no one else does.

Sorry.

Sorry for the reckoning Fraser, but yeah, it seems like that TSO H wouldn't have been too sure. It was, it was, it was, it was just too true, unfortunately. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, well look, I think we should move swiftly on from there and sweep that under the carpet a little bit. Something else I want to move on to. What makes you laugh or maybe something, can you tell me something specific perhaps in a film that has made you laugh that you can pinpoint for us? I think Nick, you're ready with something. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's, it's a bit mainstream really among sort of things that people find funny, but I think the film that makes me laugh the most and still actually makes me laugh out loud is The Life of Brian. There's two scenes that I think could just stand out. One is where Brian is graffitiing, he's trying to graffiti Romans Go Home and then the centurion comes up and starts this interaction, yeah, where, you know, like a sort of Latin teacher telling a kid off for being bad at Latin and, and I just, it's, it's perfect. I just, I just think it's perfect. And you know, the other one is the Biggest Dickers scene where, where the, you know, the centurions, Brian is explaining that his dad was a centurion called Biggest Dickers and Ponce's pilot can't tell why that's funny because he's got a friend called Biggest Dickers and he can't see the human. And of course all the soldiers are desperately trying to hold in their laughter. And the whole thing just reminds me of, of shared jokes at school, which are, or when I used to sing in the choir during the sermon, people would, would, would write things or draw things. And I think there's something about that, that combination of the kind of formal stuffy world of convention, and then just having this subversion underneath, which is really, I, I think I find that funny.

I think there's also something in that, in that scene, the Biggest Dickers scene where, where is the, the taboo of laughing or, you know, the pressure not to laugh builds the pressure all the more. And that's the, that's the school thing when you're being told off, you know, you know, you're in trouble and you know, someone does something.

It really is. They're some of the most uncontrollable laughs is, is when you are told not to laugh. And I think also we're not a million miles away there from satire as well. Which again, when you've got that sort of very authoritarian, not authoritarian, it's not quite the, you know, that sort of establishment regime, if we want to call it, which famously we have in the UK, then that just is going to breed satire. Peter?

Struggling to think of an example, but there are so many, but another scene from the same movie, Nick, I really like is when you have the people arguing in, in the, in the, in the auditorium about, they're from the People's Front for Judea and how there's this other group called the People's Judean Front and they're, they're, they're, they really don't like them. But, but the one for me, different movie though, this is Spinal Tap and when the guy's explaining how his amplifier has got, it goes up to 11, so it's therefore, you know, it's better. But what's funny is that he doesn't understand that that's just a late, like a label. You could just get a bigger amplifier or cause the, the, the, the sort of the straight man of that scene. It is.

I think it's the seriousness with which he, it's the sincerity with which he believes that it, you know, really genuinely is better to go up to 11. I feel like that sincerity is part of, I think it's the same phenomenon that I'm trying to, I'm trying to kind of badly explain. It's that sort of, you know, almost pinpricking through someone's sincerity.

But I also think it's the, it's the difference between mocking and, and laughter, which again Spinoza talked about is we, you know, we're in the know. So what we're, what we're laughing at is the, is his ignorance effectively.

And another reason I like that is, is it's sort of sparked a bit of a meme. So you see like volume dials with 11 on them sometimes, and it's sort of like just the designer indicating that they're in on the joke. Yeah.

The IMDB page for This Is Spinal Tap is the only page which go, which has a rating out of 11.

Yeah. And well, and the BBC iPlayer, the volume slider goes up to 11, so you see it in different places where people look at, pay homage to that particular scene.

Chris, who self-admitted doesn't laugh at anything. I bet his favourite scene is the, is from the Seventh Seal or something. That's right.

Yeah. It's the moment where they choose, choose which colour to play, play chess against death. Yeah. No, it's, yeah, no, I was going to say something that, that, that doesn't make me laugh, or almost sends me into a rage is Mrs. Brown's Boys.

Oh God, I'm so glad you said that because I was going to say the same thing.

