are often left a little vague. It isn’t that we crudely want entertainment – there

are enough comedians on TV. We don’t just want a laugh per se.

For two people to be able to tolerate one another over time we need to laugh.

In the nicest way at our partner and at ourselves. Spending time closely around someone

inevitably exposes us to constant departures from what we can call normality or balance. Our partners

will be a little crazy in many areas and we will be too of course. They might turn out

to ring their mother five times a day, clean the kitchen as if surgery was going to be performed

there, always insist on inviting friends around

or want to arrive at the airport six hours before a flight.

We need to say something, but doing so directly and in a serious voice can be painfully counter-productive.

Too often, the partner just feels swiftly attacked and refuses the insight. Leading to stifled irritation and bitterness. This is

where humour comes in. Humour is the most effective way of criticising another person without

arousing their irritation or self-righteousness. Their laughter isn’t just fun it's a

sign that they have acknowledged an attempt to reform them.

If people tend to get annoyed when criticism is delivered in a serious tone, it's

It's that they can't see the extent to which their attitudes have abandoned proportion and balance.

They are unable to spot their deviation from the mature meme.

So the comedic gesture involves subjecting the troublesome aspect of the other

to extreme exaggeration – which then jolts them

into recognition of a problem, while at the same time offering them the

relief of feeling that they arn't, of course, quite that bad.

In the late 1980s, the then British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher grew increasingly authoritarian with her colleagues and fellow

politicians. Serious-minded articles appeared in newspapers urging the Prime Minister to

be more collegiate and empathetic. It didn’t work at all; Mrs Thatcher simply got offended

and dug in. But then a comedy show using puppets called Spitting Image turned the Prime Minister

into a deep-voiced, psychopathic matron with a tendency to whack her naughty colleagues

over the head with a truncheon. This obviously wasn’t how Mrs Thatcher actually behaved,

and yet it was a tenfold exaggeration of a real – and painful – truth about her.

Remarkably, presented in this form, the Prime Minister could see the point, felt assuaged

by the wildness of the exaggeration and was in a position to laugh at herself. In her

memoirs, she recalled tuning into the programme and chuckling – realising that she would

henceforth need to learn to reign in a tendency that had clearly gotten out of hand. The comedy

show was rehearsing a move we all need constantly to make in our relationships.

Here too we should use the tacit of kindly comic exaggeration.

To point out the failings of another person.

Imagine responding to a partner who had become overly agitated about signs of dirt in the kitchen

in answer we might massively over-play the gravity of the issue and insist: ‘Let’s commit suicide

over the bread crumbs by the sink: you’re right, life is no longer worth living on these

term; We could nip round to the late night pharmacy and get a bottle of sleeping pills

or take the bread knife to those larger veins in our ankles. Soon, we won’t have to worry

about this messy world any longer. Come on, it could even be fun.’ One would during

the speech need to be chirpy, relaxed, with just a playful twitch of the lips as one elaborated

the technical details. As comedians know, tone is everything. The comic move is to blow up

departures from the norm to such manifestly absurd proportions, that even the partner

can see them for what they always were: over-reactions. Comedy skilfully teaches us that the way to

get someone to see that they have over-reacted is not to sound mature and reasonable. It’s

to continue to pump up the problem until the over-reaction becomes so clear, so benign

by its outsize dimensions that our audience starts to laugh. We’ll have learnt to criticise

through humour – and our relationships will be a whole lot more secure as a result, especially

when we allow our lover to magnify our own failings into jokes in turn.