David Quantick: Smut? Ronnie knew we were all gagging for it

We should applaud, not deny, vulgar humour when it's well performed

Ronnie Barker: And also to a parson who likes knickerless women.

Whenever a major figure in our culture dies, their career is instantly claimed as ammunition by somebody with a point to make about modern life. Ronnie Barker's death was no exception; in one of many heartfelt tributes, the entertainer and game show host Bruce Forsyth said that Barker "never traded in smut". And others were keen to agree with Brucie. One writer claimed that Barker's work was a return to good old-fashioned comedy that a parent could safely watch with a child. At this line, a silence fell among those of us who were children when we watched Ronnie Barker on telly. His best works - Open All Hours, Porridge and in particular, The Two Ronnies - harbour a forest of innuendo, a rude jokes' home, a virtual comedy smutasbörd. Lines such as: "Up in the loft where the lamp light flickers. I lost my heart and she lost her ... parasol!" (from a song by the Ronnies' Jehosophat and Jones) suggested that, for the great man, a double entendre was one entendre too many.

Barker himself would have agreed with the non-smutters. In his 1988 autobiography, It's Hello From Him!, he writes: "I've been told, 'The Two Ronnies could be rude, near the knuckle and all that'. But we always made sure that the audience had an escape route ... an alternative meaning, silly enough to be amusing." Which doesn't quite explain this: "The search for the man who terrorises nudist camps with a bacon slicer goes on. Inspector Lemuel Jones had a tip-off this morning, but hopes to be back on duty tomorrow." And I remember one sketch, about two upper-class men whose voices were so strangulated that they pronounced "about" as "a bite" containing a strikingly vulgar moment where Ronnie Corbett claimed he had been "shiteing abite" the place. Not sexual innuendo, admittedly, but, as with most of Barker's material, a long way from his own claim that "Swearing in comedy is the substitute for a funny line". This from the man who wrote the great "Pismonunciation Of Worms" monologue. (Nobody who loved language as much as Barker could have resisted that.)

Let's be honest here. Ronnie Barker was a great comedian, a brilliant writer and a superb comic actor, but he was about as smut-free as Max Miller. What differentiated him from cartoony, end-of-the-pier comics such as Dick Emery and Benny Hill wasn't his love of clean comedy and maiden aunt-directed gags, but his enormous wit and humour. True, The Two Ronnies and the two great Barker sitcoms haven't joined On the Buses, The Dustmen and Love Thy Neighbour on the scrapheap of Saturday afternoon cable repeats, but that's not because they're not vulgar. It's because they were written, or performed, with comic genius. They are vulgar (Porridge Doctor: I want you to fill one of those containers for me. Fletcher: What, from 'ere?) but they're also brilliant. And it's not too pompous to say that they are also part of a lineage.

Lacking the tired misogyny and half-hearted sexism of other comedians of his time, Barker was nevertheless part of the long traditional of rudery this country seems to produce, from Marie Lloyd's "He sits among the cabbages and peas" via George Formby with his little stick of Blackpool rock, Miller's raucous filth, and, yes, Morecambe and Wise's knowing asides ("It's nice out," says one "Yes, I think I'll take mine out too," says the other). It's a much-covered topic, but vulgar comedy and this island have always gone together. Britain, or at least England, is the land of smut.

Not to say that Barker was completely filthy. (He certainly couldn't have been as crass as Bo Selecta's Avid Merrion, whose use of the phrase "sex wee" would make an actual pervert ill.) There was the verbal wit, which always leavened his humour in a way that Jim Davidson will never know. There was the brilliant character impersonation. (Only bad people hate Barker's Reverend Spooner, who famously exclaimed that if his spouse left him, it would ruin his "lay of wife".) And there was, with Barker, a very strong philosophy of smut, rooted strongly in his love of those great dioramas of naughtitude, British seaside postcards. He liked to cite them as examples of humour "saucy without being vulgar". Barker owned thousands of cards by the great postcard artist Donald McGill, who, as well as being brilliant, was once prosecuted for a card of a man with a large stick of rock pointing up from between his legs with the caption, "A Stick of Rock, Cock?". No silly, alternative meaning there.

But there Ronnie Barker is, right at the heart of the tradition. And those who attack today's smut, which has apparently come out of nowhere, must secretly know that the nightmarish sexuality of Julia Davis's Nighty Night and the penile neuroses of Peepshow are as much in that tradition as Ronnie Barker was. It goes on and on. Farces still run in the West End - and No Sex Please, We're British is not only a classic example of rude comedy, it's a great ironic title - pantos are still saucy, and the humour we send on the internet continues to be "office unfriendly".

As a nation, we're obsessed with sex, especially in its comic form. The recent bunch of "satirical" shows about David Blunkett, now no longer Home Secretary yet oddly subjected to more mockery than any other misguided Blair acolyte, is a clear illustration of this. The shenanigans of Peter Mandelson and other fallen cronies lack the comic allure of the Blunkett farce because they're not smutty enough. Which is not something that could ever be said about Ronnie Barker. He was both an original and a disciple of a great comic tradition, and we should really celebrate him for what he was: a very rude man indeed.

David Quantick is a freelance comedy writer and the author of 'Grumpy Old Men'