The best jokes are parochial, not universal

Some forms of humour transcend national boundaries. The rambling, surrealist monologues of Eddie Izzard go down particularly well in Sweden. Norman Wisdom's slapstick antics tickled communist Albania. Clowning is truly universal.

But I'd argue that the best jokes, in their purest linguistic form, are parochial. They rely on a shared language, history or view of the world. Racist, sexist or other "ist" jokes are exclusive because they ask you to laugh at someone outside the identity group. Pure gags surprise us with the familiar and make us part of an exclusive club without sneering at those who don't belong. We get it, geddit?

Jonathan Swift noted that the sweetly evocative phrase "the sight of you is good for sore eyes" was in common parlance in 1738. Today we comprehend it without thinking about it. Vine slams it up to date and shakes us out of our linguistic complacency, just as he did when he placed second on the list of top jokes from the 2011 Edinburgh Festival with this gem: "Crime in multi-storey car parks: it's wrong on so many levels." There, we're led up the garden path of strangeness before he dumps us in the fishpond of familiarity.

Weirdly, one joke by Sarah Millican appeared on both the Edinburgh and the Lafta lists: "My mother told me, you don't have to put anything in your mouth that you don't want to. Then she fed me broccoli, which seemed like double standards." Not bad. But you could translate it into German, or Italian or French, and it would more or less work - which is why it's less funny than either of Vine's.

Several years of trying, and failing, to find quips that my 11-year-old, half-Danish nephew can both understand and relay to his friends in the Copenhagen playground have shown me how much I love jokes that rely on idiomatic English. Try this: "I woke up this morning to find a plane in my bedroom - I'd left the landing light on." Or this: "I told my doctor I can't pronounce the letters F, T or N. He said: 'You can't say fairer than that.'" Or this: "What did the inflatable headmaster say to the inflatable boy who took a pin to the inflatable school? 'You've let me down, you've let the school down, but worst of all, you've let yourself down.'"

Beautiful though colloquial gags are, there's something to be said for a joke that is both linguistically clever and understandable to all.

What's more, a 2002 study by the University of Hertfordshire found it, and traced it back to a 1950 Goon Show written by Spike Milligan. A 999 operator takes a call from a hunter in the woods, who says his friend has collapsed and might be dead. "First make sure he's dead," says the operator. There's a pause, then a gunshot, before the hunter comes back on the line. "Okay," he says. "Now what?"

Boom boom.