I have sat through many a film in the cinema (or movie at the theater) and laughed myself sick at certain things and been one of only a dozen or so in a packed auditorium to do so.... culture, education, memory and experience all play a part in what is funny.

I'm of an age where I was on the cusp of the traditional wordplay/storyteller artists (Flanders and Swann, Marriot Edgar, Tom Lehrer, Bob Monkhouse, Tommy Cooper, Les Dawson and so on) and the newer 'alternative comedians' like Ben Elton, French and Saunders, Rik Mayall etc. I appreciate a good fart joke like most people but I'm also still able to listen to a long and rambling monologue without a swear word or obscene comment in it. The word 'fuck' does not become funnier the more you say it, neither does it make anything it describes funnier.

When I'm the solitary giggler in the cinema (or the Les Barker concert) it's because I've recognised and appreciated a sequence of words or a visual reference that was meant to amuse - in 'Educating Rita', I was the lone laugher at the line 'I think I'll call myself Mary Shelley' - a line clearly meant to be funny but only if you remember that the lecturer has declared that he has made Rita what she is, and that Mary Shelly was the creator of Frankenstein and his monster. It went over the heads of the majority of the audience because I strongly suspect they thought Boris Karloff invented Frankenstein and didn't know the original author.

Humour is inherently individual... one man's fall down a staircase is another man's risk assessment is another man's £250 video clip show - and it's entirely circumstancial. Something hysterically funny at the time is only mildly amusing when related later ~ yesterday morning as I lay in bed, Limpit was on the computer playing games and Manitas was in the bathroom. We don't close doors in our house so I was treated to the sounds of both. I heard the loo seat go down, Manitas seating himself and then 'grunt, strain, kaboom'! A well timed explosion sound from the computer made the moment one of those that will have me smirking for a few days, but in relating it to visitors later that day (we know them really well, we're not in the habit of discussing our toilet habits to postmen or Jehovah's Witnesses [although that might get them off our doorstep] or any other passing caller), it just wasn't the same.

LTS