uk comedy is in a nadir

[WashYourHands]

Nah, it's not that. I can't really explain it. It's this feeling of everything being like a DFS sofa advert.

when you get home from abroad and the first thing you see buying a bottle of water is The Daily Mail. Immediate comedown happened a few times personally, like an open sewer of disgust and to not accept it as as an unavoidable part of life occasionally is madness too

You should move to Portugal - at least it's bright a lot of the time.

and take heroin and post the resulting playlist in the music for opiates thread ; )

 

[version]

One of UK’s most wanted men arrested at Lisbon airport

Alex Male is alleged to have been a regional distributor of class A drugs across south-west England

www.theguardian.com

 

[forclosure]

oh btw @shakahislop of the other British comedy shows i mentioned from the 00's i forgot one show that was also big at the time aside from Little Britian

 

[thirdform]

Is it because of woke?

I mean the problem with Alf Garnett wasn't that his character was prejudiced working class white, but that it was a depiction straight out of the victorian era. Looks so dumb now. If the anti-wokers are holding this up as exemplary British comedy then oh boy...

 

[Mr. Tea]

As a kid I couldn't believe it when I discovered that President Reagan used to be an actor.

I know a lot of people thought at the time, and probably still think, that Reagan was a bit of a thicky - having his underlings make his intel briefings into videos so he could watch them because he found reading a chore, that sort of thing - but I'm sure a lot of that was just snobbery from the Ivy League-educated old guard in both parties. And then a little while back Craner posted that clip of Reagan telling jokes about the USSR, and I was struck by how good he was at it. Great timing, great delivery, just really effortlessly working the crowd and getting good laughs. Makes perfect sense with his background as an actor (and a radio sports presenter before that, I think), of course.

Then I thought about how everyone used to take the piss out of GWB, with his stumbling diction and endless malapropisms. And how even he comes across as relatively articulate in comparison to Trump, who can't even string a coherent sentence together and ricochets randomly from topic to topic like an ADHD kid who's forgotten his meds.

So my extrapolation of this is that the next Republican president will be unable not only to read, but even to speak, and will indicate his needs by issuing low, bestial grunts and pointing at flash cards held up by his minders, which will bear symbols for 'food', 'water', 'toilet', 'sleep' or 'woman'.

 

[forclosure]

I mean the problem with Alf Garnett wasn't that his character was prejudiced working class white, but that it was a depiction straight out of the victorian era. Looks so dumb now. If the anti-wokers are holding this up as exemplary British comedy then oh boy...

same could be said about Al Murray whose a descendant of William Makepeace Thackeray fun fact

 

[thirdform]

Well maybe I'm kinda jumping in a bit here and the answer for me is different from that for Version. For me I didn't so much move AWAY from the UK, as TO Portugal... I don't really have a problem with the way Britain looks or its size or the national psyche or whatever. I possibly did when i was little and saw films from US (mainly) but as I grew up my perspective changed I suppose - I didn't think that bigger roads with bigger cars next to bigger tower blocks was better. In fact I had what I want to call a realisation - but which is really just a change of opinion - that a lot of the reasons I had for disliking the UK compared to US were suddenly reasons for preferring it.

But now I just hate the political culture. The constant lying, the debasement of government, Brexit etc I mean I've said it many times before I'm sure, but the problem is that people in power realised that a lot of the rules they were supposed to follow were effectively no more than guidelines as they had way of being enforced. So things that people resigned for in the past cos they were awful, they now just go "fuck it I'm staying" and no-one can do anything. Right now this minute our PM is the first sitting leader to be convicted of a crime, he's mislead parliament countless times, being fined for breaking his own laws and... etc etc well we all know all this. Each one of these would have been a certain career ending offence not that long ago, but now they ignore it and you have Nadine "Really Fucking Particularly Fucvking Thick Even By The Standards of These Thick Cunts" Dorries on twitter calling Starmer a liar as she shares a picture of him eating a curry with a man who died in 2019 to prove that he broke lockdown laws. This fucking idiot is the culture secretary and she went on telly talking about the privatisation of Channel 5 the other day. The whole political class is not up to the job - they are thick as fuck, lying, grasping bastards and they are spiteful. They won a huge majority of seats with a minority of votes and they use it to line their pockets, bully immigrants and make the country worse. And it makes me really angry and really sad and really ashamed and I'm glad I don't share an island with them any more and I live in a place that is sunny and Boris Fucking Johnson isn't in charge oit.

