It's the 16th hit of the frying pan that makes it so funny

Several times in Adrian Edmonson's excellent Berserker autobiography, the great man points out that The Young Ones only took up 14 weeks of his life, but that it's all anybody wants to talk about. 

He does go into the making of that series a little bit in that book, but while reading it recently, I was pleasantly surprised to see him spending almost as much time talking about this one gag in Bottom, and why it was so funny.

If one hit to the face with a frying pan is always going to be funny, hitting them sixteen times in the head with the pan is going to be sixteen times more funny. It's just science.