They think that repeating
phrases like the «great cities of the North», will go down well in Yorkshire, opposed to it sounding like the
tired old patter of a used car salesman.
As the American novelist Edmund White has succinctly
phrased it: «The spiritual side of life, to be sure, is diminished by jokes... Humor is the enemy of lyric beauty and sadism (Jean Genet is never funny), but their friend - or at least their willing accomplice — is wan humor, weak jokes,
old gags,
tired one - liners.