A smart dinner party is under way. Six guests arranged around the table are all wearing open-necked shirts, some of them with garish vertical stripes. They are enjoying generous glasses of wine. The dining room is enormous and lined with bare brickwork and minimal fittings, a little abstract art in the corner. A man who happens to be wearing the most egregiously garish shirt of all is talking loudly while everyone else either glugs or munches in silence: ‘I’d say I was working class, but then I went to university, I mean we all did, so does that necessarily make me middle class? I still read the Daily Mirror. Why not? It’s a damn good paper. But then I also get the Guardian. So, what’s that saying?’ Meanwhile, the man to his left is a picture of concentration. A napkin nestled in his hand, he dabs it with chloroform before cutting off the Daily Mirror/Guardian reader by smothering him. His companion comatose, he returns to his food. His wife hisses across the table, ‘Steve’, almost indulgently, before he huffs, aggrieved and bemused, ‘What?’.

The man with the napkin is an actor called David Mitchell and the class-confused comrade his longtime comedy writing partner, Robert Webb. The comedy series which featured that sketch, That Mitchell and Webb Look, ran for four series between 2006 and 2010 on BBC TV. I watched That Mitchell and Webb Look obsessively throughout my late teenage years – my dad captured it on videotape and soon most of it was available on YouTube, where I would watch favourite sketches on an endless loop, loops that shaped the entire scope and durability of some of my school friendships. Many of them had their foundations in quoting, and creatively misquoting, Mitchell and Webb sketches. Favourites include ‘Are we the baddies?’, ‘That’s Numberwang!’, ‘That’s just community support officer brutality’, and ‘Now we know, oh we know now’. Throughout the same period, I discovered English comedy: Fry and Laurie, Peter Cook, Monty Python, The Office, Peep Show, Alan Partridge, Ripping Yarns, and on and on. I absorbed the comedy of English manners and class distinctions, something of an education in the taste and conversational habits of a country that I had hardly ever been to. That education did not extend to the great English novels, a deficit I have tried to make up for in my twenties, nor, shamefully in retrospect, did it extend to Scottish comedy: Still Game left me cold, Billy Connolly felt like he came from another universe (Scotland’s other major city).

I have an English father and a Scottish mother, but my upbringing and schooling were firmly rooted in Scottish geographies, both mental and physical. Before I came to live in England for university and then moved to London, I’d hardly ever been to England, in fact had never been there for more than a few days at a time. England is continually novel to me – a land of such vast and various qualities that it can never cease to yield strangeness and curiosity – whereas Scotland is home. England remains yet to be fully understood and explored, and my mental landscape remains patterned, perhaps forever, by the familiar, thrawn textures of Scottish life, literature and culture.

Robert Louis Stevenson spent his childhood almost wholly in Edinburgh, confined to his sick bed, or further north on holiday or with his family (his father was a lighthouse engineer), and he spent much of his adult life in England or travelling abroad. In his essay collection of 1887, Memories and Portraits, published towards the end of his life, he writes eloquently of the condition of Scots in England. In ‘The Foreigner Abroad’, RLS reflects that the Scot is ever-conscious of a separateness from the people he lives among, even as they share a language: ‘He has had a different training; he obeys different laws; he makes his will in other terms, is otherwise divorced and married; his eyes are not at home in an English landscape or with English houses; his ear continues to remark the English speech; and even though his tongue acquire the Southern knack, he will still have a strong Scotch accent of the mind.’

This ‘accent of mind’ never left RLS, even as he travelled across the world in search of climates which would suit his health better, from France to America to Samoa, where he died at the age of 44. His last work, Weir of Hermiston, remains unfinished. Its main character, Archie Weir, is a scion of the Edinburgh middle class. Even in the jungle, RLS turns back to his homeland, the picture of Scotland, he writes, ‘which alone the Scottish boy adopts in his imagination’. This ‘accent of mind’ is sharpened by exposure to English society: ‘The first shock… is like a cold plunge.’ The Scot who goes ‘looking for too much’ from his English compatriots, RLS continues, makes an experiment ‘in the wrong direction’, because the Englishman only wants to receive ‘the wages of going on and being an Englishman’. RLS’s essays are humane, dextrous and usually get to the heart of something – whether it’s the way in which the traveller experiences a new landscape or the rhythms of student life. But in this particular respect, I thoroughly disagree with RLS: the person who goes ‘looking for too much’ in the vast world of England’s comedic traditions will never reach its limit.

