A men’s website that helps grooms and fathers of the bride write wedding speeches has carried out the study and found that mother-in-law jokes are relics of the Seventies and Eighties. The portal has discovered that today’s comedians and those making speeches at weddings tend to give the jokes a wide berth.

But the study found that almost half of men claimed to loathe their mother-in-law and would like to be able to make jokes about her; the top causes of friction were moms-in- laws spending too much time at their daughter’s house and interfering in relationships, the “Daily Express” reported.

Andrew Shanahan, editor of ‘www.iamstaggered.com’ which conducted the study, said mother-in-law jokes were old hat for comedians. He said: “They were so characteristic of a particular time of comedy, from the Seventies to the Eighties, with Les Dawson and Bob Monkhouse. Now alternative comedians react against it.

“The mother-in-law jokes became the figurehead joke of that genre and the alternative comedians were saying we don’t want to be the same as our forebears, we want to be something new and something fresh, so that’s what swept the jokes away.”

But Shanahan said while comedians think it’s a tired genre, many grooms would still like to hear a mother-in-law joke. “In the run-up to the wedding the mother-in-law is taking over a little bit so you instantly go for jokes to try to amuse yourself about the situation. The feeling was that it was a shame more comedians hadn’t touched this as a topic,” he was quoted as saying.

Shanahan said mothers-in-law still riled their sons-in -law, who would often respond with humour. “We laugh and joke because that’s the way we cope as British, but there’s still a lot of tension there, especially just before the wedding.

“It’s a topic that’s never actually gone away. It’s just fallen from the headlines. There’s no figurehead like Les Dawson, but people certainly still laugh about it — because if you don’t laugh you cry,” he said.