Making jokes is hard, and is certainly no laughing matter

The most valuable people on earth are those who can make you laugh. Laughter is the great restorative and rejuvenator. I’m surprised more philosophers have not written about it: only boring Bergson. In recent years the people who have made me laugh most — ‘shriek’, as Nancy Mitford called it — are Carla, Leonie and Taki. Nothing can beat the running gags of life with intimate friends. But I like the professionals, too, who sweat at it, and whose only object is, as they say in Leeds, to ‘prise open them grim jaws of yours with a crowbar’. Query: why are Yorkshiremen so reluctant to laugh? Eric Morecambe from North Lancs used to tell jokes on the point, such as ‘Ee, lad, thou wert so funny I almost laffed.’ Or ‘Ees quite good, this lad, isn’t ’ee?’ ‘Aye, if you like laffing.’

I have been rummaging about in my copy of the Domesday Book to find an entry under Berdic, who held lands in Gloucestershire and is described as joculator regis.