Happiness Quote by Denis Norden

There’s a neat little death-rattle in Denis Norden’s line: the idea that comedy used to live in the machinery. When he says “after that came word processors,” he’s not just marking a tech upgrade; he’s marking the end of an era when writing was tactile, noisy, and resistant. Typewriters jammed, keys stuck, carbon paper smeared, and the page itself bore evidence of struggle. Those frustrations weren’t just obstacles, they were material - the slapstick of labor. You could hear the effort. You could see the revisions. You could blame the machine.

Norden’s punchline - “it’s hard to make those laugh” - personifies the old tools as co-conspirators. A typewriter could “laugh” because it had temperament: it clacked back, it punished typos, it left scars. A word processor is obedient, silent, frictionless. It deletes without drama. That’s the subtext: when the process becomes smooth, the work loses a certain comic adversary, a source of accidental timing and physicality that shaped writers’ rhythms and, by extension, their jokes.

Context matters here. Norden came up in a mid-century British comedy world built on scripts, rewrites, studio deadlines, and the thick presence of paper. His nostalgia isn’t just sentimental; it’s a sly critique of modern creative life, where efficiency can flatten the lived texture that feeds humor. The joke lands because it’s true in a sideways way: comedy thrives on resistance, and the new machine refuses to misbehave.