Mother-in-law jokes going into oblivion in UK

London: While yesteryears’ comedians like Les Dawson made it big cracking mother-in-law jokes, the trend seems to have faded from Britain`s stand-up comic scene today. Modern comedians are averse to the tried-and-tested jig targeted at the wive`s mother and prefer more relevant material in a bid to keep their audiences rolling in the aisles.

They claim audiences are bored with mother-in-law jokes and believe they have become outdated. Now a men`s wedding website dedicated to helping grooms, best men and fathers-of-the-bride cope with the pressures of the big day, have commissioned a new pack of rib-tickling jokes to keep readers entertained. "The demise of mother-in-law jokes are just purely the fact that they were so characteristic of a particular time of comedy, so from 70s to 80s with Les Dawson and Bob Monkhouse,” the Telegraph quoted Andrew Shannahan, editor of www.iamstaggered.com, as saying. "Now alternative comedians react against it. "The mother-in-law jokes became the figurehead joke of that genre and the alternative comedians were saying we don``t want to be the same as our forebears, we want to be something new and something fresh so that`s what swept the jokes away from that topic. "It`s a topic that`s ever actually gone away. It`s just fallen from the headlines, there`s no figurehead like Les Dawson making jokes on TV on a daily basis, but people certainly still laugh about it because if we don`t laugh you cry,” added Shannahan. In the online poll conducted, 47 percent of men admitted to loathing their mother-in-law, while 53 percent said they loved her. ANI