LIZ JONES: Did you hear the one about the unfunny, smug, male comedians?
By LIZ JONES COLUMN
My favourite comedians used to be men. Groucho Marx. Bob Hope. Tony Hancock. John Cleese. One of the funniest books I’ve ever read is Stars And Bars, by William Boyd. I like Nick Hornby.
So, you see, I think men are capable of being funny. But I think in order to be funny, you have to be either depressed, or self-deprecating.
The sort of pompous, showy-offy male humour imposed on us over Christmas – by the likes of Jimmy Carr, Jonathan Ross and Jack Whitehall – is about as funny as the jokes inside my luxurious crackers from Toast.
Best sample gag from The Big Fat Quiz Of The Year on Boxing Night, which featured the three of them: ‘If you want to play along at home, presumably you don’t have the new Xbox. Unlucky.’ How many millions are these people paid?
There was a sweetness to Morecambe and Wise, wasn’t there?
Whereas these interchangeable white men seem to belong to an intolerable, exclusive, snooty group who all indulge in bromances with one another. I don’t know how Jimmy Carr has been forgiven so rapidly for avoiding tax, when his day job is satire.
And while I do find Russell Brand funny because he is not remotely pompous, and is a bit mad, I have to wonder whether Alan Carr really talks in that strange, gay voice when he’s at home in his kitchen.
I think you can only really be funny if you are damaged and not wearing a sharp suit. And why are John Bishop, Rob Brydon and Micky Flanagan on every chat show going, when they have nothing to say?
Am I the only person not to laugh when Mrs Brown’s Boys comes on – or when David Walliams dresses up as a post-menopausal woman?
Why is a man in drag (bar Jack Lemmon, in Some Like It Hot, a film that was always about female beauty and male desire) supposed to be humorous?
Yet some of these men make millions in stadia tours, spewing lame one-liners with no insight.
I hate to come across as bah humbug, but I don’t find Miranda Hart funny, either. Her humour is mostly slapstick.
Sarah Millican surely doesn’t speak in that silly little voice at home when the recycling men have, yet again, left a few tins and a piece of cardboard at the bottom of a wet bin.
Sue Perkins once made a horrible fuss when I worked on the London Evening Standard and we wrote about her lesbianism.
But now that she is ‘out’, she thinks nothing of using Sapphic innuendo when commenting on the cakes in The Great British Bake Off.
It is all on their own terms, you see. No vulnerability, or truthfulness – just raking in the money.
Tickets for Millican’s next tour start at £25 and on her website she writes that she is determined to put down roots, and has a cat, which she calls a ‘furry baby’ – an epithet she surely stole from me.
The joke’s on us, don’t you think?
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