A third of Brits reckon they could make it as a stand-up comedian

What's stopping them?

comedy A third of British people reckon they could become stand-up comics ‘given the chance’.

That’s the finding of a survey by the Beano comic, which also found that more than half of Biritsh people - 55 per cent – believed they were the funniest member of the family.

Meanwhile, Carlisle was named the UK’s most laughter-prone city, with people there guffawing 33 times a day.

The study found that the average Brit laughs 22 times a day, for 23 minutes. But in Carlisle, they laugh 33 times a day.

London snuck in just behind, at 32 times a day, dispelling stereotypes about the capital’s residents being miserable, with Leicester in third spot.

In fact, there’s a significant North/South divide, with people in the South laughing for a solid 400 minutes more a year than in the North of the UK… perhaps not helped by Scotland being the dourest nation of the UK, laughing only 141 times a week on average compared to 168 times in Norther Ireland 154 in England and 143 in Wales.

As a whole, the UK appears to be laughing less than when Beano last undertook the ‘laughter audit’ in 2021, when we were laughing 23 times a day. In total we’re laughing for 730 fewer minutes a year than we did previously

The survey also found a quarter (24 per cent) of Brits found sarcasm to be their favourite type of humour, followed by wit (23 per cent) and observational (11 per cent)

The cities that laugh the most