Whoever heard of a stand-up comedian telling jokes?

AA GILL wrote a long piece of hatred against jokes and joke- telling in the August 14 edition of the Spectator. I think he was probably on the right track. Most jokes, whether about a guy who goes into a pub or about, say, Jill Dando, are a waste of time, or, at best, a time-filler, and almost all of them are endlessly recycled.

Some years ago Jonathan Miller dealt with this very well in a lecture entitled "Why do women tell jokes badly?", in which he put forward the convincing theory that women tell jokes seldom (and therefore badly) because they don't actually need to tell jokes. They have conversation instead. They are good at talking about people, and problems, and situations, and relationships, and about domesticity and life.

Men are not good at talking about real life, so they talk about other things, such as sport, and things on the telly, and the performance of cars. And, above all, they tell jokes.

Incidentally, laughter-resistance may be contagious in the Spectator magazine. In the issue now out, Philip Hensher writes a long bad-tempered piece about the William books by Richmal Crompton, saying they are sentimental, unrealistic, socially naive and class- ridden. Absolutely right, I am sure. But nowhere in the piece does he mention that they are also some of the funniest books ever to be written. Maybe the Spectator is, after all, developing into a completely laughter-free zone.

Now, I want to say straightaway that although I think Hensher is talking through his politically correct hat, I am sure that Gill is right about the existence of the joke-dependent culture. So why do I find his diatribe unsatisfying ?

I suppose partly because it's all so obvious, as if he had written an article condemning bad driving, but even more because his crossness has clearly deafened him to the world around him. For instance, he says: "Stand-up comedians suck their teeth and say joke-telling is the hardest thing in the world." Then he goes on to tell us how wrong they are, that anyone with a bit of talent can make a drunk student audience laugh.

Do you see the flaw in this argument? That's right. It's the assumption that stand-up comedians tell jokes. But, AA, they stopped doing that years ago! Even if the very old comic practitioners, like Bob Monkhouse and Jim Davison, still tell jokes, the whole point about alternative comedy, as it used to be called, was that it did away with the joke. Young comedians stopped telling jokes. Alexei Sayle and Ben Elton never told jokes. They said funny things about the world, which is a very different thing.

No, today's stand-ups are more likely to tell autobiographical stories, or, instead, give us mock confessions, or rueful admissions, or relate fantasy tales about their own lives. And this can start very early, even when you have very little life behind you.

I was up in Edinburgh the year that Victoria Coren did a stand-up season, and she was so young at the time that when she did a routine about the inadequacy of babysitters, she wasn't reflecting on how difficult it was to find a decent one when you want to go out, she was criticising the odd babysitters that her parents had inflicted on her. There was a sort of silent gasp from the audience at the idea of anyone being young enough to remember what it was like to be baby-sat - and then getting up to confess it.

But what today's comedians are even more likely to do is choose characters and tell us what the world looks like through their eyes.

Murray, the man who has just won this year's Perrier Award and thus belatedly restored its reputation in my eyes, is one such comedian. He has invented a twinkly, but hugely grouchy, British pub landlord who can explain everything, defend everything and attack everything. I saw him on tour at the Merlin Theatre, in Frome, Somerset, much earlier this year, and his hour on stage as the hectoring pub landlord was a tour de force. It was about the funniest single monologue I have ever heard.

Oddly, you got no feeling from this performance as to what Murray himself was actually like. He could be a learned Oxford graduate with a good idea; he could be an East End funny man with a good act. God knows how he gets on in interviews - who does he pretend to be ? But on stage, as the landlord who is vaguely reminiscent of Alf Garnett and twice as inventive, he is wonderfully politically incorrect and wonderfully funny, and he tells not one single joke.

Hensher would probably not get the point, as he can't get the point about William Brown, but Gill might possibly laugh, if he ever got out and about a bit and went to see a post-Monkhouse comedian.