What's a laugh?
The sound of common-sense falling apart
What's common-sense? A million unthinking hearts
At the end of the working day
And who am I?
Call me the barman standing waiting for the workers
To drink their work away

I'm the man who serves the laughter
To the drunkards of disaster
After they've got plastered on the news
And I've got the situation comedy blues

What's the situation?
This man has been abandoned by his woman
What's the reason?
He's lost his sense of humour
This man is sober
And so he's gone to bed with another writer's scripts
And his wife has had to move in with her mother

And the man who serves the laughter
To the drunkards of disaster
After they've got plastered on the news
Has got the situation comedy blues
He's been devising a new series
Where the first man to appear is
Pakistani and the second is a queer
Who rings the bell in tights and biker's gear
And he tells them that he's sorry to disturb them
But the sari that the wife had on today was out of sight
And could he maybe borrow it tonight?

And the man who serves the laughter
To the drunkards of disaster
After they've got plastered on the news
Has got the situation comedy blues

So the Paki asks the queen in to his brilliantly-lit kitchen
Where he demonstrates his do-it-yourself tools
He's the type who doesn't gladly suffer fools
But he electrocutes his finger in his biggest Black and Decker
When his wife appears in towel and rubber hat
And the bath she s running floods the neighbours' flat

I've been sitting here unhappily
Trying to write this comedy
When I hear a sudden laugh in the next room
And thinking it's my woman who's come home
I call her name expectantly and, glad that she's come back to me
I throw away my trivialising pen
And then the television laughs again
Marie come back to me