Many years ago my sister and her husband, long time card-carrying Sons Of The Desert, advised me to pay particular attention to Hardy’s hands. They were right.
I used to love his late night show in the late 50’s thru mid 60’s. “Smock! Smock!” “How’s your fern?” and so on. Beside humor, he was an accomplished pianist.
Steve played other instruments besides the piano. He was a talented composer and lyricist as well. This is remarkable, since (by his own admission) he couldn’t read music. (Steve wrote lyrics for the original Hollywood Squares theme, which he titled “That Silly Song.” Unfortunately, the show got a new theme right around that time, so he needn’t have bothered.)
My mother and older brother always watched his late night show. I was too young to stay up late, but I used to listen lying in bed. I remember one night in particular when the studio audience participated in cooking the world’s largest omelette. (I also listened to Amos ‘n’ Andy lying in bed when a local station started airing repeats late at night.)
My brother told me about the time a woman brought Steve some homemade short’nin’ bread. He asked “Is this the short’nin’ bread Mammy’s little baby loves?” before taking a big bite, as though he’d been waiting all his life for a chance to try it. He damned near spat it out and said “Well, Mammy’s little baby can keep it, as far as I’m concerned!”
In the syndicated show I watched, members of the audience were always bringing in gifts for him. One woman gave him a long chain of chewing gum wrappers woven together. He shook it vigorously and said “Ooooh, look how wriggly it is!”
Jerome K Jerome - in some ways a predecessor to P.G. Wodehouse - is still laugh out loud funny today especially in Three Men in a Boat.
Georgette Heyer has genuinely witty dialogue and good character comedy; going up the literary ladder a step, Jane Austen (“thank you my dear, you have delighted us long enough”) is also very funny when she wants to be.
Not all Damon Runyon’s stories are comedy, but even the ones that aren’t have turns of phrase that will make you (me) snort with laughter.
Shakespeare’s plays don’t always read as funny on the page - especially if you don’t have the annotations to explain that he’s really talking about genitals - but there are productions of both Midsummer Night’s Dream and Much Ado About Nothing currently selling out in London theatres due to rave reviews about how funny they are. Comedy of Errors produced right can also be a laugh out loud show.
There’s a lot of funny stories in the Decameron; the Miller’s Tale from Chaucer mines a similar (v. bawdy) vein of humour. And a lot of Restoration comedies with stock characters and situations still get laughs.
Lysistrata (women organise to stop the war by going on sex strike - it nearly works) is top drawer comedy premise.
I’m not American so don’t have any baggage or preconceived notions about this show, but whenever I’ve watched clips of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In I can’t stop laughing. Goldie Hawn’s giggling is contagious.
Laugh-In debuted when I was a ‘tween. (It stole Star Trek’s original time slot, leading to that series’ drastic decline in ratings.) The few times I watched it, the only bits I found funny were those where Arte Johnson’s Old Man tried coming on to Ruth Buzzi’s Old Maid and got bashed for it:
Would you call me attractive?
Whack, whack!
Would you call me sexy?
Whack, whack, whack!
Would you call me desirable?
Whack, whack, whack, whack!
Would you call me … an ambulance?
This was incredibly stupid, but I couldn’t help laughing at it!
I was backstage crew for Much Ado About Nothing on a stage production, and it was hard not to laugh out loud at a lot of it when there was an audience in the house. No matter how many times we had heard all the lines in rehearsals, it was still gut-bustingly funny every time.
And I saw A Comedy of Errors at a “Shakespeare in the Park” production in Toronto. Great cast and crew, and the park was erupting in laughter.
One I haven’t seen mentioned, but deserves some mention, are the works of Stephen Leacock. A Canadian economist, a professor at McGill University, he doesn’t sound like the type who would have a sense of humour. But he did. His short story “My Financial Career” is about trying to open a bank account—not normally anything you would find humour in, but Leacock did, and did he ever. Rather like George Carlin, he could take a simple, everyday occurrence, and find the ridiculousness in it.
But his magnum opus has to be Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, which is a collection of vignettes about Mariposa, a fictional town located in Ontario. Mariposa is a thinly-disguised version of the real town (now the city) of Orillia, Ontario; and if you’ve ever been there, you will recognize many of the places Leacock wrote about. But all the vignettes are humorous accounts of small-town life, that haven’t changed, and remain fresh.
My favourite Sunshine Sketch is the one about the annual town outing, where pretty much the whole town piles on a ship for a cruise on the lake. It’s to be a picnic cruise to celebrate an important holiday. But the ship develops problems, hits a snag or something, and starts to sink. Panic ensues! There aren’t enough lifeboats! What to do, is there nobody to come to the rescue?
