Elephants walk on tiptoes — but can they dance? This year’s stocking-fillers explore such puzzles

It’s almost a shock to admit it, but this year’s gift books aren’t bad at all. It’s even possible that, should you be given one of these for Christmas by the aunt who hates you or the brother who merely despises you, you might actually enjoy it — more than the acrylic scarf or the comedy socks that I always get from my least favourite relatives, anyway.

What with one thing and another, there are roughly four million new books by comedians, all written during lockdown when there was nothing else to do. The best I read was Bob Mortimer’s sweet, elegiac memoir And Away… (Gallery Books, £20), which tells of how an impossibly shy solicitor saw Vic Reeves performing on the tiny stage of a south London pub, was entranced by his comic brilliance and got involved in the show, first as a sidekick and later as a fully fledged partner-in-laffs. Few comedians come over as genuinely nice and decent people, mainly because a lot of them aren’t. Mortimer is an exception.

Jack Whitehall’s How to Survive Family Holidays (Sphere, £18.99) is co-credited to his parents, Hilary and Michael Whitehall, and the three of them have been on what sound like some of the most horrendous and embarrassing holidays known to mankind. It’s quite a cosy book, but you get drawn into its web of drollery more easily and willingly than you might expect. Photos of Michael wearing hideous short shorts in the mid-1980s should by rights be sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions, or the fashion equivalent.

Meanwhile, comedians who have already written autobiographies are having to be more inventive. Jack Dee, described as ‘comedy’s little ray of sleet’ on the cover of What Is Your Problem? (Quercus, £20), has set himself up as an agony uncle of, at times, uncompromising rigour.