Comedy genius Barry Cryer has left us in tears with laughter!

He must have the most inappropriate surname ever after all, there can be few men who have made more British people laugh than Barry Cryer.

A great comic in his own right, Barry has also written huge amounts of hit shows, and the Slapstick Aardman Comedy Legend Award on March 20 was his latest accolade.

After six decades at the heart of British humour, it’ll go nicely alongside Barry’s OBE the Queen told him: “Keep on making people laugh” and many other honours he’s earned.

“I feel very flattered,” says Leeds-born Barry, who turned 80 on March 23, and has written for Bob Hope, Frankie Howerd, George Burns, Rory Bremner, Morecambe and Wise and The Two Ronnies to name just a few.

“Barry Humphries won it last year, and I wrote a little poem about it. At the end, he jumped up and hugged me, and someone said: ‘Two hundred years of comedy between them!’

“Just to show how the generations go on, I wrote some Kenny Everett shows with Ray Cameron. He was the father of Michael McIntyre, who I have known since he was a kid.

“I’ve worked with the icons, like Eric and Ernie, the Ronnies, Tommy Cooper, but Kenny Everett left many happy memories with me.

“We just hit it off, and we’d have an idea and let Kenny go with it. What he could do with an idea was just wonderful. But people aren’t one-dimensional, and he could be very serious.”

Barry admits: “Maybe I’m unpatriotic, but my idol was Jack Benny, the American who I worked with twice over here. He played a mean, conceited coward, and he was brilliant!

“Jack was a lovely man to work with, warm and generous, but he had this brilliant persona that the audience loved.

“He also loved being the butt of the joke, letting others get the laughs I can assure you not many comedians are like that!”

Always self-effacing, Cryer reckons Lady Luck has guided him through decades of fun.

“I was pitchforked into writing years ago, and have been dogged with good luck all my life!” Barry laughs.

“I was having a drink with David Frost and Ronnie Corbett, and David added Ronnie to the show, and I became a writer for The Frost Report.

“One drink, one night, it changes your life. You can’t plan that sort of thing. But it’s all part of a great nonsense tradition.

“If you think back to Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear the poet, and then Monty Python or Spike Milligan, our comedy has always had nonsense and losers.

“We’ve had Alf Garnett, Tony Hancock, Basil Fawlty every one a loser just sounding off. We see a bit of ourselves, but when we laugh at them, we get that nice, smug feeling.”

In the halcyon days of the 1960s and 70s, when superb comedy flooded out of Britain much of it from the pen of Mr Cryer he reveals that quality and quantity wasn’t down to competition.

“We were like a big club, a family, and there was a lot of camaraderie,” Barry reveals.

“We used to get together a lot, get drunk, talk about the shows and the stars. Today’s comics are more competitive, although stand-up comedians today even do shows together.

“That is important. One I love these days, actually, is Ross Noble, the way he works with the audience.

“I am also very impressed with Have I Got News For You, the way they work off what’s happening in current affairs. Superb.”

The royals are anything but losers, and yet several members of our most-famous family are known for their love of humour the more eccentric, the better.

As Barry reveals, when he got together with Princess Diana, it was she who put a beaming smile on his face, not the other way round.

“I met Princess Diana a few times, and she had something special,” he says.

“I went to a do and ended up sitting next to her, and she said, ‘Where’s your wife?’

“I said: ‘She’s got the flu.’ Diana asked: ‘What’s her name?’ and I replied: “ It’s Terry.’

“That was that, and we chatted and chatted, the evening wearing on.

“After a while, Diana said to me: ‘I bet you want to go home, don’t you?’ I told her: ‘Yeah, but I can’t leave before you and him!’

“She said: ‘Oh, go on!’ and she reached under her chair to get some flowers, and said: ‘Give these to Terry.’

“It was hours later, and she’d remembered her name. I got home, my darling Terry was sitting up in bed, having a coffee, and I said: ‘Diana’s sent you these!’

“Terry didn’t believe me, but it was true that attention to detail is special.

“When Diana was talking to you, it made you feel like you were the only person in the world.

“Oh, boy! Looking into those eyes, those eyelashes oh dear, oh dear!”