Is that possible? I’m sorry but Americans do it far too much.We like to think we here in Britain have a brilliant sense of humour. You hear it about the regions. Liverpudlians? A breed apart, amazing sense of humour. Brummies? So dry, amazing, always get me going. The Scots, Billy Connolly? Say no more. Americans? Nah! No sense of irony?

NO! Americans do comedy brilliantly.

Saturday Night Live. A bedrock of some of the best in the world. A recent discovery is a stand up comedian Nate Baghatze. Dry deadpan delivery with no effingand blinding, nothing crude about him, no shocks. His little sketches on SNL of the captain of the ship addressing his men with proclamations is brilliant. I am assuming he wrote it, but with Americans you cannot be sure, they employ dozens of writers. As do the BBC with their radio comedy: the News Quiz, not my favourite programme has a list of writers at the end. Of course they have, how can you possibly risk going through an episode of that and the various celebs being lost for words. Sadly if you know this it takes the shine off the whole thing. So the so called comedians on the news quiz are not the comedians we think they are, they are actors delivering the writers lines. I hope this has not spoiled it for you.

Meanwhile back to the Americans. I was taken by this chap Nate, and watched a couple of short clips of his stand up, but then found him on a talk show. It appears that he is big news and sells out huge auditoriums with his shows. So now he appears on talk shows, so here’s a bloke who talks for a living talking on a talk show to a talk show host who just laughs far too much. It’s embarrassing and you can almost feel the embarrassment. It’s like every word that comes from this guest is outlandishly funny, and it is patently not. He’s just talking. The talk show host laughs so much he’s almost in need of help with his breathing. The audience is taken in by all this and also laugh at the poor guys every utterance.

Recent news from across the pond means those guys are going to need a sense of humour, and that’s with a ‘u’.