Laughter was distrusted for most of the history of western thought because of its disruptive potential. In Plato’s ideal society, the philosopher kings should avoid laughing: ‘For ordinarily when one abandons himself to violent laughter, his condition provokes a violent reaction.’ Too much mirth sets a bad example. Aristotle believed that ‘a jest is a kind of mockery’. A distaste for laughter pervades early Christianity. According to Saint John Chrysostom: ‘Laughter often gives birth to foul discourse, and foul discourse to actions still more foul.’ Is there something contagious about a sense of humour? The Renaissance philosopher Montaigne casts laughter in a rather different, more humane, light. We often laugh and cry at the same things, he writes, ‘for everything has many faces and several aspects’.

In a similar vein, for the Czech writer Milan Kundera, laughter may be identified with both demonic and angelic powers. Laughter can be foul and beautiful at the same time. As an ‘accent of mind’, it is rather unique – a person who laughs alone carries an air of derangement. I still haven’t got used to the spectacle of seeing someone, AirPods in, laughing at some joke on a phone call. Without the hand clutched to the ear, it feels vaguely unreal: Who are you laughing with? And at what? We want to laugh with other people, sometimes at other people. A shared sense of humour is one of the most powerful tools in our arsenal that enables us to rub along with others. The English, RLS writes, may keep an ‘egoism’ that is ‘self-contained’. The Scot, RLS writes, ‘will give you the best of himself, like one interested in life and man’s chief end’. But England’s comic traditions give the lie to that view – man’s chief ends are always in play, even when they’re being given a gentle ribbing.

The Mitchell and Webb universe hosts four distinguishable types: upwardly mobile metropoles, of the kind satirised in the dinner party/chloroform sketch, who love the New Labour ‘vibe’, wear jeans, drop their ‘t’s, and have fuzzily defined ‘nice’, ‘enlightened’ politics; very posh people who tend to be drunkards or sad or useless; representatives of the old middle class professions, vicars for example, who attempt to enforce hilariously out-of-date U vs Non-U rules of decorum; and the working class stereotypes of yesteryear, including parodies of the garish double acts that were once the backbone of the northern ‘comedy club’ scene. The variety owes something to their contrasting origins: Webb grew up on a council estate in Boston, Lincolnshire, and Mitchell is the privately educated son of the respectable middle class. Both met while at Cambridge University.

In series one, Fish and Chip (Barry Chip and Alan Fish, both with broad northern accents) break up because Chip wants to form a new act with a comic called Pin, of Pin and Cushion, to make… Chip and Pin. When Fish protests, ‘What the hell is that? It’s not a thing,’ Chip responds: ‘It’s a new way of making credit and debit transactions more secure, and it’s going to be massive.’ He continues: ‘Fish and Chips are on the way out, they’re high in cholesterol.’ Both the double act sketch and the chloroform dinner party scene have an epigrammatic quality and tell the viewer something interesting about society at large – in this case, the queasiness generated by the Blair government’s push for a healthier Britain and the pervasiveness of new technology. Or the ‘avocado bathroom’ sketch which lampoons the curious psychopathology that motivates people to watch other people buying houses and then doing them up: one third voyeurism, one third loathing, and one third inspiration.

On-the-nose class commentary abounds. One of the longest-running sketches features a 70s-era drunken snooker commentator, whose sole observations on the game consist of ‘Oh and that’s a bad miss’, combined with wry and occasionally bawdy takes on the complicated private lives of the players. But the writers get away with it, just about, because they continually deflate both their own egos and the art of comedy itself. In ‘behind the scenes’ footage, Mitchell and Webb appear as themselves, two writers reflecting on the show, or just chatting, water-cooler style, about something they’ve read in the papers. Early on in series three, Mitchell gets out a notepad and turns to Webb: ‘Running order for the show. I was thinking, hit, miss, hit, hit, miss, miss, hit, miss, hit, miss, hit, miss, miss, miss, hit, hit, miss, hit, miss. What do you think?’ Webb responds: ‘It is quite time-consuming writing and filming all the misses…’ And Mitchell replies: ‘Well it’s the other writers I feel sorry for. The ones who have to, you know…’ Webb finishes his sentence for him: ‘write the hits.’

