If, by now, you are smiling and gently singing, "Goodies! Goody, goody, yum, yum," you are most likely over the age of 20. If you are bewildered, stick around anyway, and be enlightened. Or as a five-year-old doing backward somersaults into the water at South Bank told me this week after my attempt: "Amateur, watch and learn." (When, exactly, does school start?).

Anyway, back to the funky gibbon. The man seated next to me during the flight I'm writing this on - expensive shirt with French cuffs, two watches to keep time with multiple overseas finance markets - just read that sentence over my shoulder and asked: "What exactly do you do?" This sounds rude. But it is not, considering flying cattle class these days means more body contact and less privacy than most marriages.

It seems that when highly important people pull out a laptop during a flight, it's to finish off the final draft of their book for the publisher. Or business plan for the MBA. Or report on sustainable architecture to help the tsunami-devastated coastal communities. Somehow typing "Anyway, back to the funky gibbon" tends to blow out of the water any pretence of importance.

Anyway, back to the funky gibbon. To the uninitiated, it is a song, nay an anthem, of the cult followers of The Goodies, a comedy trio that crashed on to Australian television screens 30 years ago.

Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie and Graeme Garden wore Union Jack waistcoats and took risks on their BBC shows. Initially in the UK it was screened at 10:30pm. Here, in an inspired bit of programming by the ABC, it was popped into the kiddies' timeslot.

The news is, The Goodies are reuniting for shows in Australia. They are now in their 60s. Can angry young men become happy old men and still retain their subversiveness? You see, they were so deliciously naughty. To love The Goodies is to love The Goons and Monty Python.

Ned, my fellow passenger, revealed Goodies loyalty was cemented thanks to his father. "He came home from work one day, he was a school principal, and said: 'What's this rubbish.' I looked at him, standing there in nylon shorts, long white socks, lace-up shoes, a short-sleeved shirt and tie, and thought: Anything you hate, I love."

The Goodies took the mickey out of royalty and the establishment. They were the most controversial thing in suburban Australian life. Up until then, the most exotic thing we knew about was Mrs Price down the road who wore a caftan at parties, passing around a tray with a pineapple on it stuck with toothpicks holding green and red cocktail onions and Kraft and Coon cheese.

Yet Ned's dad was not without a sense of humour. It's just that he was more a Sid James kind of man, belonging to a generation that found Are You Being Served? and Love Thy Neighbour hilarious. Benny Hill skits depicting girls on bicycles getting their tyres pumped up yet their breasts inflating instead, tickled their fancy.

Humour is highly subjective. Some who howl at Kath and Kim don't get Seinfeld. One man's Daffy Duck is another's dead duck. And frankly, there may be roadrunner fans out there, but I would rather see the "beep beep" wiped off his smart-arse face just once by the coyote's Acme-brand homemade bomb.

Whatever you laugh at, humour is as vital to us as oxygen. To all couples out there, if you don't share plenty of laughs now, run for the hills.

Treasuring The Goodies may, on the surface, seem infantile. But not if you compare it with, say, being a fan of The Phantom. Fully grown men love the underpants-on-the-outside attitude of The Ghost Who Walks.

And to be honest, I could almost see the attraction of this masked stranger until I came across Diana, his wife. She works for the UN, dumps her twins on the Bandar and the pygmy poison people at the deep woods, so she can go off and get in trouble in a jungle river. She emerges, lipstick and strapless dress intact. In other words,she's an overachiever with disproportionately large breasts. (Clearly a wet nurse was used.) Yet you must tread lightly. Old jungle saying: Piss off the Phantom, pay the price. Or maybe I just made that up.

Anyway, back to the funky gibbon. (Start writing that and you just can't stop.) The reunion shows in Australia will contain the banned bits from the original series. The word "bloody" was cut out. And in series three, the audience laughter after the word "bum" has been cut. It seems you can say "bum", but you can't draw attention to it being funny.

There are plenty of classic Goodies moments like the concert featuring best-known tunes Cactus In My Y-Fronts, Funky Gibbon, Black Pudding Bertha and Wild Thing. Or the show when Tim gets fed up with the advertising business and wants only to tell the truth, marketing string. The country goes string crazy until string sheiks in the Middle East sit on a string mountain, to inflate prices.

As adult entertainment, The Goodies is sometimes slapstick, as is most classic comedy. So who laughs at The Goodies? Plenty. Their DVD released last year sold more than 50,000 units before Christmas.