83 Ridiculously British Signs That Deserve To Be Framed

Of course, day-to-day humor in the UK isn’t some kind of caricature where people only crack jokes about cuppas and rainy weather. But it is instantly recognizable and widely loved by people overseas.

It’s also had a long history in the making. Even centuries ago, Shakespeare was just as deadpan and sharp-tongued as modern Brits are. If you didn’t know, the man came up with some truly spectacular insults, including “More of your conversation would infect my brain” and the iconic “What, you egg? Young fry of treachery!”

Yes, those are real lines from Shakespearean works. Look them up.

So what exactly defines UK humor? Well, according to the British Council, there are a few key ingredients. Wit and wordplay are a big one, with puns and clever double meanings being second nature to most.

Then there’s the classic dry, deadpan delivery, where someone says something hilarious with a completely straight face. Sarcasm and irony also play a huge role, used to poke fun and amuse in equal measure.

And finally, there’s observational comedy, which takes the most boring, everyday situations and makes them genuinely funny by pointing out how absurd they really are.

As for where all of this actually comes from, that’s a harder question to answer. Dr. Ian Wilkie, a lecturer in performance at the University of Salford, told the BBC that many people, especially younger American students, tend to think of British humor as being the same thing as Monty Python.

By that, he explained, they mean “a sort-of slightly erring towards the surreal, very iconoclastic in terms of attacking the big targets, very silly.” But he doesn’t think “that cuts the mustard.”

Part of the reason is that humor in the UK changes a lot depending on where you are. Dr. Wilkie pointed out that there are already noticeable differences between the four home nations, and it gets even more varied between the major cities.

Scottish humor, for example, tends to favor witty and hard-hitting jokes, often with a mocking edge to them. And while there are similarities between the humor found in Glasgow and other port cities like Liverpool, that doesn’t necessarily carry over into Welsh or broader English comedy.

The interesting thing is that, as much as we like to think of British humor as something that was born and bred in the UK, it was actually shaped by a lot of outside influence.

The kind of loud, exaggerated characters that are common in British comedy, for instance, can be traced back to Commedia dell’arte, a form of theatre from 16th-century Italy that involved recognizable characters and witty dialogue.

Surrealism, often seen as a key part of British comedy, was originally done by Dadaist artists from countries like Germany.

“They were doing surrealism to the nth degree, quite deliberately as a performative art, in the early part of the 20th Century,” Dr. Wilkie told the BBC. “I think it’s something we like to appropriate in a way and imagine that we’re the custodians of it, but it’s not culturally specific at all.”