TLDR; there is a load of stuff that I hate about the UK, but I get the impression that it's not at all the same stuff that Version hates, in fact there may not even be that much overlap (I mean I'm sure he hates Dorries, Johnon, Mogg etc like any right thinking person but I think his main issues with the country are different and arguably run deeper).

It's ironic you say all of this when Portugal still has a powerful far right.

My problem with British self-hatred amounts to this kind of vacuous obsequiousness. This desire for a national renewal, for Britain to reconstitute itself. Whereas for me and Webbie (I should think) it's more a case of the chickens coming home to roost.

 

[shakahislop]

when you get home from abroad and the first thing you see buying a bottle of water is The Daily Mail. Immediate comedown happened a few times personally, like an open sewer of disgust and to not accept it as as an unavoidable part of life occasionally is madness too



and take heroin and post the resulting playlist in the music for opiates thread ; )

it's often an amazing mixture of suddenly being amongst a load of english people en masse on the plane, then a descent down through thick cloud, to the 'welcome to london' posters with beefeaters or whatever on them, and then getting to WH Smiths, before paying 25 quid to take a coach an hour down the motorway. england doesn't fill me with dread but the arrival is quite something sometimes, a mixture of objectively bad stuff and all kinds of weird identity markers that serve to put you back in your place

 

[shakahislop]

no because i want to not that you've picked 3 comedies from that era all British i don't know whether its convienience or just it flat out faded from your memory but you forget how Little Britian was a big success at the time not only that but Fonejacker,Balls of Steel i feel like The Inbetweeners was the last gasp of that kinda show

anybody here gone back and revisited Spaced?

yeah and a lot of that stuff is gash (little britain is anyway). but there was at least some stuff that i thought was properly great.

i don't think the woke hypothesis holds up. there are probably some good jokes that don't get through the net. but that doesn't feel like such a massive limitation to me.

i went on a binge of decade-old episodes of have i got news for you. i'm not saying i'm proud of myself. i was just tired. it's pretty interesting to see how much of it they wouldn't say on the show now. or indeed, basically no-one would say on tele. and it's not like they were ever edgelords. there was one bit where they were making jokes that tangentially related to andy hamilton's disability and he was very polite about it, and the audience laughed, but i got the impression that he was annoyed about it. a few other bits and pieces like that as well. it is kind of amazing that the twitter teaching machine has re-wired us all like that.

 

[version]

My problem with British self-hatred amounts to this kind of vacuous obsequiousness. This desire for a national renewal, for Britain to reconstitute itself. Whereas for me and Webbie (I should think) it's more a case of the chickens coming home to roost.

I don't care about this stuff. There isn't a period of British history I find appealing or think we need to get back to. The place just isn't to my taste.

Mark going on about 70s Britain comes to mind. That period just looks grim to me.

 

[thirdform]

I don't care about this stuff. There isn't a period of British history I find appealing or think we need to get back to. The place just isn't to my taste.

Mark going on about 70s Britain comes to mind. That period just looks grim to me.

I get that but the impulse for a national renewal doesn't necessarily have to conform to a history. If anything it can be a bit of a hindrance to know too much. It's no coincidence that most nationalists are not of the actual ethnicity they advocate for. This has been the case from Irish to Turkish nationalists.

 

[thirdform]

Not saying you're a nationalist btw @version I'm just observing that a lot of british self-hatred comes from a vantage point I find worse than mild patriotism, in some respects.

