Stuff You Just Don't Get.

[ad hoc]

Wasn't it BBC who commisioned The Mighty Boosh? Channel 4 screened 'Noel Fielding's Luxury Comedy' which was, to put it mildly, best forgotten.

I liked him in the IT crowd. Never seen him on anything else

[Arturo]

At the risk of getting run out of town, I have largely tried and failed with comedy from the 1950s and 60s. So classics like The Goon Show, Hancock's Half Hour, and Not Only...But Also will raise a smile and the occasional laugh, but leave me a little flat.

I don't dispute the talent of people such as Milligan, Sellers, Cook, and Hancock. Neither do I question the groundbreaking nature of the material and it's significance. If anything, I'm more interested in the stories behind it all coming together and the reaction it produced at the time, rather than the actual work itself.

I do love the Ealing comedies though.

[Lang Spoon]

The (earlier) Scrooge McDuck comic plot that Inception seems to be remarkably similar to is also a lot more entertaining. Such a dull load of empty nonsense.

[3 Colours Red]

The twat on the Bake Off. He's about as funny as treading in shit wearing your only pair of sandals on holiday. Six miles from your hotel and any shops.

That's practically eulogising compared to what I think of the humour-vacuuming, flat-faced, "please, please look at me, aren't I so amazingly weird", dressed-in-the-dark, far-too-old-to-be-a-Goth, cunting cunting cunty cunt cuntface.

I fucking love Taskmaster, There's a whole series (and the Champion of Champions) I can't watch because of that cunt lest I smash my TV or phone or computer or whatever else I can watch Dave on. Mind you, I'd send that cunt the bill and charge him quintuple.

[Lang Spoon]

Another vote for Charlie Brooker. Including Black Mirror in that. Seems cookie cutter plots judging by the last few seasons.two ideas stretched very very thin.

[Arturo]

Anything with Simon Pegg and his fat friend in it.

Shaun of the Dead. Everyone I know raved about it. It was alright but really not that amazing and never felt inclined to watch it again.

[Janik]

I was rather underwhelmed by The Death of Stalin. Very thin gruel compared to Iannucci's high standards. Its not just that I didn't laugh once, it's more that I never came close to laughing. And the weird thing is I normally 'get' Iannucci's humour.

Someone up thread mentioned American TV Series/Box Set culture, and another Breaking Bad in particular. The former not so much, some of them I do find worthwhile, but Breaking Bad definitely it's one. It's not that it bores me or annoys it, it's that it's simply nothing more than adequate. To the point where, if it's on, I might not turn it off but I wouldn't make the teeniest bit of effort to watch.

Homeland from series 2 onwards - this just made no sense. The first series was brilliant, but continuing with the same lead characters after they had clearly become burned and no longer able to be active in intelligence fields turned it from something with brains immediately into a show of mind-numbing stupidity. And that really pushed the motivation for continuing to the fore, i.e. commercially cashing in. If those behind it had had any artistic integrity, it would have been one-and-done.

The Killing (original Danish version). Mostly series 2, but series 1 was a curate's egg. The focus on the effect on the victim's family was unusual and welcome, the 20 episode run was it's ruination though. That meant each episode became formulaic, 90 degree turn, new suspect, cliffhanger, into the next episode and repeat making the previous one next to pointless. It dragged everything out soooo tediously. It turned out the writer of the show was doing it week-by-week, without having the ending already set. Um, yes. It shows. Series 2 and 3 had all the flaws of the later half of series 1 without the redeeming feature of the running story of the devastation on the victim's family.

[WOM]

I never watched the original run of Roseanne. I'm sure I must have watched an episode here and there and thought 'this is garbage' and never watched again.

Anyway, it came and ran and went and I couldn't have given two fucks. So, it's now come back, and last week I took leave of my senses and PVR'd it to 'check it out'.

Well, we checked it out last night. It's complete and utter garbage, devoid of any description of humour, wit, mirth, joy, <runs to shelf for thesaurus> or funny, but there's a big, on-cue guffaw from the 'audience' every twenty seconds or so.

It's almost like a Simpson's-take on a bad sitcom.

[Jah Womble]

If you weren't down with it 'then', what made you think that you might be 'now'?

Or was it just curiosity? (I'm not a fan, btw...)

[WOM]

Uh...curiosity, and the vague sense that maybe I'd 'missed something' the first go-round. Maybe I'd been a comedy snob 20 years ago and was more 'down' with the riff raff today.
It's hard to explain, actually.
But rest assured, it's shit on every level and an utter insult to the intelligence of the audience it purports to entertain. And if this is comedy for the Trump voter, and they actually laugh at it, they're too stupid to be trusted with a ballot. "I've said it before...democracy just doesn't work."

