US comedies have last laugh

We are currently, in case you hadn't realised it, waving a tearful goodbye to a total of 27 years' worth of television laughs. This week, the soggy hanky is fluttering in the direction of Frasier, which is plodding manfully through its 11th and final year.

Tomorrow, we can begin saying our farewells to Sex And The City as it bares its pearly teeth for the last time at the relatively kittenish age of six. Perhaps the most instantly nostalgia-inducing moment of all comes next Friday when Friends gets into its final huddle at the ripe old age of 10. But let's leave aside the sweet sorrow of parting for a moment, and ask why so much laughter is drying up at the same time.

The truth of the matter is that we have had enough of a certain formula. Nothing - and this is particularly true of comedy series - can stay fresh forever. The classic UK shows, such as Fawlty Towers, The Fast Show and The Office, proved conclusively that brevity is the soul of wit. Shows which ignore this rule - and the Americans are invariably keen on breaking it - eventually engage the law of diminishing affections.

Frasier, Friends and the City sex babes are, it must be said, bowing out a little too late. Respectively, their average UK viewing figures are 2.1 million, 3.6 million and 2.9 million, which do not add up to Top 20 television. In addition, the salaries paid to such actors as Kelsey Grammer ($1.6 million per episode), Jennifer Aniston ($1 million) and Sarah Jessica Parker ($370,000) have made their relatively simple television vehicles wildly expensive.

Yet, advanced age and economics are by no means the full story. These programmes no longer address the communal funny bone in the way they once did because we changed and they resolutely refused to.

All three deal with neurotic and selfish people playing the relationship game, which for the past 10 years, has been the only game in town. These were romantic dramas of love and self-love played out as comedies, and eventually the permutations ran out. How many times have we stifled yawns as Ross and Jennifer set up another appallingly contrived romance? The endless and tiresome battle of egos between Frasier and Niles, with hapless dad stuck between them, have become utterly predictable. And as for Samantha and her crass blow-job jokes - well, recycled smut never looked so stale.

Invariably, all that was left for the characters at the end of each story strand was to kiss and make up. We became tired of the predictability, of the fact that no one grew up in a dramatic sense. The ultimate heresy was that we challenged the assumption that a failed relationship was the end of the world.

Whereas this obsolete strain of American comedy was based around the comforting idea of a family, either biological or social, the programmes that we now admire are founded on quite a different view of life.

A measure of our tastes is the obsession with reality TV which has proved that there is no limit to our appetite for other people's humiliation. In the same way, we seek cruel laughs from our comedies. We have become officially antisocial, applauding behaviour that is the antithesis of hearth and home.

Since the Royle Family exploded our lingering illusions about snuggling up with the family, we have no further need of its embrace. The success of The Office was based on its absolute refusal - at least until the very end - to allow rays of sunshine into the lives of a group of utterly disparate and mostly unsympathetic characters who lived in an environment where common ground has been replaced by minefields.

This is funny living next door to tragic. The success of The Office at the recent Golden Globes emphasises that this darker taste also exists in America - witness the success of the edgily badtaste series Six Feet Under, Nip/Tuck and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Our need for new laughs will increasingly take us into the orbit of antisocial comedy. The coarse cameos of Little Britain - a nasty man malingering in a wheelchair, or the only gay in the Welsh village spitting bile - are now preferred to elaborately coiffed Americans swapping smart one-liners. It's hello and welcome to Little Britain, and goodbye and good riddance to Friends. Well, it was fun while it lasted.