No, not divorce.

The ‘D’ word today is Deceduti and how this sitcom has taken the island by storm.

Is this a time to be talking about comedy, I hear you ask. Well, yes I would say it’s perfect timing seeing how our politicians have taken the democratic process of Parliament and turned into one big joke.

So Deceduti and why it’s so popular is my topic of choice this week. Well, let me rephrase that; to be exact not everyone loves it. In fact, quite a few people I know simply tell me ‘what’s so funny? I don’t get it’ and switch it off after a few minutes.

Others on the other hand including (I confess) me, love it to bits, and look forward to Thursday nights to follow the latest antics of this wacky list of characters.

What makes a programme like this provoke such polar opposite reactions, and more importantly, why is it so difficult to explain how a certain type of humour can appeal to one person and leaves another person cold?

My taste in comedy is quirky and eclectic; it ranges from the politically incorrect Little Britain to the very British Miranda with her plum posh voice and gangling awkwardness to the very American sitcoms which have now been denied me because of certain cable companies who shall go nameless.

I enjoy dry, understated sarcasm and irony, but I also have a keen sense of the absurd and ridiculous, and often laugh at very silly things, which is why I find the broad comedy and deliberate exaggerations of Deceduti funny.

It is the same reason that I find Zoo (on stage, rather than on TV) hilarious and why I used to love, and greatly miss Ray Calleja’s brilliant characters on Bomba.

Humour is very personal and subjective so I am not going to try and convince those who don’t like Deceduti that they are wrong. But those who are dismissing the sitcom as childish, lowbrow comedy might be missing what really makes Deceduti work. In my opinion the script goes beyond what you just see on the surface – what is at play is another layer which, once you strip away the almost slapstick humour, reveals a very witty hand at work. In fact, we are being asked to take a look at ourselves and laugh at our own eccentricities and foibles.

The premise (in a nutshell) is that a set of ghosts who have died during different eras are witnessing what’s happening in the lives of the modern day occupants of the different apartments which were built on the ruins of a burned castle.

Of course, the characters are highly stereotyped to the point of caricature, but the situations they find themselves hit very close to home – for example, some of the best scenes are between Ramon, the terrified, henpecked husband and his snarling shrew of a wife aptly known as Rosie l-pitbull. We all know couples like this, and normally we might sympathise with the husband’s predicament, but by stretching the plausibility of how these characters behave to the point of absurdity, it becomes, well, funny.

The star of the show, however, is Gladys – whom I’ve written about before. Earthy and raw, with a flamboyant wig for every occasion and a loud, piercing voice which could stop a raging bull in its tracks, she says what everyone else is thinking but would hesitate to say in public. Her scathing descriptions of the Song for Europe singers, for example, were precisely what we were all saying at the office on Monday morning.

Come on, admit it, you know it’s true.

Gladys tears away at the veneer of what you are ‘supposed to say’, and instead explodes into a litany of what, given half a chance, many of us would love to say but don’t. She shocks you with her brutal honesty and frankness, and you have to laugh at her sheer audacity. Well you don’t have to…many people have told me that they don’t. So I find it interesting on a sociological level, why different people laugh at different things.

Does humour have to do with one’s personality, one’s socio-economic background, one’s culture?

Studies on the psychology of humour say it does. To use myself as an example, normally someone like Gladys in real life would make me cringe with embarrassment on her behalf. I have an innate dislike of people who cause scenes or who draw undue attention to themselves. However, during the suspension of belief of a television comedy, I can let go of this hang-up and I find myself almost admiring Gladys’ ability to speak her mind and not let anyone push her around, as she simply does not care what people think. If Freud were alive to analyse me, he would say this is a form of catharsis and he would be probably right. On another level, my appreciation of, and fascination with, Gladys is because I am in awe of this new actress who has honed such an unforgettable character and who portrays this ‘type’ with such wicked accuracy.

In fact when I think of the comedies which make me laugh they are almost always based on specific character types which are portrayed to perfection by highly observant comedians.

On the other hand, I’ve realised that the indifferent reactions to Deceduti can be traced to a person’s cultural sense of humour. People who prefer British comedies such as Black Adder generally seem not to like Maltese comedy – perhaps because they were brought up to identify with the social mores of England, more than their native country. (Or, they will tell you, because they find Maltese comedy to be a pale imitation, too amateur and not very funny). Similarly, those who enjoy the verbosity of Italian comics are usually people who do not watch any Maltese television and so are completely out of sync with their own culture.

I will be the first to agree that Maltese comedy often falls flat because many times the scripts lack wit and intelligence, and there’s still a tendency to rely on crass toilet humour to get laughs. However, I do not agree that it’s impossible for us to create our own successful brand of humour. Sometimes I suspect that there’s a subconscious prejudice against anything which is Maltese at work. For how do we explain that we often make enormous allowances for foreign humour even when it borders on the offensive, but when it is in our own language it irritates the hell out of us? I wonder whether this is because the use of the Maltese language is still associated with low brow culture, a working class background and, inevitably, politics. Sad but true. I once actually heard someone say that anyone who is Maltese speaking is automatically a Labour voter – and he did not mean this in a nice way.

So maybe some people have a problem warming up to Maltese comedy (or drama for that matter), because they want to distance themselves from it as much as possible, keeping it at arm’s length so to speak so that they are not perceived as being like “them”.

Or maybe, I’m just over-analysing the whole thing. When Miranda recently won at the British Comedy Awards this year, the online comments sizzled with people disagreeing with her win, and demanding to know just what made her so funny.

Humour is such a personal thing.

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