The wit & wisdom of Frankie Boyle

[you]

That video is quite funny. The logical conclusion.

glad someone got it

 

[blacktulip]

Fair enough, I guess it's just a style of comedy more suited to people with an attention span longer than five minutes.

That's an assumption, and not a very nice one. Is waterboarding a style of torture more suited to those partial to swimming a few lengths of a Saturday morning?

 

[you]

^^^^^thread adhering to godwins law after 3 pages^^^^^^

 

[rubberdingyrapids]

i saw those tweets he did but didnt really find them offensive or funny.

i dont know enough about him except it seems a lot of people want to attack him for being offensive and a cunt while also clearly finding him funny for being an offensive cunt.

gervais is def a cunt and is maybe worse as he tries to hide it more and just seems to have no clue that hes a cunt.

i prefer my cunts to be self aware.

 

[muser]

Incidentally I partly have decided Frank Boyle is a cunt because my mate's sister's friend is friends with him, and because of this he (my mate ) ended up having dinner with Frank some years ago and relayed to me that he was indeed a bit of a cunt

 

[Mr. Tea]

gervais is def a cunt and is maybe worse as he tries to hide it more and just seems to have no clue that hes a cunt.

Yeah, a while ago I watched a bit of this live show Gervais was doing called Politics. He opened with a dig at Jim Davidson, who'd just done a gig in the same venue - a valid though obviously pretty easy target - and then spent the next twenty minutes milking the inherent hilarity of the word 'spastic'. Um, nice one mate.

I remember seeing The Office when it started and thinking Gervais must be a great actor to be able to play such a total prick so convincingly. Later I realized he was just playing a less intelligent version of himself. Anyone see that episode of Curb he was in? 24-caract shithead.

For me, the difference between the offensiveness of Chris Morris or Sasha B-C and that of Boyle or Gervais is kind of analogous to the difference between South Park and Family Guy.

 

[baboon2004]

I'd definitely put Baron-Cohen in the second of those groups since roughly the second series of Ali G though.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I'd definitely put Baron-Cohen in the second of those groups since roughly the second series of Ali G though.

I dunno, even in Borat it's definitely American ignorance and insularity that's the target of the satire, not Kazakhstan - which I think was lost on a lot of people. (A liberal knee-jerk "he's pretending to be from a culture he's not really from, ergo it's obviously horribly racist" type response, basically.)

Haven't seen Bruno but I kind of want to see The Dictator.

 

[baboon2004]

To me it came off as an opportunity for SBC to laugh at whatever he wanted to laugh at under cover of alleged satire. The first bit of the film didn't involve any Americans at all to be fair, just SBC reeling off some weak stereotypes about Kazakhs (or more accurately, whatever Kazakhs were meant to symbolise, non-white people you can get away with'comically' painting as uncultured/backward or whatever. Can you imagine if the character had been portrayed as Japanese or Liberian? I can't imagine the film ever getting made) e.g. the joke about his sister being the best prostitute in the country.

The film did definitely shift to taking the piss out of American people, but by then I think it was clear that SBC had no real satirical intention, pretty much like Gervais. And I think he's disingenuous in hiding behind 'satire', much like the way you accurately described Gervais.

Don't know what happened to SBC after the first series of Ali G, Probably he thought that to get more famous, it was easier just to dumb his humour down, to the point where people were laughing at that character, and not at the credulity of the people he interviewed, which was the original idea (which he did return to when he went to America, though) where the Ali G character was a device and not the thing to be laughed at in itself.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Well maybe, I dunno...the first series of Ali G was definitely the high point, to be sure. In fact he was one of two good things about the otherwise execrable 11 O'clock Show (a poor man's Armistice, if ever there was one) - the other being Gervais's opinionated London cabby. Gervais is undeniably funny when he's being a character other than himself, or at least was before it became clear what he's really like.

 

[Mr. Tea]

Borat is still funny as fuck, though. Luka had it spot on in that thread k-punk started about it when it came out.

 

[baboon2004]

Definitely funny bits in Borat in isolation, as with Frankie Boyle (and Gervais I guess, very occasionally). But I think they all do the same thing of smuggling in completely unacceptable things because they're being 'ironic'/ because a character is saying it and of course that's not their own opinion. Little Britain did that too a lot, as I (try not to) remember. Thing that sets SBC apart is that I don't think he started his career off doing that at all.

 

[Mr. Tea]

There were some good bits in Little Britain - Lucas's fascistic Weight Watchers leader was brilliant - but it got very repetitive very quickly.

For a really harsh look at the idiosyncrasies and dysfunctions of British culture, you can't go wrong with The League Of Gentlemen. Well, the first two seasons plus the Christmas special, anyway.