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

At the risk of getting run out of town, I have largely tried and failed with comedy from the 1950s and 60s. So classics like The Goon Show, Hancock's Half Hour, and Not Only...But Also will raise a smile and the occasional laugh, but leave me a little flat.

I don't dispute the talent of people such as Milligan, Sellers, Cook, and Hancock. Neither do I question the groundbreaking nature of the material and it's significance. If anything, I'm more interested in the stories behind it all coming together and the reaction it produced at the time, rather than the actual work itself.

I do love the Ealing comedies though.

Again I quite like these, but I listened to them when I was small and can recognize that they're so of their time as to be crushing. If popular music of the sixties has managed to age rather well, it's because music to a degree can be divorced from the society it was made in. (There is very little about motown to suggest what life was like for black people in the 60's in the US) a comedy is going to be set a) in that time and b) in the attitudes of people of the time. Already Father ted must look weird to people who didn't see it at the time. given that it's a comedy show from that tiny sliver of time when you could still make a comedy about priests so unsuitable for their roles that they have to be hidden on a remote island. It's from that sliver of time when we went from knowing about the phenomenon, to being able to laugh directly in the face of the church, before we realised why Priests were put on places like craggy Island. It was usually because they were predatory child abusers that were being hidden from earlier accusers. Not a lot of room for humour there. But because people like it, they can keep that window of time open, while spitting on any bishops that they see.

But children born now are hardly ever going to see a priest in their lives. They aren't going to go to mass, and their parents won't have gone to mass for at least 20 years before they were born. The average age of Irish priests is nearly 70, and many rural parishes are down to a single mass on sunday, as there aren't enough massgoers to warrant more, and there aren't enough priests to do them. When Arthur Matthews and ardal O'Hanlon tried to make a father ted like show in 2008 about a celtic tiger era politician, who winds up going to jail for planning corruption, it was a bit of a disaster, because everyone wanted Ardal's character to go to jail. If Father Ted had been started, when it ended, it would have just made people very angry. The mood had changed radically.

The other thing is that there are a whole load of jokes in Father ted about life in Ireland in the 70's and 80's, which seem like surrealism to british audiences, but are actually based on actual things, that don't really happen any more, or are vastly less important, or are very different now, in large part because they saw themselves on father ted. The Sheep festival for instance is about agricultural fairs, which used to be a huge thing, but aren't any more. The Lovely Girls festival, Caravaning holidays, thinking that america is somewhere that you might want to live. Henry sellars is a cross between henry Kelly and terry Wogan, with an additional major flaw. The Priest running a disco..... Chinese people arriving on Craggy Island etc. ALso the Ireland of Father ted is an achingly poor country. Ireland didn't look like that 5 years later. Indeed you can drive around the various places where they did external shots without having the slightest clue of where they happened, because even in 1995 they were setting up shots like it was a historical drama, and editing out the more modern buildings that were starting to be built at the time, so dougal driving around in a milk float (Which is a joke primarily aimed at UK audiences, because we didn't have these things in Ireland) is shot in three or four different towns to get the look right.

So it's weird to listen to stuff like Around the Horne and similar, which are set in an extraordinarily childish world, while Kenneth Williams talks about getting fisted in public toilets in a secret gay language, and The worldview in which tony hancock's character makes sense broadly speaking doesn't exist any more. There are no women, and everyone is living with the feeling of being completely trapped by life. Even by the 1990's the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy was starting to show it's time very clearly. One of the huge problems with the movie they made is that HGTTG is a spoof of life in the UK in the 1960's and 1970's, and for example, by 2005 the joke about Arthur saving the day because he's really good at queuing made absolutely no sense whatsoever, because people forget that a lot of life in post war britain involved queuing, like you were in the Eastern bloc. Those fifties and sixties shows are often just a spoof of the Edwardians who were actually running the UK, with the central characters representing people a generation older than themselves coming to terms with the modern world. In order to be successful, it had to allow the Old to laugh at the modern world, it had to allow the young to laugh at the old, and it allowed the large number of people trapped in precisely this situation to laugh at the situation they found themselves in, without taking sides. If you don't know about all of what the entails then you're going to miss most of what's going on, but at that point it's no longer a comedy, it's like studying hamlet for the leaving cert, and you've got notes to explain to you why hamlet is always banging on about the Stars.

BTW Bottom and the Young ones are utter shit if you weren't an english teenager/early 20's when it was made. if you came to it 10 years after it was made, it was embarrassing. But that's because unlike those other shows, it's made explicitly for a very narrow group of people in a really narrow sliver of time. And if you're one of those people, then it's great, coz it reminds you of life when you were young and your knees weren't giving you grief, but It's very Punk, and very thatcherite in that way. The thrust of the show seemed to have been this is "just for us, fuck you" really shows it to be as much or its time as suspending the constitution to fight miners, or seling council houses. It may be ostensibly rebelling against that world but it is fundamentally tied up in it.

