SUCH was Sir Ken Dodd’s dedication to his audiences it was typical of the man that he should choose this week to go to that great tax haven in the sky. After a week of poison and skullduggery, what a relief to turn to the reams of his gags printed in the papers.

And there were reams. Some comedians today, more versed in observational humour, would struggle to fill a paragraph with their jokes. Not Dodd. He was famous for his lengthy performances/hostage situations, as Herald reader Tom Kelly reminded us on the letters page. “Doddy cared for us elderly,” wrote Mr Kelly, “he never let us go home in the dark.”

My favourite was his Poundstretcher gag: “I’m going on one of those Poundstretcher holidays. You can go anywhere in the world on a stretcher for a pound.” For some reason it did not make it into the “best of” lists.

One line that did was: “The trouble with Freud is that he never played the Glasgow Empire on a Saturday night after Rangers and Celtic had both lost.” Dodd said he was “terror-stricken” when he got on stage in Glasgow. Yet the city went on to have a firm place in his affections. Glasgow returned the compliment, and why not?

Between Dodd, the famous Mike and Bernie Winters incident (“Christ, there’s two of them”), Billy Connolly, Kevin Bridges, Janey Godley, Frankie Boyle, and Elaine C Smith, Glasgow has acquired a reputation as the hard man of humour, the Mike Tyson to England’s Michael McIntyre, the dawn raid to Dawn French, and we rather like it. See us? See taking no prisoners? We arra people. But here’s a question to make you laugh on the other side of your face: is it something we should be proud of, a reputation we still want to have?

It is notable that the finest purveyors of Glasgow humour come from the working class. To grow up in certain parts of Glasgow is to undergo a training in humour not far short of the kind of stuff David Carradine went through in the TV series Kung Fu. It’s likely much the same in Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen, Belfast, Liverpool, Manchester, Bradford, Cardiff, New York, Boston: you get the idea.

There is something uniquely brutal, though, about the humour apprenticeship in Glasgow that produces so many comedy heavyweights. Is there anyone brought up in Glasgow, for example, who was not told by their siblings they were adopted? Where else in the world can you go to a family occasion and be verbally pummelled to the point where you are on the brink of tears, yet accept it all as an expression of purest love? Who else hands out medals for being good at giving and taking a slagging?

This kind of humour, though, hails from a dark place. Working class Glaswegians had to learn to laugh at life to survive the rotten housing, the body-bashing, soul-sapping jobs, the terrible education, and all the booze, violence, and cruelly limited horizons that went with the territory. Once established, such humour was passed down the generations, from Connolly to Rab C to Bridges and to all the local up and comers appearing at the Glasgow International Comedy Festival this month.

It’s a funny peculiar thing though, Glasgow humour. It has to be used with care when first you venture outwith the city limits. Like a superhero using their powers for the first time, you must learn how to control it, when to go full throttle (probably never) and when to hold back. Craig Ferguson went through this with his Bing Hitler character, only to calm down and reinvent himself as a slick host of a late-night talk show in the US. Comedians change and their comedy changes with it. You are not going to hear Bridges, for example, banging on about the hell of a JobCentre interview.

Maybe some in his audiences would prefer him to do so, because, going through the same things themselves, they could do with the laugh, but that would be phoney and patronising. Glasgow humour needs to keep things real.

We can accept, then, that Glasgow humour is a way of coping with the bleaker side of life. But what if it is ultimately adding to the despondency? If we were sillier in the face of gloom would we cast it away? We are never going to be a nation of Mirandas, but could we be a bit more Morecambe and Wise?

In truth, we are. Glaswegians like daftness as much as anyone, perhaps even a bit more, but they do not tend to shout about it. Give us Laurel and Hardy, Tex Avery, Morecambe and Wise any day. As for the grim stuff, we’ll keep it too, thanks, just in case. As Doddy knew, and his fans loved him for it, it’s a tough old world out there.