What do you get if you cross Jane Russell and a game of pontoon?
Answer: the most influential joke in the history of British comedy
IT was a standard joke about a Hollywood bombshell and the size of her bust, but its effects on British comedy lasted long after the laughter stopped.
In fact comedy historians speculate that had the joke had never been written, the likes of characters such as Albert Steptoe, Basil Fawlty and The
Office’s David Brent might never have been created. The joke, known as “the Jane Russell pontoon sketch”, was submitted by the writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson to a BBC producer for a radio show in 1951. On the strength of it, the producer teamed up Galton and Simpson with Tony Hancock, and the trio went on to create Hancock’s Half
Hour and also some of the archetypes of British sitcom which continue to define the genre to this day.
A rare recording of the Jane Russell pontoon sketch was unearthed last year and was yesterday played to an audience for the first time in 65 years.
Galton and Simpson’s work – particularly Hancock’s Half Hour and Step
toe and Son – went on to influence later comics, such as Paul Merton, David Mitchell, Robert Webb and Steve Coogan. Hancock’s Half Hour, in particular, was a pioneer of the British sitcom and its influence can be seen in later unsuccessful, frustrated characters such as Fawlty and Brent.
Tristan Brittain-Dissont, an amateur comedy historian who discovered the lost recording, said: “From that meeting we have Hancock’s Half Hour, and then Steptoe And Son. And you can draw an arc from Hancock all the way through comedy history, through Step
toe, Captain Mainwaring, Basil Fawlty, Alan Partridge, even to David Brent.
“And therefore, in my opinion, this is one of the most important jokes ever written.” The gag was written by hand and sent to the BBC in the summer of 1951, where Derek Roy, a producer-performer, bought it for five shillings for his radio show Happy Go Lucky. It sparked a collaboration between Roy and the writing duo which led to them being appointed staff writers after
Happy Go Lucky’s previous team was fired amid falling ratings.
Hancock had a regular sketch on the programme, called The Eager Beavers.
At a rehearsal of Galton and Simpson’s first full-length show, at the Paris Theatre on Nov 11 1951, Hancock turned to the pair and said: “Very funny.”
The recording played yesterday was made at a performance of Variety Ahoy!, a radio show which toured naval bases performing live for seamen, on Jan 22 1952. Mr Brittain-Dissont discovered the joke on an acetate disc in the British Library early last year, while trawling through a collection Roy bequeathed to the library upon his death. The joke itself was originally used in a longer sketch called Captain Noseblower, set on a pirate ship.
In it the crew are discussing how to kill time and one suggests they play a game of Jane Russell pontoon. His shipmate asks: “Is that the same as ordinary pontoon?” To which the first replies: “It is, but you need 42 to bust.”
Russell was one of the first global sex symbols on account of her curvaceous figure. Or as Bob Hope put it at the time: “Culture is the ability to describe Jane Russell without using your hands.” The clip was played yesterday at Birmingham University, in Hancock’s home town, as part of an event which included screenings of two lost episodes of Hancock’s Half Hour and several recordings of Cross
roads, previously thought to have been destroyed.
‘From that meeting, we have Hancock’s Half Hour, and then Steptoe and Son, all the way to David Brent’