Tony Walker

This is stand-up, essentially.

Observational stand-up delivered in an Edwardian register.

So if you think of some British comedians now, what they'll do is like Peter Kay and Michael McIntyre or Lee Mack.

And what they do is they take an ordinary situation and narrate it as though they're telling a mate in the pub.

And then you drop in sideways comments that reframes what just happened.

So, the stake that makes him feel he's illustrating Mrs. Selston's surgery lecture, the waterfowl have taken their night off, the ablative absolute.

They're all the same move.

You set the situation straight, that's to say, you set it up as if it's a straight story, then you tilt it, and the laugh comes from the gap between what the narrator is experiencing, a grim stake, a corpse, a blizzard, and the angle he chooses to notice it from.

This is what they all do now.

So, and the parenthetical aside is a key device.

So you basically set a dash followed by a remark that undercuts or deflects the hospitality of my poor roof.

And it was a poor roof, it let the wet in.

Which everyone, so basically they run headlong into a wall.

Oh!

which everyone knows is a fatal thing to do.

So this is, I don't know if the Americans do this, but this is British observational comedy from Music Hall through Hancock and Morecambe and Wise right through Peter Kay doing the biscuit tin routine.

He doesn't tell jokes.

You do get the one line of jokes, a joke, a joke, a joke, a joke.

But there is this tradition of just telling a story and digressing into absurdity.

So you get things like the anatomy wrong on purpose.