Yeah. And it's almost like anti-wit, you know, it's, and I just can't, I can't get my head round it because there's some, you know, comics like Stuart Lee play very much on this notion of some of the humour going over people's head, right? And there's this distinction between people, but with Mrs. Brown's Boys, it sort of seems to go below my head. I don't, I don't quite, I cannot fathom it because it is so, it is so, so simplistic.

Well, I don't know, on one reading, Mrs. Brown's Boys is just the inheritor of a long, you know, tradition of, you know, the Commedia dell'arte and the pantomime game and all

In fact, right, in kind of preparation for this, I thought, well, look, I went and did a bit of a binge on YouTube of Mrs. Brown's Boys and I kind of found myself revising my opinion of it over, over time that there are these big elaborate set pieces. So it didn't make me laugh, but I did, I did come to appreciate it on a different level. But I think the thing, the thing that I think of the, the last thing I probably laughed out loud at was, and that was about 10 years ago, was the, the first sort of, I don't know, 20 or 30 pages of the Time Waster's Letters book by Robin Cooper, isn't it? Robert Popper is the, is the author, but he writes under his pseudonym Robin Cooper, I think.

I agree. That's, that's a book, you know, sitting on the tube reading that. Can't, cannot, anything other than laugh out loud. Yeah. Highly recommended. Well chosen. Just to finish off, I mean, look, I like my highbrow stuff. You know that from me, you know, you can understand that. But just to go against the course of what we're going here, and I, I like a little bit of lowbrow stuff. Okay. And it's not, I don't like slapstick. No, that's not my thing, but I have to confess, and I know it's lowbrow, but I do like, you've been framed. Okay. So just people for, you know, which is for non-UK- People falling over. It's basically people falling over. Real people in real life falling over. Okay. And yes, lots of them are not funny, but some of them I just, I just do find utterly hilarious. And I think it's the, I think what it is I like is just someone totally normal, not doing anything, not trying to be funny, but some, you know, they fall, they trip over something, you know, or, or like trying to clear a blockage from a, a silage sort of distributor and, and, and it, you know, it unblocks and they get covered in crap.

And I think, I think that's, I think you've hit on something there Fraser, because for me, one of the things I find most difficult about comedy is the fact it's labelled as comedy, right? And so it's a bit like someone saying, I've got this really funny joke. I'm going to tell you this really funny joke. Off we go. You're guaranteed not to laugh at it. And comedy is almost that as a construct. So I think just seeing random people, you know, get hit in the balls by, you know, a flying golf ball or something is, is really.

Yeah, there's a great, it gets me every time. A great subreddit called idiots fighting things, which is, you know, someone going up to a bin and kicking it and then they fall over. It's really, really good fun. Well worth, well worth subscribing. And just to finish it off, and although I do like the stuff that's unintentional, back in the day, what was Dom Jolly? What was his thing? Trigger Happy TV. Trigger Happy TV. What I found is I've got a penchant for people dressed up as animals fighting each other. For some reason, if you get a, so like you would see like, so he would stage this at a bus stop, you'd have a, I don't know, a dog just sitting there. Okay. And then a cat would come along and just see. Usually in slow motion. Yeah. With something, with something like, you know, Gordon Lightfoot's If You Could Read My Mind playing over the top. Some very mournful sort of. Yeah, it's very Donnie Darko. Yeah. Quite a niche genre. It is quite. And also, but sometimes my two preferred genres do overlap. So, which is real life stuff where it's not meant to be funny, but animals dressed up fighting each other. Sometimes, sometimes at sporting events where you get two mascots fighting each other. I love that. That's the sweet spot for me.

Bring back It's a Knockout for Fraser.

Please, yes. Let's get that out there. Okay. Let's finish off there. If you've got any thoughts or suggestions for topics, please email us at podcast at alephinsights.com. We'd love to hear from you. Also, if you've enjoyed the podcast, what should people do, Nick? They should, they should buy a bunch of flowers for the like button and then smash it. They should do that indeed. So, don't forget to like and follow us on your chosen streaming service. Thank you as always for listening. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Peter Coghill, Nick Hare and Chris Wragg of Aleph Insights. Until next time, goodbye.