The ‘on set’ scenes have Mitchell and Webb occasionally playing heightened versions of themselves, and many of them revolve around heated arguments in which Robert Webb plays the idiot savant and Mitchell his smug superior: the ‘cheese argument’ sketch is one of my favourites, consisting of a furious debate about how cheese is really made. It’s the kind of insider, knowing dynamic that explains why the best jokes become in-jokes and vice versa.

Something of that scattergun comic energy runs through another noughties classic, Peep Show (2003-2015), written by Sam Bain and Jesse Armstrong and starring Mitchell and Webb as Mark Corrigan, a thoroughly repressed middle manager in a credit management firm, and Jeremy Usborne, a Gen-X lounger, stuck in an ill-matched London flatshare. It presses that insider dynamic to its absolute limit – only allowing the viewer to see what the two main characters see (with one exception – a flashback in series one) and hear what they think. The artifice is executed so effectively, and the inner narratives are so convincing and articulate, that it all seems very plausible, even the expansive and picaresque plots. Jesse Armstrong’s subsequent hit Succession arguably owes some its best material to the rhythms perfected in the sitcom: when Tom Wambsgams, played by Matthew Macfadyen, compares his relationship with his hapless companion Greg to that of Nero with the eunuch Sporus, it’s straight out of Peep Show. When Alan Johnson, Mark’s boss (played with incredible charisma by Paterson Joseph), sells a business move to Mark, he tells him: ‘If we succeed, I’m going to be Charles and you’ll be my Camilla.’

The genius of Peep Show is the jump-cut ability to portray every scene from at least four angles – Mark’s thoughts and Jeremy’s thoughts, Jeremy’s expression and Mark’s expression, and then the reactions of the rest of the cast. Peep Show channels something of the charm of an epistolary novel. From the 17th century onwards, the form’s emotional selling point was the chance to see directly into someone’s inner thoughts as they unfold in real time – at least for as long as a character puts pen to paper. And part of the interest is that the intelligent reader can register directly the frequent self-deceptions human beings employ to justify how they act, and the even more frequent occasions when intention fails to translate into the desired outcome. Peep Show articulates, again and again, the magic circle of every good joke: a moment of release, and fleeting self-knowledge, that is both personal and experienced in company, uneasiness turned to joy. In this sense, it is a deeply humane piece of filmmaking, a magnificent, accessible and compelling portrait of a living friendship.

In The Office (2001-03), Ricky Gervais channels the classic and generally knockabout ‘upstairs, downstairs’ dynamic of many older TV comedies into something altogether queasier: a spoof documentary portraying society at the start of a new Millennium. The viewer is invited to compare the ‘warehouse’ workers at Wernham Hogg, a fictional paper company, with the ill-defined and classless white collar environment of ‘the office’. Upstairs, university credentials are common and social distinctions are slight compared with the great, yawning divide between ‘the office’ and ‘the warehouse’. David Brent’s would-be suave fellow regional manager, Neil (from the Swindon office), admits to being ‘more of a rugby man’. He speaks in RP (Received Pronunciation, the English equivalent of the Hochdeutsch register), and likes a sport firmly associated with the leading public schools, but he is recognisably of the same world as the staff he manages. They speak in a combination of RP and Estuary English (a generic southern accent).

Compare and contrast with the men who work in ‘the warehouse’, where knockabout, pungent ‘banter’ dominates. Some of them have old-fashioned Cockney accents, or a somehow more acerbic, acrid and expressive version of Estuary English. And although the cast of the administrative class is far larger than the workers, reflecting the steep decline in manufacturing jobs and the growth of the service sector throughout the 80s and 90s, the ‘warehouse’ operators exude a genuine, if extraordinarily unpleasant, sense of camaraderie, especially in contrast to the artificial and forced ‘office’ social calendar: the Red Nose Day, the Secret Santa, the sparsely attended birthday drinks for colleagues.

Into this complex web of relationships and status blunders David Brent, played by Gervais himself, the regional manager of the firm, and a man with virtually no self-awareness at all, and no feeling for the delicate hypocrisies that sustain the equilibrium of office life. Much of the comedy emerges from Brent’s uncanny ability to misread just about every social situation he’s exposed to.

