Playing for laughs

Sue Arnold on A Thousand Years of Laughter | My Turn

A Thousand Years of Laughter, compiled by David Timson (5hrs, Naxos, £11.99)

If it is true, as Shakespeare said, that "a jest's prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears it, never in the tongue of him that makes it", then I'm bound to admit that I didn't find the new anthology of humour from Naxos a barrel of laughs.

Compiling a comic anthology is a no-win situation because humour is as personal as dental records. Even so, I did expect to guffaw more than groan during a selection spanning 1,000 years, especially on audio with professional actors doing the telling.

The problem is that word "laughter" in the title and the fact that Gryff Rhys Jones, who presents it, is a stand-up comic. I was expecting jokes. Had it been called A History of Comic Writing I would not have felt so short-changed by this lacklustre selection and might even have been mildly amused by such medieval jests as "how many calves' tails behoveth to reach from the earth to the sky? No more but one an it be long enough."

As a sociological exercise tracing the roots of comedy, from Bishop Leofric's Anglo-Saxon riddles to Bertie Wooster's first encounter with Jeeves, it is perhaps of some academic interest, but Timson's choice is at best quirky and at worst lazy. Why do we need two extracts from Mark Twain, a very dull passage from FC Burnand (who he?) and only three epigrams from Oscar Wilde? What happened to Perelman, Waugh, Marx, O'Brien, Jennings, Sharpe and Milligan? No one doubts the wit of Dorothy Parker, Saki and PG Wodehouse, but if that's all Timson can come up with from the last 100 years, it's a joke.

My Turn, by Norman Wisdom and William Hall (3hrs, Random House, £7.65)

When Norman Wisdom collected his knighthood from the Queen for services to entertainment, he couldn't resist pretending to fall over. It was, after all, a major part of the variety act that had audiences falling about for 50 years. Nothing dates more quickly than stand-up (or in Wisdom's case, fall-down) comedy. To a generation brought up on The Simpsons his cheeky-chappie antics would be dismissed as pants, but this isn't about gags. It's about a kid who, against all the odds - height, background, tyrannical father - made it to the top. He cries when he reads it and so will you.

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