Not known for his humour, DH Lawrence thought of Lady Chatterley’s Lover as a serious novel about the sacred nature of sex. But some of the activity between Connie and the gamekeeper Mellors is funny, either unintentionally (as in the scene where they garland each other’s naked bodies with flowers) or with a playful recognition of carnal absurdity: his penis is “farcical” and intercourse involves a “ridiculous bouncing of buttocks”. More comic still was the fallout from the book: customs officers seizing banned copies, high court jinks, innumerable skits and cartoons. As Guy Cuthbertson shows in his entertaining book, “It’s not a comic novel as such, but one way or another, it created laughter.”

On a steam railway in Devon, you can ride in a carriage called Lady Chatterley. Boots, blouses, thongs, earrings, pens, postcards and saris also bear her name and there have been endless jokey variations on the title: Lady Chatterley’s Pullover, Lady Chatterley’s Loofah, Lady Loverley’s Chatter and so on. Allusions to the novel turn up everywhere from lonely hearts ads to fancy dress parades. And as John Profumo and David Mellor discovered, if you were caught with your pants down in a sex scandal there’d be jokes about the new moral decrepitude that followed the unbanning of the book.

The biggest sniggers came during the trial itself, in 1960 – Regina v Penguin Books – when Mervyn Griffith-Jones, for the crown, asked: “Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” The 35 witnesses for the defence, graded A to D in terms of their potential impact, were an impressive bunch, including EM Forster, Rebecca West and the Bishop of Woolwich, with English lecturer Richard Hoggart the star performer. The prosecution didn’t call on any writers, though Evelyn Waugh and Enid Blyton were in favour of the ban. To assist their judgment, members of the jury spent a pre-trial week in armchairs at the Old Bailey reading the book, with morning coffee provided. The judge’s inclination was for a guilty verdict but they defied him. Some 400 people queued outside Foyles in London before the shop opened on the first day of sales. The paperback quickly sold 2 million copies.

Among those in the gallery at the trial was Sylvia Plath, who’d bought an expurgated copy as a student and, after marrying Ted Hughes, confided to her diary that she was a woman living “with her own gamekeeper” (Hughes had indeed once wanted to be a gamekeeper, just as his brother Gerald became). How far the novel influenced her work and thinking isn’t clear but, as Cuthbertson shows, it did leave its mark on George Orwell’s fiction and on Stella Gibbons’s Cold Comfort Farm. Philip Larkin thought it a “grand” book (“parts of it made me laugh deeply”) and, whereas some librarians refused to stock it even after the trial, he organised a special exhibition to celebrate its release.

Entertainers of all kinds were drawn to Lady C. Screaming Lord Sutch recited extracts on his pirate radio station. David Bowie named it one of his favourite books and wore red trousers, just as Mellors recommended. Jimmy Edwards chose it on Desert Island Discs. The novel was alluded to in Mad Men, featured in a song by Tom Lehrer (who rhymes it with “philately”), and drew everyone from Joanna Lumley to Sylvia “Emmanuelle” Kristel to appear in film versions. Only the magazine Field and Stream failed to share the enthusiasm, finding the book deficient as a guide to gamekeeping.

Deeply English though the setting is, with class division and industrial blight among its themes, the novel caused controversy worldwide. In the US, it was debated in the Senate. In Japan, the translator Itō Sei was found guilty of obscenity. In Egypt, the wife of King Farouk kept a paperback copy by her bed. My mother did the same, tucking it away in a bedside cabinet that I secretly raided in my teens. You could be teased or shamed for reading “the dirty bits”. People hid it in plain brown covers or inside more wholesome books.

What might offend readers today isn’t the sexual candour and use of four-letter words, but Mellors’s doom-laden and homophobic philosophising. Connie’s antisemitism too: “You only bully with your money like any Jew,” she tells her husband, whose disability has also caused upset. If Lawrence wished to emphasise Clifford’s weakness and impotence, couldn’t he have done it less objectionably than by putting him in a wheelchair?

Guy Cuthbertson has been a diligent researcher, spending many hours trawling through archives and cuttings. He has even looked through the trial judge’s copy of the book, with its highlighting of rude words. If he underplays the significance of Kate Millett’s attack on the novel’s phallocentrism, that’s because he’s keeping things light. After all the heavy moralising that went with the book, it’s the right way to go. He has produced an enjoyable piece of social history, less earnest Leavisite sermonising than saucy Ealing Studios comedy.