With ISIRTA, the show became too cosy for Cleese: because performers were perceived as playing versions of themselves, and because of the long-running nature of the programme, the audience, which included a fair number of regular attenders, became, perhaps, too proprietorial than is comfortable for someone listening alone at home: laughing/groaning more loudly than a typical audience as though to affirm the importance of their own role in the proceedings.
So I would say it's not just the quality of the puns but the interaction between the material and the audience/performer relationship in that particular case. Mind you, because the performers are indeed so charming and because there was certainly a degree of craft in the recent edition ("I'm going off my nut, Meg!") it's relatively easy to forgive.
With Roy Hudd, if you listen to some editions of Huddlines he will lapse into a Max Wall voice at the point of pun delivery, a device which is both apologetic (I can't bear to say this in my normal voice) and (as with allusions to Gert and Daisie in some sketches) also serves to highlight the rich comic heritage which Huddlines draws on (the opening monologue was very much in the style of Max Miller).
The Wildbeest Years puns appeal to me less - maybe because I don't feel the same relationship with the performers as those in ISIRTA, plus those piscatorial ones an episode or two ago didn't sound as well crafted as those in the recent ISIRTA.
But to sum up, delivery plus awareness of audience relationship is everything. Plus, as Ivor says, the surprise element. Also on both ISIRTA and Wildbeest, it's also about the effects of bombardment, so not about the quality of individual jokes but the cumulative effect. I'd also refer readers to the repeats of The Consultants coming up - can't think of individual examples but I seem to recall they have some pretty good ones very carefully presented to an unsuspecting audience...
***
Listening again to part of this week's broadcast of ISIRTA at lunchtime (look, I have a minidisc player, lots of cheap blanks and not much imagination, alright? Happy now?) and trying to work out why the puns were so acceptable, I was aware the whole thing was exceptionally well orchestrated: other forms of wordplay for contrast; lightning delivery etc. When you get a bit of sophistication you are more inclined to digest the rest - as though the puns are the greens you're conned into eating because of the layout of the plate. Think I found the fish puns in a recent Wildebeest undigestible because they were unrelenting, unvaried and not all that good (and yes, I know that may have been the intention).
For obvious reasons I cannot comment on the second part of Ivor's post but certainly part of the fun of Milton Jones is the implied attitude: a bit like Steven Wright it appears to be a matter of indifference to him whether you get the joke or not - he's not audibly selling it - and that kind of forces you to come to him, like an unamplified singer who forces a keener attention out of an audience. Very crafty.
But I think in both cases it's not about the pun per se so much as the quality of the presentation around it so you're reassured that the performer is indeed capable of more and then you can relax into this infantile pleasure.
***
I suppose the trouble - if you need to call it that - with ISIRTA from Cleese's point of view is that a show which depends on the likeability of its performers (or a version of themselves, anyway) is restricted - ie it can't explore some of the darker corners which Monty Python could. (And before anyone protests, yes, that particular show gives you a great deal to compensate for that restriction and I greatly enjoy it.)
I suppose the appeal of puns in personality-heavy comedy shows is that the focus is on the performers: the subtext roughly equates to "Laugh at my daring and impudence in presenting this weak material to you as acceptable humour" - sometbing which wouldn't work if the same material was delivered by anonymous actors. (By the by, this may also be why Eddie Braben's self-presented radio programmes don't quite work.)
Have just been looking at the Pythons' autobiography: interesting to see that Cleese praises the programme as "wonderful practice" for the rigours of live TV which he was doing around the same time (The Frost Report): "like warming up in the nets before you go out to the middle to play cricket" but finally says that although the experience of so many radio broadcasts improved his comic technique "Eventually, the audience became so much an integral part of the programme, and being a bit of a purist, as I certainly was in those days, I got fed up with the fact that so much was based on pun, which I did think was the lowest form of wit."
***
Erm, I hate to be technical (actually, I love it) but the Temazepam joke is not a pun, is it?
It's not a play on two similar sounding words (like Catholic / cataholic) but instead depends on the differences between two related interpretations of the same word: inner peace stemming from a sense of emotional wellbeing vs. a chemically induced version of the same thing.
Anyway, generally, I'm with Lewis Carroll's Snark on this. Of the five unmistakeable signs of a genuine Snark, according to the Bellman,
The third is its slowness in taking a jest.
Should you happen to venture on one,
It will sigh like a thing that is deeply distressed:
And it always looks grave at a pun.
***
... and if you're not familiar with it, find Lewis Carroll's poem The Hunting of the Snark here in all its batty glory:
www.theotherpages.or...
I suspect that the Bellman, leader of the voyage, may have been predisposed towards puns himself to judge from the familiar-sounding reaction of his shipmates in this verse:
The Bellman pereived that their spirits were low,
And repeated in musical tone,
Some jokes he had kept for a season of woe ---
But the crew would do nothing but groan.
***
Reminds me of of a Lord Snooty episode in the Beano when Snooty and his pals are informed they are ineligible for the winning prize in a competition: "Oh dear - we thought that meant 'No coal miners.'"
***
A good 'un. And the real fun of that gag, I think, is in that marvellous understatement of things "going a bit sour" - ie the comic effect is as much the result of MJ's care in presenting that pun as in its intrinsic comic potential.
That said, I never, ever found those anecdotes in My Word by Muir and Norden which led us down various tortuous pathways to some painfully punning phrase very funny. And I speak as a fan of Take It From Here.
***
My friend's fave joke from that Goon film The Case of the Mukkinese Battle-Horn:
NARRATOR
Wasting no time, Superintendent Quilt and Sergeant Brown began a thorough search for clues.
BROWN
Look, sir! (points down) An impression of a heel!
QUILT
Very clever, Brown. We haven't time for your impressions now.
***
Whoops - you're right.
Let me instantly deflect attention from my gaffe by calling to mind one of my fave Punch cartoons by Bud Handelsman:
A waiter bearing a plate with a crustacean in a miniature suit , complete with waistcoat and tie, tells a diner:
"It may be a question of semantics, but to me that *says* 'dressed crab.'"
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