So far this season, I have seen three pantomimes and I think I have stumbled on The Year’s New Joke because it’s been in two of them.

I won’t spoil it by telling you the ending, but it’s one about a magic hat that clever people sell to less-clever people on the grounds that when they wear it they are soundproofed from all the noise that is surrounding them.

What actually happens is that the vendor is singing his head off until the moment the hat settles on the head of the victim, at which point he continues the song in mime.

It’s all very panto-like and all very simple, and it does have a punch-line. Moreover, it has made me ponder other pantomime jokes past and present.

One that I first saw several years ago and have seen pretty frequently since, concerns Cinderella’s Ugly Sister when she’s trying on the glass slipper. Prince Charming is suitably alarmed to find that it fits perfectly. Then the false leg comes away in his hand. I have yet to see my first Cinderella of the season, so I don’t know whether this one is still up and running, or even hopping.

But another one that I’ve seen twice already this year involves the funny man in persuasively proving that he isn’t here, having got the other half of the conversation to agree that he is neither in Peking nor Calcutta and must therefore be somewhere else – and if he is somewhere else, he can’t be here.

Another very old but very amusing routine involved the man with a plank or a ladder over his shoulder, clouting the other half of the act with the far end every time he turned. This has gone missing with the good old days of slapstick, together with the other plank-on-the-shoulder joke, in which the funnyman enters stage left, carrying a ladder that is so long that it is still crossing the stage long after he has disappeared into the wings.

Uproar always ensued when the other end eventually appeared – also carried by the funnyman.

And there’s one that has always been with us but which now almost invariably messes up its ending. It’s the It’s-behind-you one, in which three characters stand in line singing a song while something alarming – a ghost or a gorilla – frightens them one at a time and takes them away, eventually leaving the Dame on her own.

This is the point at which the tap on the shoulder causes the Dame to turn round – whereupon the terrified intruder turns tail. At least, that’s what it always used to be – but just lately the laughs have seemed to depend upon a good show of sheer terror from the Dame as she gallops away, which is not nearly as funny.

Who thinks these things up, anyway? I ask in a spirit of admiration, not in any kind of accusatorial tone. I love ’em!

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Word for some reason has only just reached me of the death of Sue Teers, a month after her summer production of J B Priestley’s 1947 play The Linden Tree at the Talisman Theatre, Kenilworth, where she was artistic director.

I hope it is not too late to add my salute to the remarkable woman who has been described as "just a genuinely good person, unfailingly polite, utterly gracious, wonderfully kind and in some sort of way magical."

There are various ways of dealing with hecklers. One put-down is: "I haven’t seen a set of teeth like that since Lester Piggott was coming in on his last Derby winner."

More drastic was the solution offered by a comedian who could not see his tormentor among the massed ranks of his audience in New York’s Madison Square Garden. He sought help from his many supporters – by asking those around the heckler to punch him in the kidneys. I have just learned this from Stop the Show, by Brad Schreiber, which describes itself as a history of insane incidents and absurd accidents in the theatre – give or take the American spelling of theatre.

WHAT’S ON

Aladdin, Hall Green Little Theatre (to Dec 18).
A Christmas Carol, Nonentities, Rose Theatre, Kidderminster (to Saturday).
A Murder is Announced, Crescent Theatre, Birmingham (to Saturday).
Daughters of Albion, Stage 2, Patrick Centre, Birmingham Hippodrome (to Saturday).
Wassail, Crescent Players, Highbury Hall, Moseley (to tomorrow; & Crescent Theatre, Birmingham (Dec 19 & 20).
Puss in Boots, Priory Theatre, Kenilworth (Dec 15-Jan 6).
Christmas Cabaret Concert, Young Rogues & Vagabonds, Stratford-upon-Avon Civic Hall (Dec 20).
Beauty and the Beast, Talisman Theatre, Kenilworth (Dec 22-Jan 6).