Some may well be wondering just what I find to be funny or amusing, well I love clever wordplay and inventive insults that make good use of the delights of the English language Boris Johnson, the current Mayor of London is a talented wit.

• Last year, when the London assembly voted not to debate Johnson’s budget amendment and requested that he leave the hearing, he berated them as “great supine, protoplasmic invertebrate jellies“. Once again choosing jelly (see Clegg, above) as his insulting noun of choice, he qualified it with no less than four adjectives. Great, meaning large; invertebrate, meaning spineless (not like those spine-riddled jellies you get nowadays); supine, meaning inactive (again, not to be confused with those jellies you see hard at work, doing press-ups and the like) and protoplasmic – an especially odd choice of adjective for a jelly, as protoplasm is the colloidal liquid from which cells are formed.

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I am very much inclined to thinking that Johnson is channelling Oscar Wilde in his put downs and insults and it should surprise no one that Wilde is also right up there on my list of great wits and masters of the Queen’s English. However when it comes to contemporary humorists and purveyors of satire  my tastes are very eclectic and largely apolitical. While I certainly do like social commentators like Pat Condell I also enjoy  ardently left wing comedians like Alexi Sale. In many ways I’m pretty old school when it comes to comedy and satire, The Goons, the Goodies  and Monty Python are utterly classic prototypes for good humour as far as I am concerned. They all managed to produce satire and and clever jokes that are largely immune to being dated the way that many contemporary stand up routines that focus on politics become dated.

Cheers Comrades