Not being funny, but each to their own on comedy

YOUR correspondent J Hunter bemoaning the decline in standards of comedy, both on TV and radio, takes a rather roundabout route to reach her conclusion (Yorkshire Post, January 16) and loses, I fear, the whole point of her argument.

She may well be correct in saying that she regards “contemporary comedians’ approaches to humour as being distasteful at times, as well as unkind”, but the flaw in her argument, as I see it, is that the comedic examples given are outdated, and given the development of everything else including technology as well as language, these examples do not support her premise.

What I fail to see is the correlation between letter writing and script writing. The former is to be read, usually in silence, and not “performed” by the recipient, while the latter is a performance art which is to be assisted by the skill of the delivery.

Using the example of Blackadder, your correspondent appears to omit the fact that the script was written by a very funny, and dare I say “modern” comedian and that the actors were performing his lines.

Stating the blindingly obvious fact that “the quality of comedy on TV is related to the quality of the script writing” is, and should have been, the point of the letter and made in the first paragraph.

Meandering through once-upon-a-time TV shows is hardly conducive to making a point about current styles and what improvements must or should be made.

Letter writing is not, and should never be, a way of using as many words as possible to make one’s self understood but should, in the words of Marcus Fabius Quintilian “not aim at being possible to understand, but at being impossible to misunderstand”.