It’s a strange cove, is your comedy. Obviously, when it’s fresh nothing can give greater satisfaction. But it does have a distinct tendency to go off like yesterday’s fish. That said, ladled down with enough rose-tinted nostalgia (for hearing it performed hot off the presses first time around when in one’s prime), it can retain a surprising level of palatability entirely baffling to the contemporary audient coming to the stuff almost 60 years later.
This, then, is the dilemma. As a former short-trousered oik who legged it home to witness the Bonzos anarchically tearing it up on Do Not Adjust Your Set back in ’68, it’ll probably come as no surprise that I pretty much arf myself insideout ever single time I hear The Intro And The Outro (“Adolf Hitler on vibes”? Never not funny). But, in light of this fact, am I the right person to recommend these proto-Python war babies, these pre-rock-era-weaned musical Dadaists to a generation who’ve grown up with Inside Number 9 and Fleabag?
