I had an exceptional English teacher in the fourth form (no, it wasn't at St Michael's!), who tried to teach us a lot of things about language, and really kindled my interest in it beyond the obvious.
He was an exceptional man, passionate about English but unfortunately also about religion, because he later completely lost the plot and became an Anglican minister. He liked boys (and I DON'T mean that in any salacious way) and tried to get them to think. Part of his approach within the context of studying English was to dissect humour, to try to demonstrate why some wordplay-related things were funny and others went down like a lead balloon. Enter The Goonshow. It's chocka with just about every humorous linguistic device known to mankind. He played excerpts from a number of shows one day and we were to discuss them.
Three of us in the classroom (of some 30 boys) were ROTF almost from the first moments. This was two boys (myself and Jim Mora, now a well-known broadcaster in New Zealand whose commentaries are usually absolutely hilarious) plus said Mr Evans. The rest of the class was more-or-less po-faced. Didn't get the joke at all. Oh, they twitched from time to time, but they just weren't open to that kind of zany play-on-top-of-wordplay. Even at that age they were seriously serious and morbidly career-focussed.
At this point I should point out that the majority of those humourless little twerps went on to become "big men" in Zildish society - doctors, lawyers, teachers, dentists, accountants, a few businessmen and now, one judge. You can tell what a bundle of laughs our class reunions are. I avoid 'em like the plague!
Gawd help us all!