 

[version]

Right, but what I mean is that if things were on the up and people were doing well, that still wouldn't resolve my personal issue with the place.

 

[Leo]

it's often an amazing mixture of suddenly being amongst a load of english people en masse on the plane, then a descent down through thick cloud, to the 'welcome to london' posters with beefeaters or whatever on them, and then getting to WH Smiths, before paying 25 quid to take a coach an hour down the motorway. england doesn't fill me with dread but the arrival is quite something sometimes, a mixture of objectively bad stuff and all kinds of weird identity markers that serve to put you back in your place

that might be true of anyone returning to their homeland, though. I can't say the return through JFK or LGA is much different from what you describe, but with different markers. that being said, that first glimpse of the Manhattan skyline when approaching in your taxi/uber is still pretty damn good.

 

[shakahislop]

that might be true of anyone returning to their homeland, though. I can't say the return through JFK or LGA is much different from what you describe, but with different markers. that being said, that first glimpse of the Manhattan skyline when approaching in your taxi/uber is still pretty damn good.

yeah for sure. one of the fundamental things about going on holiday or whatever is that you escape all those markers and the baggage that comes with them. definitely not a uk thing.

for sure i don't have that sinking feeling when i get into NYC. there's always a bit at JFK where you are truly reminded that you're in america though, the way that the airport looks like its about to fall apart, the fact that they charge you $8 to use those trolly things that are normally free. the fucking airtrain. that skyline thing for sure is great though if you're in a taxi. i've had some real moments with it.

 

[forclosure]

yeah and a lot of that stuff is gash (little britain is anyway). but there was at least some stuff that i thought was properly great.

i don't think the woke hypothesis holds up. there are probably some good jokes that don't get through the net. but that doesn't feel like such a massive limitation to me.

i went on a binge of decade-old episodes of have i got news for you. i'm not saying i'm proud of myself. i was just tired. it's pretty interesting to see how much of it they wouldn't say on the show now. or indeed, basically no-one would say on tele. and it's not like they were ever edgelords. there was one bit where they were making jokes that tangentially related to andy hamilton's disability and he was very polite about it, and the audience laughed, but i got the impression that he was annoyed about it. a few other bits and pieces like that as well. it is kind of amazing that the twitter teaching machine has re-wired us all like that.

i mean i think this is reductive maybe its just people being more considerate of things that they weren't prior, to say it's just twitter is giving the site more power than it actually has.

Todd Philips before he went and "reinvented" himself as a serious clown director was a guy directing comedies where men called each other homophobic slurs as a way of affection

 

[boxedjoy]

I was always annoyed by eg transphobic jokes in Friends, it's just that in 1997 I had no way of being heard, whereas now I can tweet asking why this was accepted.

 

[Mr. Tea]

anybody here gone back and revisited Spaced?

I watched it again a few years ago because my girlfriend had never seen it. The only bits that made me think "You wouldn't get that in a comedy made these days" are the jokes about Vulva being a "big fat tranny".

Papa Lazarou was featured in the short fourth series of The League Of Gentlemen in 2017, although the whole show was withdrawn from Netflix a few years later.

 

[WashYourHands]

Satire isn’t enough. Seems like there’s been a collective subconscious decision switch over to ‘apathetic + can’t be fucked + all/most US stand ups are cunts’

 

[Corpsey]

Not sure about the "state of British comedy" because I don't watch any TV but I do know that the writers of some of the best British comedies of (relatively) recent years – Armando Iannucci and Jesse Armstrong (The Thick of It/Peep Show) – are now working in the US.

A couple of comedy series from (more) recent years that I've enjoyed: Motherland, The Detectorists, Ghosts. The latter two in particular aren't particularly funny, more gentle and pleasant.

Other than that it's only really Limmy on Twitch. I did (finally) see an episode of People Just Do Nothing the other day and it was pretty funny, although crawling with Brent-isms.