Paul Ferris reported on the jokes industry for the Observer Magazine of 5 October 1969 (‘The deadly serious business of being a funny man’). ‘Jokes in bulk are awful,’ wrote Ferris, starting at the bottom. ‘What could be gloomier than the dense collections of jokes and sketches usually duplicated on foolscap paper, as advertised for sale in the Stage?’
‘Mr Hoyles of Preston will write special material or sell from his stockpile, at the modest rates that prevail at this end of the business.’
‘For five shillings you can have “Fun in the Sanitary Inspector’s Office”. Very funny sketch. For two people: lady and gent or two men. It is about a mouse being in a meat pie. Plays six minutes. Clean.’
Peter Cagney’s Treasuries of Wit and Humour is ‘intimidatingly packed from cover to cover with gags, witticisms, howlers, boners and humorous slang expressions… The index to one of the books shows Girls as the subject of more jokes than anything else, followed by Wife, Men, Drinking, Marriage, Fashion, Motoring, Figure, Doctors, Money, Children, Courtship, Law and TV… All too accurately, all too sadly, it reflects what we care about, what we laugh at.’
As Ferris rightly added: ‘Jokes remind us that we live in two worlds, the polite one on the surface and the real one underneath.’
The BBC’s head of comedy seemed to act as gatekeeper of this polite world. ‘I have a particular thing about jokes to do with the evacuation of the bowels and the bladder,’ he said. Had he never heard the flatulent Bloodnok in The Goon Show (‘No more curried eggs for me’)?
‘The comedian is more important than his jokes,’ wrote Ferris, ‘but the jokes are still a serious matter. The origin and life-cycle of a joke are more mysterious than those of the salmon or the eel.’ A serious but fishy business, too, then.
