By the time he was nineteen, Royston Vasey had married, divorced, fathered two children, spent two years in Britain's toughest Borstal, served three prison stretches and been stabbed while in the Merchant Navy. He thought his only career choice would be a life of crime. Fifteen years later, he was one of Britain's most successful comics, playing live to half a million fans a year as Roy 'Chubby' Brown. COMMON AS MUCK! tells an incredible story of hardships, heartbreak and, ultimately, success. From an impoverished childhood with his abusive father, to his brand of comedy too rude for television and his determined fight against throat cancer, COMMON AS MUCK! is a frank telling of a remarkable life, laced with Roy's irrepressible humour.

I've written another book and this will be one of those that when you pick it up, you'll begin to regret it. You see, I don't read books; I read the Sun newspaper. Actually, that's a lie; because when I get to page three I can't let go of my cock, so I can't turn the pages.

Comedy is crucial to how the English see themselves. This book considers that proposition through a series of case studies of popular English comedies and comedians in the twentieth century, ranging from the Carry On films to the work of Mike Leigh and contemporary sitcoms such as The Royle Family, and from George Formby to Alan Bennett and Roy 'Chubby' Brown. Relating comic traditions to questions of class, gender, sexuality and geography, A National Joke looks at how comedy is a cultural thermometer, taking the temperature of its times. It asks why vulgarity has always delighted English audiences, why camp is such a strong thread in English humour, why class influences what we laugh at and why comedy has been so neglected in most theoretical writing about cultural identity. Part history and part polemic, it argues that the English urgently need to reflect on who they are, who they have been and who they might become, and insists that comedy offers a particularly illuminating location for undertaking those reflections.

A biting and original history which places culture front and centre to explain how our country went to pieces.

Tell us one we Know e-book Hi there everyone. Since realising that we are living in the 21st century after all, we thought we should try and ditch our technophobe image and bring out an e-book version of Tell us one we Know. It’s very likely that the chap who originally uttered those immortal words, “can you ‘Tell us one we Know’...” so many years ago in that Northern Club will probably be turning in his grave right now muttering, ‘What the f***k’s an e-book?’, but all the same, it has to be done. Our books are generally prescribed by medics for the cure of acute insomnia, so we’ve replaced the dark dinghy front cover from the original version with a brightly coloured new one, in the hope that if you start to nod off while reading, you can just flick back to the front of the book for it to shock you into waking up again. It also gave us the opportunity to tidy it up somewhat by putting the full stops and the commas in the right places; we got someone else to do that bit. With our e-book being more environmentally friendly, no trees to chop down, and therefore our small contribution to saving the planet, we would like to think that you feel compelled to buy one. If you haven’t already read ‘Tell us one we Know’, it’s a collection of stories that had been missed out of previous publications, filling in some gaps and looking behind the scenes of the comedy genius Roy Chubby Brown. If you have read the paperback, please have another look at the e-book version to hopefully convince yourself that we aren’t really as thick as you originally thought we was, err sorry, were. Either way there’s some funny stories of being on the road, a bit of history and a few of those just ‘getting it off me chest’ moments…. something for everybody, all accessible from the comfort of your own phone. Hope you enjoy the read as much as we did doing it all over again.

An investigation of the origins of comedy and the meaning of laughter, drawing on biology, anthropology, classical studies, behavioural science, philosophy and psychology - with a few authorial jokes along the way.