 

[baboon2004]

Yeah, any good that came out of that programme would have to be to do with Matt Lucas.

League of Gentleman is a cut above. One of the greatest ever British comedies, I'd say, with no need to trot out stereotypes because they were way more inventive than that.

 

[rubberdingyrapids]

i think that slide towards broad faux satire has been lurking in there since ali g as far as SBC but i think hes def lost any real cutting satire that he had, even as recently as bruno, the slip from proper satire to 'arabs are funny!' has been pretty dramatic. but the dictator was always going to be problematic for him as its a proper narrative, not just a docu style thing, so its no wonder hes lost a lot of what made him good. i think hes shown he can be just as /prejudiced as gervais.


this is pretty otm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/02/frankie-boyle-pseudo-media-storm

 

[Mr. Tea]

The first bit of the film didn't involve any Americans at all to be fair, just SBC reeling off some weak stereotypes about Kazakhs (or more accurately, whatever Kazakhs were meant to symbolise, non-white people you can get away with'comically' painting as uncultured/backward or whatever. Can you imagine if the character had been portrayed as Japanese or Liberian? I can't imagine the film ever getting made)

Been thinking a bit more about this. Yeah, really I think he chose Kazakhstan because in the British popular imagination it's pretty much terra incognita - it would have been different if he were pretending to be Irish or French or German or American or Russian or any of other countries we have well-worn stereotypes about.

And no, I can't imagine him playing a Liberian (because a white actor playing a black African would just be beyond the pale these days, and obviously wouldn't work in terms of being at all convincing) or a Japanese (partly for the same reason that it wouldn't convince, I mean he's like 6'5" or something for a start, and partly because there's really no point in satirising Japanese culture since whatever stereotypes you might have to start with, the reality inevitably turns out to be even weirder).

 

[baboon2004]

I meant rather that had SBC made some of the 'they're so backward' jokes he made about Japanese or Liberian people, he would have been crucified by the press, and rightly so. He got away with using essentially racist stereotypes that are routinely applied to poorer countries simply because of Kazakhstan's complete lack of profile in the West. Plus also the interesting fact that in the first scene(s), the people who were in the film were reportedly actually Roma, and weren't in on the 'joke'.

Edit: as a point of interest, there are lots of tall Japanese people! I can vouch for that personally, lots taller than me (I'm about 6 foot), especially in the younger generation

 

[rubberdingyrapids]

actually i dont think the fact no one knew about kazakhstan mattered. i saw it as just a stand in for eastern europe.

 

[Mr. Tea]

this is pretty otm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/02/frankie-boyle-pseudo-media-storm

Underneath all this, two connected issues bubble away. First, as anyone halfway conversant with social theory could tell you, there is a strong sense of these pseudo-storms obscuring real issues about people's rights, the distribution of wealth and power, and what we now call institutionalised prejudice – something neatly dramatised by the way that the Boyle hoo-ha overshadowed the inspired protest about the involvement in the Paralympics of Atos, the corporation whose contract for work capability assessments makes them a byword for the government's unforgivable treatment of disabled people.

Second, it seems self-evident that vigilance about "hate speech" is in danger of curdling into a state of continuing hysteria. The police – the police! – investigate "bullying" on Twitter, drunken fools who issue "racist rants" on public transport go to jail, and, in response to such lunacies, fairly unpleasant people can easily become renowned martyrs. Put another way, while zero-tolerance comes hammering down on random targets, does Britain feel like a gentler, more accepting place? Not really. Such, perhaps, is what happens when you remove responsibility for human prejudice from the public realm and habitually call in the clunking fist of the state – which is a perverse consequence, to say the least.

Yep. I've felt for a long time that the draconian policing of everything everyone says or types allows Thee Powers That Be to congratulate themselves on tackling inequality in a meaningful way while at the same time allowing no leeway for what could well be a reasonable satirical or ironic point by taking everything at face value and out of context. Like everyone going apeshit over Ferdinand's allegedly racist tweet (or re-tweet, as the article points out) about Cole when the guy is himself mixed-race.

 

[rubberdingyrapids]

agreed. also, whenever i read this apparent media outrage about this racism/prejudice/whatever i never really feel the media even believe it themselves. its like theyre reporting on it and getting hysterical not because they really give a shit but because they hate PC-ness (i have a problem with people who hate having to be PC anyway as i dont see why simply respecting other people is such a bad idea, the main problem comes when its imposed by a load of people who have no real connection to the people its apparently protecting so it all goes wrong) so much that if they keep on banging on about these non-stories it will cause everyone to go the other way.