Around the Horne and Other Jokes

Around The Horne and Other Jokes ©

By

Michael Casey

I ended up listening to Around The Horne the BBC comedy show from the 1960s, I suppose I heard the repeats on BBC Radio4 in the 70s perhaps. BBC Radio 4 being my University. As I talk to you my small daughter is watching The Gilmore Girls on Netflix. It is very good, but for me the comic timing is off by a second. Remember I’m a Radio man, so timing is everything and you grow up listening to timing. Groucho Marx’s timing was great, I grew up listening to him in his films on tv in the 1960s, and he knew all about timing.

If you’ve watched too many old black and white films as a child you learn about timing. Then you get a colour tv and you refuse to watch anything in black and white any more. The Oscars should have done the same when we had that black and white silent film, The Artist, very self indulgent, but that’s Hollywood for you. They say its all about Art, but it’s really all about self indulgence, telling the audience what they should like. It’s all about Money not Art, though the audience will say this is rubbish and I won’t watch it Oscar or no Oscar.

That’s enough of the serious or pseudo serious, what I want to talk about today is the Joke. A joke must breath and a tale must be told, it should not be shortened or stood on, nor interrupted by an idiot, this is the best bit when X Y Z happens. So ruining the joke for the rest of us. Its like a noisy sister talking over Dr Who at Christmas, though Dr Who scripts got so bad that Dr Who became boring and not a must view. Now we have a girl with a gang, so we’ll see if it can be saved.

You have sight gags, that was the fare of Buster Keaton, or Laurel and Hardy. You have telegraphed gags, you can see what is coming, the man will fall into the hole in the road. Only he does not but knocks the girl into the hole instead. Then he tries to help the girl out of the hole and he falls in himself and round and around it goes. When done properly it is entertaining and it can be stretched and extended with more and more people falling into the hole, and so on. Or it can be totally boring. It all depends on the style. If I could draw cartoons I’d draw one now to illustrate, that is a real regret of mine, I cannot draw cartoons. I try and draw cartoons with words instead.

Another form of joke is the circle or word play. Who’s on first if you go back to your Abbot and Costello. Or Stan Laurel trying to explain until he starts to cry, and Oliver Hardy just looks straight down the camera lens. In England we had Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker a double act for years, Ronnie Barker also wrote a lot as Gerald Wiley. His speciality was word play, puns and sound alike words, as Shakespeare himself used to do as well. The thing with wordplay is that it must bounce, it should not fall flat, or it would be like a trapeze artist always slow and dropping the spangled dressed girl. Like a very bad Cirque du Soleil.

Words are like the ball in a tennis match, Wimbledon is coming soon, so you can see the metaphor. Serve and return, serve and return, a long or short rally then a point won, that’s how word pay should work if it’s done well. Sometimes its like a squash game, very fast and sweaty and exhilarating. There are different styles too, remember Uncle Buck talking to the child, John Candy was great in that. And yes I’m a slimmed down version of him, but with a British accent, and yes you can hear me here www.michaelgcasey.typepad.com 

Dave Allen had a great style,we all grew up with him, the world over. Storytelling at its very best. As I speak Michael Rows the Boat Ashore is blasting from the tv in the room behind me. I hate that song, my brothers and sisters used to sing it to me to make me cry. When I was in China one of my mother in law’s friend’s son said he knew English so he stood up and sung it too me. I resisted the temptation to punch him, or cry. I told him the story and we laughed instead. Years later I met him again in Shanghai and he asked me did I remember him, I told him how could I ever forget him. This is a true story, but you can see the best comedy can come from true events. He now works in the diamond trade, and yes I’ll aways be a rough diamond.

They say that story telling should be a circle or reach a linear conclusion, I disagree. Writing is as unique as you or even me, and so is joke telling. Its getting the audience to listen and want to hear more, that is the secret. How you dress up, does not matter, it’s always the words that count, and never count the words, don’t be so boring. There is no formula, its is not maths, MC=4C, which none of you smart alec maths wiz could fathom. A joke takes as long as it takes, just make sure people don’t yawn as you tell it. You should get a good laugh when you finish, and if you are lucky they’ll buy you a pint of Stella Artois when you finish.

And what does MC=4C mean, you can really annoy the Maths Geeks with this formula, and get free Stella Artois for a month. Well MC=4C means Michael Casey equals 4 Chinese, because I used to weigh as much as my wife, my mother in law, and my 2 children.

You can leave the Stella Artois at the door.