The ship sinks in three feet of water, and nobody was ever in any danger. But the way Leacock draws all this out is hilarious.
I cannot speak to Leacock’s works as an economist. But his works as a humourist are as funny and as fresh as ever.
If you want REALLY old, with the right translator the old Greek and Roman comedies are funny. Aristophanes’ Lysistrata has already been mentioned, but several other plays of his survive. Then there’s the roman Plautus, of whose works many survive. The Menaechmi is one of them, and is the basis for The Comedy of Errors, mentioned above (I translated part of it in high school). For that matter, consider that one of his plays is Miles Gloriosus – Larry Gelbart strip-mined Plautus to come up with A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.
Several of the satirist Lucian’s works still hold up (providing there’s a decent translator), and the epigrammatist Martrial could be darkly and wickedly hilarious.
Hey, if we’re digging into the classics, there’s some graffiti from Pompeii that’s still worth a chuckle. Much of it is routine (lots of “I was here” statements, and references to pooping and prostitutes), but occasionally you get a real gem:
Dear innkeeper: We have urinated in our beds. I admit that it was wrong. Why did we do it, you ask? There was no chamberpot!
Lots more like this. Well worth finding and browsing a collection. Real insights into the day-to-day of Roman life, in addition to the amusement.
Speaking of plays, I’d say that The Importance of Being Earnest is still funny.
I found Laugh-In hilarious when I first watched it during its original run, but now it feels embarrassingly outdated. It relied heavily on poking fun at its own era, making much of the humor unrelatable today—and what was once hip and edgy now just seems corny. By contrast, a sketch comedy show from an earlier generation, like Your Show of Shows, still makes me laugh, underscoring how truly timeless its comedy was. That said, I do believe most of the Laugh-In cast were talented comedians—and Goldie Hawn is adorable.
I recently purged the household of several hundred books but retained a knee-high stack of Nero Wolfe paperbacks to read while soaking in the tub. The mysteries are a little hackneyed and I remember the solutions to most of them from when I read these books decades ago. But the humor in the voice of narrator par excellence Archie Goodwin is as fresh as ever.
Another play/movie that I think has stood the test of time is The Man Who Came to Dinner. The humor still holds up even with the dated references (I believe there were later adaptations with minor chances to modernize it, some of which work and some don’t).
Of course, my love for it may in part be based on my wife’s desire to see me play Sheridan Whiteside.
When it comes to HHGttG the original radio show is still the best version, and has lost none of its brilliance!
The Monty Python records are arguably better than the original TV show presentations of the same sketches, definitely more polished.
And I still listen to The Goon Show! There are some dodgy racial-stereotype characters sometimes, but otherwise as fresh as ever.
As is Pygmalion.
One of Twains stories that always makes me laugh is when he has to deal with the lightning rod salesman. I don’t remember the name of the story.
Sheridan’s play The Rivals is still funny.
“Political Economy”? I read this for the first time just a few months ago.
Yeah, that’s it. He’s trying to write a paper on political economy and keeps getting interrupted by the salesman, finally losing it.
Late to the thread here, but I’ll take the position that NO comedy holds up well, because a major element of comedy is novelty and surprise. Once you’ve watched the movie/TV show, read the book, you never get the feeling you had your first go around.
Moreover, second time around you are approaching it with expectations, which generally can be difficult to live up to. So, you remember a large number of funny jokes - but forget the dead space between them. Or you are seeing them from a position of a more responsible/experienced adult, or with societal norms having changed.
Sure, certain works can be amusing on repeated reads/viewings. But it is exceedingly rare for a work to impress me as being as funny on repetition as when I first encountered them.
Moreover, humor is so personal, it is VERY challenging to convince someone that something you thought funny - especially some time in the past - will be funny to them.
I have gravitated to humor all my life, and I’ve been consistently disappointed on rewatching Mel Brooks, Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Woody Allen, Monty Python, EVERY TV show mentioned upthread, reading Dortmunder, Wodehouse, etc.
My fave repeat watches are likely Blues Brothers and Caddyshack. And the last time I saw both of those (within the past year) I thought it would be a while befor I needed to watch them again.
One definitely needs a period of R&R after seeing one’s favorite comedies for a while. I recently started watching Seinfeld and Two and a Half Men again after an interval of several years. The initial “shock” factor is long gone, but I still laugh at the jokes and enjoy waiting for them to come up, based on what I remember.