Memoirs published this week by the last surviving member of Adolf Hitler's personal staff reveal that the Führer had... a great sense of humour.

I have never thought of “a great sense of humour” as much of a recommendation in a man (it usually means either that a person tells endless jokes and comical anecdotes instead of conversing like a grown-up - which makes you want to slap them in the chops - or that they laugh all the time because they are too stupid to see that life is hard, the Earth is screwed, and we're all going to die), and this revelation about the World's Most Terrible Human Being only confirms my scepticism.

But what sort of sense of humour did Hitler have? Did he laugh at his own jokes? Was it all fart stuff? Did he endlessly quote Monty Python as if you'd never heard it before? Or was he (as I suspect) more of a Mr Bean man? Or, perhaps, like one of those nervous, chubby women who laugh at just about anything until you start worrying that maybe they are a bit touched in the head? Indeed, now that we know he was mad, was his constant girlish giggling perhaps, the first sign?

The Last Witness by 90-year-old Rochus Misch, the telephonist in Hitler's Berlin bunker during the last days of the Reich (great job - I'm sure that Adolf was very patient when told he was fourth in the queue and would be answered soon), has revealed that it was largely a case of joke-making at the expense of his generals.

He had a favourite one about Hermann Goering, for example, who was apparently fond of awarding himself medals. “Mrs Goering came into the bedchamber one day” Hitler used to say, “and found her husband waving his baton over his underwear. ‘Hermann, darling, what are you doing?' she asked him. And he replied: ‘I am promoting my underpants to OVERpants!'”

Yup. I know. Don't give up the day job, Adolf. No, wait. Do.

Herr Misch, who has waited 63 years to go public with his recollections (perhaps if the jokes had been better he would have published sooner), details many more of Hitler's favourite gags and as I trawled through them I began to wonder if history will now have to rethink Hitler as a thwarted funny man, rather than as a disappointed painter, say, or a mono-testicular, self-hating, Viennese demi-Jew.

In a reverse of the paradigm by which Ronnie Corbett (and every other short or in some way inadequate comedian) started telling jokes at school to placate bullies, perhaps Hitler became a monster because nobody laughed at his jokes. Tears of a clown and all that.

Ben Macintyre wrote on these pages yesterday about the ways in which dictatorships can be undermined with humour - it's sobering to think that the 20th century might have gone all pear-shaped in the middle simply because a chap who considered himself to be in possession of a GSOH just didn't get the laughs that he thought he deserved.

But I'm not saying Germans aren't funny. Don't think that. Every time that you put “German” and “sense of humour” in the same paragraph you get into terrible trouble. When I was editing the Times Diary in 2001 I ran a series of “jokes in German” that landed me on the Today programme on Radio 4, sitting opposite the German cultural attaché in London.

After one particularly hilarious quip of mine, the cultural attaché said: “We are not here to make silly jokes Mr Coren.” At which James Naughtie interjected, “Well, actually, he sort of is.”

And we will need all the silly jokes we can muster to deal with the pain of yet another German footballing triumph in the final of Euro 2008 tomorrow. Because they are going to rub it in something rotten. On Thursday morning, after the Boche had won their semi-final, a German friend of mine e-mailed simply to say, rather chillingly: “Ha ha ha.”

I replied, because I was hurt and cornered, that it was handy that the game had been played in “neutral” Switzerland, because it meant the German supporters would be able to pick up some of the looted gold they had left behind last time they were passing through.

“Better still,” my Hun chum replied: “We've got home advantage in the final, which is being played in Austria. Or, as we Germans call it, Germany.”

The announcement this week of a revolution in army rationing to overcome the problem of “menu fatigue” in Iraq and Afghanistan, made me feel, for once, rather butch. I have suffered from this malaise for many years - if I see “pig's trotters Pierre Koffman” on one more beastly five-course tasting menu, I am sure I will scream - but have always assumed that it was a side-effect of the life of a fopsicle food writer. I never imagined that it was a syndrome I shared with the hardest men in the universe.

And it's even got a name, so it must have been around for some time. To think that I watched all those war films, read all those boyhood novels of military derring-do and wore thin a thousand copies of Battle, Victory and Sergeant Rock, and never once guessed that what really makes life hell at the front is an inadequately varied table d'hote.

I would never have dreamt, watching All Quiet on the Western Front, that as the shells whistled overhead and the clouds of mustard gas rolled across the bomb-pocked poppy fields, what the soldiers were all really saying to each other, inaudible above the battle's roar, was by no means “Achtung, Fritz!” or “For you, Tommy, ze war is over!” but, “Oh no, not the lasagne again!”

Women's tennis has come such a long way to its current point of equality with the men's game, overcoming the imbalance in prize money and generally persuading the world that there is nothing funny or wrong about women being cast as great sporting heroes. And then this Alla Kudryavtseva woman comes along and says that she was motivated to beat Maria Sharapova because she didn't like her outfit.

It's a strange version of the eternal spirit of sport, and it rather forces us to admit that, yes, they are ladies, and that they do things differently from men, and to wonder what motivates them to play tennis in the first place.

None of the women players, for example, seems to enjoy it very much. They never smile, they don't seem to like each other at all, and then they insist on playing only three sets, presumably because after that they get bored and want to do something else.

And there's all that grunting. The men don't grunt. Seeing the ladies strain and shout and wheeze like that makes me feel terribly uncomfortable. I am filled with sympathy rather than sporting glee. Like watching bear-baiting. Perhaps, if it's so much effort for them, they shouldn't be made to do it.

She did well, Kudryavtseva, whatever her motivation, but now, with Sharapova gone, the women's draw starts to look like the second half of a summer cocktail party, when the weather has turned a little chilly and all the pretty girls have gone home.

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