Comedy is something that interests me a lot. In my younger days I quite often went to different comedy clubs in London, and saw a lot of 'new' comedians and jokes. Now I tend to just be an armchair watcher, telvision and books and a little on the internet.
Good, new comedy is very hard to write, let alone perform. And it only gets harder, for every joke written, that's one less that can be new, so an awful lot of comedy is rehashed old stuff, or at least has roots in something that has gone before. It annoys me when someone complains that no-one now is as good as someone like the Two Ronnies or someone else from the past. They made some hilarious sketches, but they also made some dire stuff too. If you were to watch a large amount of their work now you would see some of the genius which sticks in the mind, but you would also see some very lame old jokes, cheap innuendo and some plain boring stuff, but that's not what you remember.
Modern stuff is the same, take Frankie Boyle as an example. He will come out with a huge amount of material, probably at least three quarters of which falls flat or is just plain offensive, but he's worth watching for the pure gems he can come out with, which can actually hurt they are so funny. I like the American comedian Rich Hall, but I've seen him trying out new material at the Comedy Store which just wasn't funny. He will have rewritten that until it was, and tried it on another small audience until it worked.
Farmer Frank doesn't have that luxury. Yes some of his jokes are rude, some are old and copied from elsewhere, but he has to come out with lists of jokes to go straight into print (one of the least forgiving mediums for comedy) and for me if there is one joke in that list which makes me laugh, and I want to pass it on to someone else, then it's worth it to me. The writers of Fred Bassett have been unsuccessfully looking for a funny joke for over twenty years now!!