Siblings, seamen, and taking the piss: the surprising history of Liverpudlian humour
Why Scousers are consistently ranked as the funniest people in the UK
You don’t need to be familiar with the long history of professional comics from Merseyside – Ken Dodd, Jimmy Tarbuck, Kenny Everett, Alexei Sayle, Paul O’Grady, John Bishop, Chris McCausland, the list goes on – to know that here in Liverpool, we have an unusually high concentration of prize wits. Pick a Liverpool pub on any given day and you can meet people even funnier.
Of course, humour is subjective. A lot of people in Liverpool think they’re funnier than they are – “Everyone in Liverpool reckons they’re a comedian,” a university friend once complained to me – and most of the professional comics from the city have been, in my view, painfully unfunny. My sides are in no danger of splitting at a John Bishop gig.
Nonetheless, a strong argument can still be made that Liverpool is the funniest city in the UK. In case you think this is one of those self-perpetuated ideas that non-Scousers vehemently refute, plenty of statistical evidence can back me up: a plethora of polls from 2016, 2018, and 2021 all had Liverpool ranked as the funniest place in the UK by fellow Brits. (Cities in the North of England and in Scotland usually rank highly in these surveys, with Edinburgh, Glasgow, Newcastle or Manchester normally the runners-up. In a Comedy Central poll from 2018, 74 per cent of respondents thought that those living in the north of England and Scotland were the funniest, with 61 per cent of Southerners agreeing that people from the north were funnier.)
These polls usually find that people appreciate Liverpool’s dark, dry and sarcastic humour – something that’s persisted for a long time now. A survivor of the sinking of RMS Titanic in 1912 recalled a Scouse member of the crew joking to his fellow shipmates, who were all about to drown: “Sand for breakfast in the morning, lads!”
