Laughter really is the best medicine.

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Foody asked the other day, what we thought people in the future would find funny?

I have often wondered that myself.

Over my sixty odd years of life I have seen many changes in humour.

I believe real humour is dead or driven underground. Killed off by the PC brigade.

The late Bernard Manning used to have a joke - 'I once got the sack for laughing.' Then after a silence he admitted: 'I was driving a hearse.'

It was a sad joke really, for in the end Manning really did get the sack for laughing. His brand of humour was considered too sexist, too racist, too just-about-everything-ist for today's po-faced Britain.

Ban jokes about Mother-in laws.

Ban jokes about the English, Irish and Scots.

Ban jokes about the bald and the short and the tall.

What have we left?

Grown men making childish faces at the camera and expecting a laugh. Jokes today are lavatorial, crude and vulgar while at the same time being somehow shamelessly politically correct.

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As children we would laugh at anything and what a happy childhood we had.

Mr Pastry and Billy Bunter for a start. It was OK to laugh at a fat boy then, but now taboo.

Mind you with all this childhood obesity, perhaps a few jokes would get them to lose a bit of weight.

I don’t like jokes about disabilities though. At school there were unfortunately quite a few of these.

Now jokes about the Irish, English and the Scots - and any other group for that matter I like - and don’t get offended in the slightest. I have always though that the one thing a true Brit has - is the ability to laugh at himself.

I have no hair on my head; Do I get upset at jokes about bald men; Not in the slightest.

Do Mother-in- Laws really get upset? No, because they know what is said is an exaggeration and is only a joke.

Do the Scots get upset about money jokes? Mrs Successful tells me not.

In Ireland, the jokes are made about Kerry men. In other parts of Europe the same jokes are made about Poles. It would be a mad world if we really thought that Irish people or Poles were really more stupid than the rest of us.

But never to make such jokes is actually very patronising to whichever group you are allegedly trying to protect.

It implies that all Irish people, or all Kerry men - are such wimps, and so in need of protection, that you must never, in any circumstances, make jokes about them.

I would much rather live in a world where comedians sometimes 'go too far', than in a tight-lipped dictatorship where you do not dare to make a joke because someone else will think it 'totally unacceptable'.

As they used to say in that soon to be lost “Reader’s Digest”… .

Laughter really is the best medicine.

Humour should not need censorship.

Jokes sometimes are cruel.

Let’s have a laugh and see if us men get upset?

“Men are like carpet tiles. If you lay them right the first time, you can walk all over them for years.”