[Bored Of Education]

I don't get Hancock's Half Hour either.

[Amor de Cosmos]

.

[Amor de Cosmos]

I should get the kid on here. He loves 50s and 60s Brit comedy. Has every Hancock episode downloaded, for example, and listens to them regularly while he's working, same with Al Read. I don't really know why. I'm sure we talked about them when he was growing up, but they were never played. That type of humour is a big part of his working process — he's also big on British comics — particularly early DC Thomson. No question it sets him apart from his contemporaries.

The worldview in which tony hancock's character makes sense broadly speaking doesn't exist any more. There are no women, and everyone is living with the feeling of being completely trapped by life.

Hattie Jacques?

[Satchmo Distel]

I opened a thread on Hancock on another site two months and received some excellent replies:

https://www.cookdandbombd.co.uk/foru...c,64881.0.html

Trapped by life - plenty of excellent comedies developed that Hancock theme and owe a lot to his pioneering that role: Porridge, Rising Damp, Fawlty Towers (trapped in prison, bedsit land and the wrong trade for someone of your personality respectively). It seems a very privileged position to be able to say "I am not trapped so nor are you." Fuck off, I'll be the judge of that, thanks.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Steptoe & Son too, maybe especially so.

[Satchmo Distel]

Same writers.

Dad's Army and Hi-De-Hi, perhaps, though perhaps not as much intended by the writers.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Till Death Us Do Part falls into the toxic family "trapped by life" category too.

[jameswba]

I second Pulp Fiction. Actually, anything by Tarantino. I don't get Reservoir Dogs either.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Trapped by life - plenty of excellent comedies developed that Hancock theme and owe a lot to his pioneering that role: Porridge, Rising Damp, Fawlty Towers (trapped in prison, bedsit land and the wrong trade for someone of your personality respectively). It seems a very privileged position to be able to say "I am not trapped so nor are you." Fuck off, I'll be the judge of that, thanks.

hmm, I'm on disability allowance, and rarely leave the house, and I am less trapped that Tony Hancock was. The fifties and sixties were a terrible, claustrophobic, limited time.

[multipleman78]

Friends - I have tried to watch a few episodes and have never come close to laughing.

[Lang Spoon]

The sixties saw the start of not just 3% going to uni, but mass opening up of 3rd level education. There was social mobility for the first time in ages. By the seventies the wave had crashed into the provinces. Think it’s dangerous generalizing entire decades you’ve never known. I’ve seen some incredible not in a good way stuff from younglings writing all historically and confidently about 90s culture. Can be hilarious.

[Lang Spoon]

The One where Ross and Monica get Horribly Maimed would be worth a go.

[Eggchaser]

I love The Goon Show because it was a childhood memory of BBC tapes on holiday and the endearing silliness of it. The names, the weird sound effects, Ray Ellington's songs, some of which are burned into my mind (I now sing his version of Old Mother Hubbard to my daughter as a bedtime song), the wilful destruction of conventional plots - half the time they wouldn't end with a resolution, most of the rest of the time Neddie Seagoon as the notional hero would be left in the lurch (e.g. Lurgi Strikes Britain). As has been said, a lot of it was puncturing the British way of life and there was some very subversive stuff going on. When you listen to the main cast interacting with the announcer, Wallace Greenslade, and involving Ellington and the orchestra, you can see where the likes of the Pythons got their inspiration. Some of the jokes are still really funny, the best part of sixty years later. Yes, some of it has dated horribly but that's something you have to expect from something of that vintage.

As for Round The Horne, someone high up in the BBC must have been in on it, if only for the reasons of closeted homosexuality allowing them to wave through Julian and Sandy.

The Navy Lark was quite good. I also enjoyed a lot of I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, there were some serious comic talents on show.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

The sixties saw the start of not just 3% going to uni, but mass opening up of 3rd level education. There was social mobility for the first time in ages. By the seventies the wave had crashed into the provinces. Think it’s dangerous generalizing entire decades you’ve never known. I’ve seen some incredible not in a good way stuff from younglings writing all historically and confidently about 90s culture. Can be hilarious.

What use is that though to people tony hancock's age at the time? What use is that to all the edwardians knocking around? Things are starting to look up, but you are starting from a horrifically low base. it was in many ways a horribly restrictive society. There's the start of a lot of things that would come to fruition a lot later, and make things a lot better, but that's not quite what i'm talking about.