Micah Richards burst onto the punditry scene with a mindless guffaw that has now become all but the industry standard. The former Man City defender’s sense of humour has forced professional miseryguts Roy Keane to undertake years of training to understand the concepts of ‘fun’ and ‘banter’.
To match Richards’ trademark tonsils-out braying, many pundits have adopted their own signature laughs. Gary Neville titters like a syphilitic chipmunk. Shearer and Lineker pretend to piss themselves at puns from the Tesco Value Christmas Cracker reject bin. Jamie Carragher has learned to pitch his laugh down into the range of normal human hearing – at first it could only be heard by dogs, bats and scousers. However, all of this was a walk in the park compared to Keane’s years of wrestling to understand and react to jokes.
When Keane realised that occasionally laughing had become part of his job, and therefore his unavoidable moral responsibility, he begrudgingly embarked on the greatest challenge of his career.
In the early days, he went through humour coaches quicker than Watford did managers. Even the Irish contingent bombed. Ed Byrne’s explanations of irony were no more effective on Keane than they were on Alanis Morissette. Dylan Moran’s grumpiness was hoped to strike a chord with the sullen midfielder, but Keane lasted a mere five minutes of his routine – “Why’s he complaining? Put up and shut up, that’s what I say.”
After the comedians, a series of Crufts-winning dog trainers were brought in. The idea was to break Keane with treatment so demeaning that laughter could be elicited on command. Little did they know that the former Man United captain would relish the prospect of jumping through flaming hoops, vaulting barriers and crawling on his hands and knees through tunnels designed for poodles. The only obstacle he couldn’t surmount was the ‘crack a smile’ command at the end of the session. His face stayed as tragically blank as a basset presented with a Rubik’s Cube.
Next came the dominatrix. Madame Ferguson, or ‘Sir Alexis’ as she forced Keane to call her, would bind the Irishman to a sub-bench and force hairdryers into his mouth, waggling them until a sound resembling laughter emerged. While superficially successful, the technique never resulted in any televisable results. Aside from the pundit having to deepthroat a Braun Satin 180 moments after any joke was cracked, he developed a tendency to randomly blurt out his safe words: “Rock of Gibraltar”.
Keane was at his lowest, sitting amongst the debris of a dog obstacle course, muttering the words ‘Rock of Gibraltar’ to an empty bottle of Bushmills, when the call came in from Sean Dyche.
Ten minutes later he was kicking his way past the Sky Sports Studio security, storming into the producers’ office and demanding they acknowledge him crack his glowering visage into a terrifying, psychotic grin. Keane was back, and this time he could react to humour! Wry smiles, knowing smirks, and a pretence of self-awareness had appeared in Keane’s repertoire overnight.
But what had Dyche realised that legions of laugh-gurus had missed? Simply that Keane may never develop a sense of humour, but he has a keen sense of vengeance: “If you see others laughing, think of Alfe-Inge Haaland.”