BY JOE NUTT

I wish I could have a good laugh. I really, really miss it. It feels like years since I enjoyed the kind of unbridled, spontaneous hilarity that was a familiar part of my experience growing up in what we have all recently come to appreciate is indeed a sceptred isle. I certainly used to feel I belonged to a happy breed. But these days the kind of natural expression of joy one associates with shared laughter is as rare as jokes about white sugar. Those are rare enough, but jokes about brown sugar? Demerara.

Not the sharpest quip I admit, but one which highlights the nature of the problem, because trying to generate humour from a concept as sensitive as colour these days, is like shouting down the barrel of a loaded gun and expecting to trigger a laugh. The list of similarly taboo topics is long and, like the time between HMRC reminding you your tax return is due and the date it’s actually due, it’s getting longer.

I blame Ben Elton, Alexei Sayles et al. Pre their era of comedy was a melting pot into which literally anything could be tossed, yet still give rise to untainted, entirely apolitical laughter. Before their leering, jeering faces appeared on our TV screens hammering home anti-Thatcher slogans with all the subtlety of professional soccer players hitting the deck; thinking you could use the stage to foist your politics on a paying audience would have been considered tasteless. No one thought comedy was meant to be about something as irredeemably dull as party politics until clowns like Elton and Sayle decided to use stand-up as their own personal hustings. No one felt the need to glance across the room just to check, before they laughed.

And before you shout Aristophanes at me, like some pound store Boris Johnson, note I stressed party politics. Because in a de facto two party state, mediated by the goldfish intellect of social media, the kind of inventive satire open to genuinely talented comic writers of previous eras is pure fantasy. If you’re not one: you’re the other by default.

Laughter is like fresh water or sunlight. Life seems to fade and wither without it. I look longingly back at the time I sat in a small, Midlands arts cinema with perhaps a hundred other adults, to watch an entire programme made up of nothing but Loony Toons cartoons. The entire cinema reverberated with peal after peal of raucous, shared laughter, as Bugs Bunny massaged Elmer Fudd’s bald head with his ears, to the tune of Rossini’s Barber Of Seville; or the poor cat in Pepé Le Pew, eyes bulging, mouth tightly shut, fought wildly to escape her would be lover’s advances. But what I remember most vividly of all was the absolute uproar that greeted each spectacularly absurd, disastrous attempt by Wile E Coyote to use some totally crazy product from the Acme Corporation, to catch a smug, skinny, supercharged Roadrunner. My jaw ached so much I really needed it to stop. I miss that joyful, human delight that comes from being surrounded by other people, knowing that they are all laughing in absolute harmony with oneself.

I’ve never been entirely convinced by the only writer I know who has seriously tried to understand laughter, the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Although I’m willing to agree that laughter is a quintessentially human phenomenon; and that some emotional states are so severe even laughter can’t penetrate their protective shell, his chief notion that laughter was essentially a means of social bonding, seems to me to preclude the common experience everyone has of smiling, or even laughing, in solitude, perhaps at a memory, or at a sudden, delightfully surprising thought. Because the real substance of laughter is surely delight. Isn’t that why we naturally think of it as an antonym to sorrow or grief?

So why does this feel like such a relentlessly grim, mirthless era? What happened? Whatever it was it preceded Putin’s invasion of Ukraine and has precious little to do with the bumbling antics, or ritualistic self-abnegation of any single political party. The stranglehold that’s gripped the nation’s windpipe, stifling even the most timid titter, doesn’t have a single cause yet it does seem to have a political root.

There is, after all, no such thing as a funny politician. Boris Johnson’s fate proved that beyond doubt. I once heard him speak at the same event as Nu Labour’s favourite drunk, Alastair Campbell, and judging by the reactions from an equally well-oiled audience, while they thought him a tedious, puritanical scold; they found Johnson genuinely amusing. Yet no amount of bumbling buffoonery garnished with Greek and Latin was able to save him being flayed alive politically.

It’s not the politicians per se but the way politics has come to overwhelm our lives that’s the problem. The truth is, most people want to get on with their own lives. Indeed that’s pretty much all they want to do. They want politicians, like bin men, to just get on with the job. They know it’s dirty and unpleasant, so would much rather someone else do it. I suspect, given the chance, many voters would plead,

“For God’s sake, please cease the endless empty wordplay, that tiresome, tedious prattling all about your sincerity and actually do something.”

They have no interest whatsoever in the stratospheric levels of vanity and superiority that define politicians but when the media started to emulate them, and instead of simply reporting the news, decided to express an opinion themselves, the entire public sphere became tainted. A truly unholy alliance between politicians, tech business and journalists has brought politics to saturation point. Our culture now feels rotten with it.

Supercharged by screens and social media businesses that value only mouse clicks, almost overnight we became a culture simmering with anger, resentment and division. There is simply no room any more for something as innocently and spontaneously shared, as laughter. Which suggests Bergson got it right. Perhaps laughter is after all, entirely about social bonding.

Maybe that’s why I find myself increasingly turning to the few sources of innocent laughter I can still find. I can’t resist a video clip of a penguin taking a pratfall or a cat spectacularly risking one of its nine lives. Dogs with guilty faces are endlessly amusing and owls, for some reason, seem naturally to possess the comic timing of Tommy Cooper. These things have the rather wonderful power to delight me, even when I’m alone. Because I don’t know about you: but I’m dying without laughter.

Joe Nutt is the author of five books, mostly about poetry and as an essayist he writes regularly for a number of magazines.