Have you heard the one about the mother-in-law?
Ian Hislop: career satirist
Andy Miah / flickr | Creative Commons
What a hoot!
Ian Hislop’s Oldest Jokes, Series 2
BBC RADIO 4
The historical roots of humour are always worth exploring, not only as a way of tracking comic tropes back to source but as a means of surveying the moral atmosphere in which they exist. It’s all very well determining the first occasion on which anyone sniggered at a slip on the banana skin, but in a supposedly more enlightened age, would anyone feel like sniggering now? As a career satirist, Ian Hislop is sensitive to this kind of tension, and his latest origins-of-comedy series (1-5 September and BBC Sounds) combines a forensic analysis of how comedy works with an acute awareness of how it also changes over time.
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