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British Humour Deficit

Funniest thing I've watched on T.V. for a long time is the Canadian show 'The Trailer Park Boys' :) , although it isn't as funny as 'Fawlty Towers' :D IMHO.
 
I am quite an unfunny person. Not that i'm unwitty or boring, in fact my sense of humour is great, my sense of timing however isn't, which has caused me numerous problems growing up among quick witted, fast talking scousers.

I recently spent time in Kent with a group of people around my own age and suddenly I was getting laughs. Whether is was politeness or not I don't know but there does seem to be a humour deficit down there. Evidence of this is in the comedies such as the office, it's a humour based not on funny observations or slapstick but actually on the REAL pain and misfortune of others. We're not laughing at Frank Spenser getting into another ludicrious situation or Basil Fawltey getting unreasonably angry at an inanimate object but rather at the deep and uncomfortable scene of David Brent making a fool out of himself, people in unfunny situations only become funny because it's not us being there, and the major problem is that we know that situations exist like this IN REAL LIFE and there are managers like David. Its less of comdey and rarger more like reality TV, explotitive, cynical and disturbing.
 
I think America has definately over taken us with comedy in the last few years. There is nothing but rubbish coming out of the UK at the moment.

Overall though, there is nothing in the world that can compare with the British classics (wether I understand Scandanavian or MOngolian humour is by the by) and British humour on a personal basis is still way ahead of the game.

GREAT BRITAIN

The Day Today
Brass Eye
Python
Hancocks Half Hour
League of Gents
Fawlty Towers
The Yound Ones
Jam
Alan Partidge (KMKYWAP)
Paul Calf
(there are loads I have forgotten here but I will be at the PC all night if I carry on)

NORTH AMERICAN

Seinfeld
The Simpsons
Kids in the Hall
Futurama
Curb Your Enthusiasm
EDIT: Larry Sanders show, not Gary Shandling

ALl that come to mind immediately. Please feel free to add more, maybe we could introduce each other to comedies that haven't yet made it over the Atlantic.
 
Kondoru said:
Cruises arent funny, they are fill of sexualy frustrated spinsters looking for a mate...

Trapped. On a ship at sea, filled with other spinsters and unknowingly lost prey who won't survive the trip single. That's pretty funny!
 
I'd like to report that the British sense of humour is alive and well!

Exhibit 1.
A sketch on a WWII version of of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire,
on The Peter Serafinowicz Show tonight (BBC2).

Exhibit 2.
Sketches about WWII RAF types on The Armstrong and Miller show (BBC1, Fridays) - where the characters talk in modern youth/rap style.

Both Hilarious! :D


Both of these examples are shown in B&W for period atmosphere, and may especially appeal to me because they remind me of my youth (when B&W films about The War were common), but since they are produced by young (relative to me!) people, I think this shows that humour will never die, because each generation can interpret itself, and its past, in a humourous way.
 
Hooray! Armstrong and Miller were better on Channel 4, but Peter Serafinowicz has been hilarious these past six weeks. I liked the harpist playing the incidental music on the Who Wants to Win £100 sketch. And Alan Alda who kept turning up in the celebrity news to complain might have been my favourite bit of the series! That and Ralph Fiennes as Leonard Rossiter ("Me-e-ein Gott!").
 
Leaferne said:
I don't see any decent comedy coming out of the US at the moment (barring The Simpsons, The Daily Show etc.) and Canadian humour is dire; it's mostly political japing.

Scrubs is brilliant :D
 
Just watched the first 3 series of "Peep Show" on DVD....

Absolutely hilarious, real laugh out loud stuff (in our gaff anyway), but I agree it is laughing at others people's misfortune, that cringy laugh when you can feel their pain but you chuckle anyway.
 
I think part of it is that there seem to be a great many people listing television as there humour bench mark. is it really that simple? What about books and your own thoughts?

TV in general is predicatble these days with commercials calling on 50+ years of funny moments then they just hack them out with no understanding of what made them work in the first place

i laugh at everything all the time and I do mean all the time. I crack jokes and act stupid in every situation I encounter. i have thought about funny things all my life and sought to adapt them to make people laugh. i still try to use ideas i have chewed over plus spontaneous rhubarb that pops into my head. I would like to imagine i am unlike the fast show character with the kipper tie and curl red hair 'I'm mad me... esmerelda, the bells the bells etc' and judging by the fact that i get chortles from a wide number of people from old to young I would say that i am a funny fellow. The point to all my trumpet blowing and patting myself on the back is that for me there is a genuine need to spread joy. Perhaps a reason that humour is losing it's strong hold in england is because people there increasingly do not give a rats arse about anyone but themselves and their own belongings

for example last new years i was watching a family letting off fireworks at midnight (parents and a few friends plus their children roughly 7- 12 years old) as they lit a particular one that didn't go off very well someone shouted 'well that was pretty shit' in a jokey fashion whereupon the mother lighting the fireworks replied 'well you should have bought your own fuckin fireworks then'. My point being that she was so uptight about 'her' fireworks that even at the traditionally light hearted stroke of the twelve o'clock bells she couldn't help but defend the attack on her status.

sure I see it all the time but that example struck me as pretty depressing.


Of course it can be argued that people cracking jokes all the time in a 'pay attention to me' fashion could have head problems and use the funnies as a way to garner effection or acceptance... I'll take that should anyone suppose that is my affliction but would say, it isn't so bad a hang up as they go.

My theory is that brains and wit are valued much less than brute force and ignorance, possessions and pseudo cool.
 
I think one of the problems is due to the way we have a larger cultural over-view than we have in the past and the how humour, which may stand the test of time, doesn't always bear repeating or being plagarised. Our popular culture is now partly driven by a nostalgia industry in a way that it never has been before.

Whilst there's always been art revivals &c., I think what we experience and relive now through 'Weren't the 1970s Fucking Great? Part XII' and other easy television programming is very different. Popular culture has allowed us to be curators and archivists of our own media libraries in a way that even the very rich couldn't have imagined a 100 years ago. This affords us a greater awareness of what's gone on before in pop culture and an intimacy with the material that would have only been available to the obsessive collector.

Perhaps due to the availability of so much in our society and the way society has gone in general, we're also more cynical, scathing and dismissive of many things too: cue post-modern theories on the worth of mass-produced commodities &c. I think ultimately, we've seen it all before when it comes to humour. In the past, because we weren't capable of having our own media library of old television series, old radio, old books &c in the way that we are now - and weren't exposed to amount of broadcasted repeats as we are now - we had nothing really tangible with which to compare the past and the present. We just relied on memory to compare our humour whites in the daylight test.

All that's left is to push boundaries even further or wait for new technologies to enable us to deliver old formats and formulae in new packaging. For example, I think Brass Eye and the Day Today were the funniest things I've ever seen on TV but they were hardly new. Morris et al just pushed it a little bit further and were able to create some visual gags with technology that wasn't available in the past with idents &c. I can't see how this will change now, all the bases have been previously covered and, worse, we all now this as the evidence is sat on all our shelves.

* may be total bullshit face *
 
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