See, one of the things that I think is important to remember is that British comedy held onto the strange and off-kilter trappings of the Music Hall tradition- what Americans would call vaudeville- for quite a long time.

Whereas, in the States, a lot of performers shunted into the purely musical aspect of the tradition and eventually gave way to the Gene Kelly-Judy Garland tradition, a great many British acts leaned into the more comedic, sometimes bawdy aspects.

There was an understanding, coated in typical British irony, that the comedian/ act had a sort of angle, that they were using a persona as part of the performance.

Even when it'd shifted from theatres onto the television, there existed this remnant of the previous era's craft. It was exaggerated, a little bizarre, and every now and again there would be this "wink" to the audience, like when Roy speaks in his natural, Northern accent, that made the crowd feel all that bit more included in the artifice of it.

Does that make sense?

Roy Jay is weird, even to modern tastes, but at the time, he was just another neo-Music Hall act from a long lineage, clinging on with his finger nails to the last wave of a phenomenon that was already a century and some old.

I guess a close modern equivalent in the US would be somebody like Emo Philips. He has more in common with the Borscht Belt comics, but he had a style and a voice that was part of his schtick that the audience was all too aware was a component of his act.

Emo was a good few miles away from Vaudeville, unlike the Marx Brothers who oozed it, but he had the same kind of approach, albeit with mind-bending jokes.