Those who like to laugh abandoned Hope long ago

He may have been born British in the London suburb of Eltham; but the humour of Bob Hope, dead this week at 100, was wholly American. (It was Hope who was dead at 100 this week, I mean, not the humour. Many non-Americans doubt whether that was ever much alive.) To many of us, especially in Britain, he was unforgettably unfunny. In these islands, he kept us unsmiling in the grim years of the war. His being wholly American was why. His humour was verbal. As a rule, American humour only makes Britons laugh when it is visual. Thus we think Harold Lloyd a comic genius and his cameraman even more so. But, with a few exceptions, most Britons only find American verbal humour funny when it is unintentional, Many Britons would have stared uncomprehendingly at quite a few of the examples on the lists of Hope jokes in the newspapers on the morning after his death. There was the one after he met Prince Charles in 1976: 'He was bare-chested and in good trim. I said that just looking at him I knew there would always be an England.' But England is not especially associated with bare-chested men. It is not even associated — compared with, say, France, or with certain African tribes — with bare-chested women. Nor is England associated with men in good trim, and, certainly not in 1976, with women in that enviable condition. Perhaps Hope was being ironic. But irony is un-American. So we scanned the passage in search of the missing word that constituted the joke, and all we found was a missing joke.

At last we knew what it must be like to be German. The whole world was laughing at something, except us. This was appropriate. For, except for his kindness, the only other nationality one could imagine Hope being was German. He was, for many of us, that unfunny. Suppose his family had emigrated from Eltham to Berlin. 'Bob Hoffnung dead at 100: comedian who played golf with every chancellor from Bethmann-Hollweg to Schroder.' The ensuing list of jokes would have been more appropriate to his audience.

But there is also the speculation: 'What would his career have been had he remained in the country of his birth? By necessity, not that of comedian; not if he wanted to be the guest of successive British prime ministers, in the way that he was of successive American presidents. For our great comedians have always been subversive of respectability, which Hope — being a good man — never was. Even if their dates had matched, we could not imagine a great British comedian, say. Max Miller, getting on with the great British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

Miller: "Ullo, Prime Minister. 'Ere, a terrible thing 'appened to me today. M'wife ran off wiv m'best friend. God, I'll miss 'im.'

Mrs Thatcher: 'Surely, Mr Miller, you must mean the other way around.'

Nor do American comedians have much of a view for the comic potential of words in themselves. Here is Tommy Cooper: 'So I said to my wife, I said, -Remember that water-proof, dust-proof, rust-proof, shockproof watch you bought me for Christmas? Well, luv, it caught fire."' Another difference between American and British comedians is the crucial importance that the British attach to 'camp' — usually combined with that special use of words. All these years later. I can remember a sketch on the Sunday lunchtime radio show of the Fifties and Sixties, Round the Home. involving two great artists, Kenneth Home and Kenneth Williams, in which Home is in the palace of some Oriental despot — to the background squeaks and twangs of what the BBC sound-effects people of the day considered Arab music.

Horne: `Aha! Suddenly there bears down upon us the terrifying figure of Abdul Ali Big Ben Rashid. the Butcher of Baghdad.'

Williams (in that effeminate whine which was the basis of his fame): `Oooh! 'Alio.'

Home: 'M'boy, you'll have to be butcher than that.'

In former days, the importance that American males attached to appearing 'masculine' would have deterred an American Kenneth Williams. Today, fear of negative stereotyping of gays would.

I said earlier that many Britons found Americans' intentional verbal humour unfunny, but with a few exceptions. Groucho Marx sometimes; but many Marx Brothers jokes were visual, though none the worse for that. The old New Yorker wits occasionally; and I remember laughing aloud at the late Dwight Macdonald's film criticism, as when — noting that an important Roman who was persecuting Jews in a Hollywood biblical epic was yet again played by a Briton — he observed that the British were once more the fall goys.

But one of the best intentionally funny Americans in history was undoubtedly Ronald Reagan. His opponents bandied around his unintentional humour, as they do the equally funny, unintentional jokes of George W. Bush. But Reagan's intentional jokes were even better. I walked behind him, with another British journalist, in a small and deserted town during the 1980 New Hampshire primary, his victory in which led him to the White House. There being few voters around and, hearing us talking, he turned around: 'Hey, are you guys from England?'

When we confirmed it, he put his hand on my shoulder: 'My films were never big in England. Must have been that innate English good taste.'

I assured him: 'That's not true, Mr Reagan. In fact, I saw Bringing Up Baby again only last night. Did you know they're doing all your films late at night on one of the New Hampshire television channels?'

'I know. I know,' he said, with a heavy sigh and dejected shake of the head. 'My opponents will stop at nothing. D'you think I should demand the right of reply?'

But it was an old British joke, suitably adapted, which drifted back into the mind with last week's pictures of President Bush driving Signor Berlusconi in a car at the Bush ranch in Texas.

Signor Berlusconi: 'How big is your ranch, Mr President?'

Mr Bush: 'Well, Mr Berlingtoni, if we wanted to drive across it in this car, it would take half a day.'

Signor Berlusconi: 'I know the problem. I too once had one of these slow American cars.'