Judging by the fact that we're still debating whether men can wear shorts to the races in Canberra, apparently not.

And it's been going on here since at least World War II, as evidenced by a The Canberra Times article dated January 12, 1940.

"Dress reformists in Canberra are losing ground. Officers who have worn tailored shorts to work for the past week have been ridiculed by an anti-short group, who have gone the other extreme and carry walking sticks.

Those with sticks elect to walk to work with those in shorts, and one of the latter admitted yesterday that he felt silly beside his well dressed companion.

"These shorts cost me the best part of a pound," he said, "and all that everybody says is that I am turning the Department into a beach pool. If you wear shorts alongside a man carrying a walking stick and dressed up to the 'nines', you feel as though you are wandering around in a state of nudity."

The counter campaign for more formal dress is expected to be more favourably received by the Public Service than the shorts cult. It would certainly meet with the approval of departmental heads.

Canberra lawyer Patrick Hornby embraces the debate wholeheartedly. Not on a personal level - he believes he's too fair-skinned to pull off bare legs - but as a comedy trope? No question.

In his spare time, Mr Hornby is also a co-founder of the Canberra Comedy Festival, a yearly event that has, in the decade since he and four mates staged the first festival on a wing and a prayer, has well and truly morphed into an institution.

Casting around for a local touch to add to the festival's official hotel, the Novotel, this year, he realised there was a trove of comedy gold to be mined in early editions of the city's very own newspaper.

His original plan to read all editions from 1926 to 1949 was a bite far too big to chew, so he set a goal of around a dozen for each year.

It wasn't a problem at all.

"There was heaps [of funny stuff], particularly in the early years," he says.

"It was a bit of a newsletter type of thing, The Canberra Times in those days, it was people sharing things and playing practical jokes on each other."

But he noticed a tone shift throughout the 1930s, as the Great Depression set in and war loomed on the horizon. The funny stuff - inadvertent or otherwise, was harder to come by, although there were still crackdowns on bikinis and cocktails, advice on how to look good while dancing, and someone called "General Smuts" afflicted with influenza.

Wartime brought in more robust gallows humour - "Australian Girls Are Not Pretty declares Ranee of Sarawak (October 18, 1942), "Minister denies bridal party was drunk" (June 29, 1944), Nudists refused house after purchase (August 2, 1945) - and reading the paper was surprisingly akin to scrolling a social media feed.

"You see something serious and then something a bit silly, and they weren't really necessarily broken up in the paper," he says.

"I guess in Canberra in the early years, everyone was living in hotels, and there were lots of big parties and things like that. And sometimes those things wouldn't go quite right."

The dozens of headlines are now individually framed (with the help of Mr Hornby's mum) and displayed throughout Novotel's bar.

"We felt that was a bit of a synergy with what we're doing with the Canberra Comedy Festival, because these guys at Novotel have been with us for over 10 years now, and we just kind of dump this big party on them every year and all the comedians roll into the hotel," he said.

This year, there's a lineup of 70-odd acts, ranging from titans of the scene to local newcomers, and many have sold out.

"You've got to compete against yourself every year, and the Canberra public, now that it's got a taste and understanding of what comedy is - keeps maturing," he says.

"This year will be our biggest - we're thinking we're going to crack 20,000 ticket sales ... in Canberra amongst all these free events that are happening in March and I think we're about the only ticketed event going on."

There are new names, some topics are now off-limits, but some things never change.

"The comedians always take the piss out of each other - there's a couple that will wear shorts on stage every now and again just to kind of test the market, and they will get absolutely ridiculed for it," he says, of the ongoing shorts debacle.

"There is something schoolboyish about especially men, I think, wearing shorts because you do look like you're a schoolboy or something."