This month, Ken's been wittering on and on about the unfriendliness of the PC's operating system, and about how ridiculous it is that the machine's been around for decades yet no-one's got around to designing a remotely useable front end for it that doesn't trash the entire contents of your hard disk whenever you try to move a file to a different folder. But that's boring, so I'm not going to mention it.

Instead, I'd like to talk about a subject much closer to my heart - my ribs. And more specifically, why they're so rarely tickled by games which are billed as being the funniest thing since Les Dawson first put a dress on. More than any other format, the PC is beset by games which try to make you laugh, be it The Secret Of Monkey Island, Day Of The Tentacle, Battle Chess, Street Fighter 2 or Leisure Suit Larry. Sex, come to think of it, seems to be a particularly popular topic for would-be PC comedians, and none of them seem to be any good at it. Comedy, that is. Although, perhaps... no.

Sometimes, in fact, comedy seems to be the entire raison d'etre of a game, with gameplay a poorly-considered afterthought (ref. - let's be honest - Monkey Island 2, where most of the action seems to be constructed as a means to a punchline), and that strikes me as odd. After all, you don't go out and buy a Benny Hill video and expect to be sitting up for hours pondering on whether there's any significance in the fact that he slapped the little bald geezer on the face with a wet kipper instead of a rolled-up newspaper, do you? So why ask a game to make you laugh? You're onto a loser from the word go.

All this, of course, is an entirely subjective opinion. I believe family homes in the USA are regularly the scene of unpleasantly messy cleaning-up operations after someone's sides have split during a game of LSL5 when a girl's breasts fall out of her bikini at a tense moment, but it just doesn't work for me. And after all, this is my column (fnark!).

Surprisingly, there IS a point to all this rambling, and it's this: how come there seems to be only one kind of humour out there (the crappy, slapsticky American one)? As the PC makes huge leaps and bounds into - allegedly - practically every home in the country, what's happening to the multi-cultural comedy of nations? I demand Jokes For Europeans Now! Wherefore the Newman And Baddiel adventures, wherefore the Spike Milligan-esque platformers, wherefore Billy Connolly's Backgammon?

Go on, say something funny.