All these comedies take society as their theme and offer acute and clever observations on the way we live now. But crucially, they also take the viewer somewhere else, into new territory. In That Mitchell and Webb Look and Peep Show, it’s inside a friendship. In The Office, it’s the volcanic longing that lies beneath the everyday. The drama-within-the-drama of Tim and Dawn’s long courtship, played respectively by Martin Freeman and Lucy Davis, and its ultimate consummation, elevates the series into something much more than a spoof ‘fly-on-the wall’ documentary. After many twists and turns, false hopes and dashed expectations, Tim and Dawn, who have clearly always liked each other and flirted at work, get together in the final stages of the last episode of the series. Tim manages to convey something of his true feelings for Dawn through the banality of a Secret Santa gift. The gesture is so supremely elegant – an office routine transubstantiated into a statement of reckless love – and romantic in the best sense. The gift is a living symbol of a man who demands nothing but hopes all things.

One of the most well observed and stylish English comedies of recent years takes the passions hidden in routine as its theme. The Detectorists (2014-22), starring Mackenzie Crook (who also stars in The Office) and Toby Jones, features a club of metal detectorists (as they insist they are properly called) based in rural Essex. The show is a love letter to the esoteric obsessions and the gentle art of the hobbyist, and also something more – a paean of praise to a lost mystical England, hidden in plain sight. ‘I need to find a new place to search’, Crook’s character tells his girlfriend in episode one: ‘All we turn up these days is litter and ring pulls. This is the land of the Saxons. I want to discover where they buried their warriors and their kings.’ In The Detectorists, the characters feel conscious of a dreamtime beyond the reckoning of generations, a power that knits land and memory together, an army lying beneath the earth, waiting to be summoned from its long sleep.

Flowers, which ran on Channel 4 from 2016 to 2018, is full of dark, magical energies. It follows the Flowers family and their disastrous domestic life in a wooded and rather dank corner of the English countryside. Mr Flowers is the inventor of a relatively successful comic series, called Grubs, which are green, slimy monsters. The series is written by Will Sharpe, who is half-English, half-Japanese, and he plays Shun, a Japanese illustrator living with the Flowers family, who finds himself constantly getting the comedy of English manners wrong. He says the wrong thing in broken English, does the wrong thing. Mr Flowers has run out of inspiration and is clinically depressed, his marriage in dire straits – so Shun travels miles to see a publisher to argue that Grubs should be given a new edition.

Shun reveals that his entire family has been destroyed in an earthquake and that he had found solace in the Grubs comic books. He tells his story to the publishers in a bid to get them to recommission Mr Flowers. He tells of how he was inspired to come to England after encountering the Grub series in a bookshop: ‘For keep warm, I go to bookshop and discover. What is this little strange book, funny picture? Have a look. It’s Japanese version of Grubs. I am reading very strange story, Acorn Conundrum, Swam Dragon, Fungus Brain. Who is this person writing this book? It’s Mr Flowers. I say, ah, Mr Flowers. You know how I am feeling. Because I need to see that miseries happen. Difficulties happen. This is world. You can survive. Grubs always survive.’

The Flowers family is grimly dysfunctional, absurd, defeated by life, thwarted, muddied and awkward, but it nonetheless survives. The Grubs series is a beacon of hope for a young man in deep trouble, half a world away.

Debates over identity and national loyalty tend to be coloured by a tone of high seriousness. In the last couple of decades, politicians have made pompous attempts to define ‘British values’, and commentators have attempted to rescue the ‘Real England’ from a society in transformation. Amid renewed attempts to define and categorise often quite slippery markers of belonging, it is worth emphasising that life in a multinational state has its advantages: you can, within reason, choose what to emphasise and many Britons are quite happy to ‘code-switch’ depending on company and circumstances. It is a creative oddity that should be treasured and shows the meaninglessness of applying terms such as ‘ethnicity’ to the UK’s many regional and national identities. Perhaps Scotland should really be called ‘Pictland’, referring to the pagan tribes that once ruled much of the territory we now call Scotland. After all, Pictish symbol stones, found all over the northeast of Scotland, bear witness to a relatively homogenous culture of profound and otherworldly beauty.

But the accents of mind that make up modern England and Britain are giddyingly diverse – and extremely polyglot. Just look at some of the most successful comedic output of the last decade about the life of the nation’s capital: Stath Lets Flats, about the antics of a second-generation Greek Cypriot estate agent; Motherland, which revolves around the travails of middle-class parents in north-west London; and Catastrophe, which explores the highs and lows of a couple, one half Irish, the other American, in Hackney.

English comedy is alchemical, a tradition that can absorb and ameliorate contemporary debates over social class, can capture the deep dynamics of a real friendship, and even promises the renewal of mystery amid the humdrum of the everyday. That’s why I started to laugh along – and why I can’t imagine stopping.