The trouble with British stand-up comedy, says British stand-up comedian Jasper Carrott - and he has that familiar bewildered tone in his voice as he says it - is that there are too many fart jokes.
Too many orifice jokes of all kinds in fact.
'Stand-up in this country and probably America too, is in decline,' he said, in a telephone interview from his home in England last week.
'A lot of material is about orifices and what goes in them and what comes out of them. I've used bottom jokes in my sketches as well of course, but it's just a small part of a two-hour show, and not the sum of it.' This could be the lead in to a Carrott joke, a variation on 'the trouble with collecting your baggage at the end of a long flight is . . .' kind of routine for which he is well-loved.
But on this point the 51-year-old comedian is deadpan.
'I'd like to take us away from the lowest common denominator and move comedy along.' And to that end (oh no, it's catching) he is about to spend two weeks later this month making preliminary sketches for a no-orifices-please-we're-grown-up comedy series planned by the BBC at the end of next year. Does he usually plan so far ahead? 'Well, I think it's going to be quite hard to prove, so I've given myself 18 months to do it. I'm trying to come in obliquely at central issues. I don't know if I'll manage that, to be honest.' Carrott, like almost every other comedy writer, complains that comedy writing is tough. However, he also acknowledges that the fortnight of writing he plans for late May should not be too unpleasant.