Shocking, but no substitute for comedy at full-throttle

Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson has offended many people over the years with his irreverent comments.

For some people, calling Clarkson irreverent would be carrying litotes right out to the very edge of life as we know it. In their eyes, Clarkson is a rude, wildly inappropriate, conceited, and exceedingly badly dressed disgrace to all things BBC. An oaf.

I remember being chewed up for sliding a half-compliment Clarkson's way in this column last year, and this was from a person who has made me laugh uproariously since 1979, a woman, to paraphrase Mick Jagger, of comedic wealth and taste. Yes I do find Jeremy Clarkson funny.

Rude, wildly inappropriate, conceited and exceedingly badly dressed? All of those. But funny with it. Two weeks ago, in the Sunday Times, he said people from Birmingham constantly buy cars with jerky steering, which is why their faces look like jacket potatoes.

A lesser man would have stolen that phrase. I know I did. I used it four different ways on four different people the next day and smiled modestly four different times as they laughed like four different drains. Exaggeration, yes, something Clarkson has mastered.

He exaggerates exaggeration. How cruel to the spine, he asked, is the new Mercedes AMG C63 Black Series? Apparently it's like being inside a fridge-freezer tumbling end over end down the side of a rocky escarpment.

Just the sort of quote the car company wants for their ads in expensive corporate magazines. But they still send him five cars per week.

When it comes to inappropriate irreverence, Clarkson is clearly the man he looks : large, loud and ill-kempt.

One suspects he has been the noisiest man at every dinner party he has ever attended. Only on Stephen Fry's excellent Qi has he gone even half-quiet, and even then he still talked more than anyone else. He was also, in a room of stellar quick-wits, the quickest and wittiest.

Our high-school English teacher, who was irreverent and inappropriate to the point where a modern-day board of trustees would have sacked him three times in a single period, once defined humour for us as a shock which made you laugh.

This made sense; we had just discovered Beyond The Fringe, which was one riotously pants-wetting shock after another. When our teacher peeled off a Fringe-like line, something rude, unkind and awful, he would open his palms innocently and ask why we were laughing.

At his trial before the board, I daresay he would have said we were misunderstanding normal, everyday language. Three times a period.

I've stayed with that teacher's definition all my life. And I should perhaps add, rudely, unkindly and awfully, that this teacher went on to another school from where he was dismissed for spending thousands of their dollars on racehorses. That was a shock that made us laugh.

There are people out there with no sense of humour who laugh all the time. They are happy people; they just don't understand funny. It has to be a shock as well. A shock in itself is not funny.

The recent Australian movie Snow Town was a real shock and was most certainly not funny. It is a shock when Clarkson says Mexicans are fat and fart all the time, but it wouldn't be a shock if he said that about Central Otago cows. Which of the two do we laugh at?

Please don't say neither. A joke whose punch-line can be seen three blocks away isn't funny because it isn't a shock. I know this, as there is no worse teller of jokes in the Southern Pacific Basin than me.

I don't remember all the key details and when I can't remember the punch-line at the end, my listeners tell me that's because I gave it to them halfway through. And then they call me a jacket potato.

Jeremy Clarkson shocks deliberately and he makes me laugh. I hope the BBC, for whom he brings in 35 million a year, keeps him on.

 - Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.