Have you heard the one about Snow White and the Seven Dwarves? There was this man, right, who needed a password eight characters long, and… and then he went and gave away the punchline before he’d done the set-up.

I’m hopeless at jokes. I told one to my children the other day that got a laugh, but for the wrong reason, because they’d heard the correct version before. “What’s the secret of timing a joke?” I said. “No, wait, that doesn’t sound right…”

So I’ll try again. As is traditional at this time of year, the best joke of the Edinburgh Fringe has been named. Written by the comedian Nick Helm, it goes like this: “I needed a password eight characters long, so I picked ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarves’.” The second-best joke this year was written by the man who wrote the best joke last year, Tim Vine: “Crime in multi-storey car parks. That is wrong on so many different levels.”

Yet as Evan Davis and Justin Webb showed on Today when they took it in turns to read out the winner and runner-up, these things are so subjective that it is meaningless to try to judge them. They both thought a gag about the Greek economy that a listener had sent in (it involved taramasalata, hummus and a double dip) was better.

Even worse than judging jokes is trying to analyse them, an exercise Woody Allen satirises in Crimes and Misdemeanours. His character has an annoyingly unfunny brother-in-law, played by Alan Alda, who keeps saying: “If it bends, it’s funny; if it breaks, it’s not funny.”
Yet despite the obvious danger of murdering in order to dissect, trying to work out a formula for funniness seems to obsess comedians. I once interviewed Bob Monkhouse who, on a summer afternoon in his garden in Bedfordshire, gave me a masterclass in how to tell a joke, talking me through the principles of timing, “the rule of three”, and the Arthur Askey “check step” you should take before delivering your “topper”. He also told me that the joke he was most proud of was: “I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my father. Not screaming and terrified, like his passengers.” The reason? Economy.

The heir to Monkhouse, though he probably won’t thank me for saying so, is Jimmy Carr, a Cambridge graduate who has written a semi-academic book on joke-telling. And the latest comedian to do something similar is Stewart Lee, an Oxford graduate whose strange and brilliant memoir, How I Escaped My Certain Fate, has just been published in paperback. In it, he deconstructs his own stand-up routine using footnotes, explaining why he creates tension here, cuts the audience some slack there.

I blame the German philosophers, who couldn’t bear to leave comedy alone, either. Kant would write dusty observations such as: “Laughter is an effect that arises if a tense expectation is transformed into nothing.”

Fortunately, most of us can get through life without either analysing jokes or telling them in public. About the only time we men have to do it is when we’re made best man. In this respect, a friend of mine, a garden historian, had the worst gig ever. He was best man to Stewart Lee, and the cream of the British comedy world was in his audience. He thought it went well. They seemed to laugh in the right places. But as he was walking back to his seat, he overheard someone ask Harry Hill what he thought of the speech. He gave a one-word answer: “Long.”