Most of us fancy ourselves as comedians at times and the bulk of us are funnier to ourselves than we will ever be to anyone else. I am definitely in that category. My mother is too, but in a nastier way. I recall my mother's sense of humour revolved around her trying to shock people and getting a kick out of their reaction, or making fun of Indians or people from the Phillipines. If she were a nine year old boy she would be frying ants with a magnifying glass and slanting her eyes at Asian people.

One genuinely funny moment came years back when I dropped a Christmas tree off to her. My husband (who was my boyfriend then), had barely met her, and was waiting in the car while I took the tree inside. In the lounge skulked the biggest drop-kick loser you could imagine as a boyfriend for your mother. She had known this joker for a while but at that moment the penny dropped that they were in a 'relationship'. The inverted commas allow for the probability that 'relationship' actually meant plenty of boozing together and a quick poke before passing out (should an erection have miraculously been possible). I returned to the car, and wound the window down to ask her if she was sleeping with him. A small woman, she fired up (big red hair and Irish blood blazing) and hooted in a voice meant for passers-by, "So what? I can FUCK SANTA if I want to!" punctuating 'fuck' with a thrust of the hips. My husband, whose mother reminds my sister of Mrs Bucket from "Keeping up Appearances", was in tears of laughter. I don't think he knew that mothers could be that way.

My mother's boyfriend is still on the scene, still her drinking buddy and still cannot string together a coherent sentence. Presumably the acohol preserved rather than killed him. You may be interested to know that my mother has had red dreadlocks for about 9 years now - her big anti-establishment statement - is missing teeth and is falling apart physically the way that alcoholics do. When LOTR was in pre-production, she was approached for a photo by one of the production team. We will never know what came of it, but when the first movie came out, I suspected she was inspiration for the Orcs. I am thinking very hard now about whether I should leave that sentence in as it harks back to my mother's nasty kind of humour. Can't resist. It stays.

I crack myself up in the privacy of my own home by pretending to be gangsta and bad. I don't mean to take the piss out of hip hop culture. I simply find ironic humour in a white middle class suburban house bitch try hard trash talking to her sister and baby-daddy. My inspiration is my 14 year old brother, who a few years back tried very hard to be gangsta. As a very small, very skinny and very white 11 year old, he aspired to membership of the Bloods and wanted to become an assassin (although I am not too sure that being an assassin is particularly gangsta). He spent hours practising spelling out bloods with his fingers, and wore pink shoelaces (I am not too sure that this is gangsta either, but I suspect that even at the age of 11 he had a sense of irony). His street talk was gold. It was a guide for my phone etiquette. If my husband or sister called I would answer with a Randy Jackson/Iced T word riff -"Yo, yo, yo, dawg, go with the flo, word up to you and your peeps". It helps that I have no idea how to really talk hip hop. It back-fired recently when I answered the phone with only a cursory glance at the caller display, thinking it was my husband:

"Yo, yo, yo, word up mother fucker G."

"Er, hello?"

"Please let this be my sister"

"Er, no."

It was an acquaintance whose son has a play date on occasion with my son. She is also a PhD in some kind of mental health discipline. Fortunately, having grown up with a mother like mine, it takes a lot more than this to embarrass me.