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Interesting article

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Dean BedfordApr 4, 2007
 

 
from the Times on the Brits and humour - following a discussion we had
a couple of weeks ago.

Comedy ain’t what it used to be (but don’t tell foreigners)

Richard Morrison

Oh dear. The critics are being beastly about the latest cinematic
exploits of Mr Bean. Or, as we may have to call him, Mr Has-Bean. In
truth, it’s a lame film. As Rowan Atkinson admits, the hapless nerd
should have been consigned to the annals of blissful memory decades ago.
After all, it’s 28 years since he was created. Even Chaplin’s Tramp
lasted only 22 years. Great comic creations should rise and fall as
swiftly as meteors — dazzling us briefly, then disappearing before we
notice that their act comprises one silly walk and a gormless
catchphrase.
But here’s a funny thing. Even as Mr Bean is rubbished by ungrateful
compatriots, he still has them rolling in the aisles in Dakota,
Dubrovnik and Darwin. Why? Because, amazing though it may seem to those
of us struggling joylessly to pay a huge mortgage for a tiny piece of
this fractious isle, the world regards the Brits as the funniest nation
on earth. From Bombay to Buenos Aires, it seems, they still split their
sides at the Dead Parrot Sketch. Except in Russia, where they continue
to labour under the tragic delusion that Benny Hill is the funniest
thing since sliced cabbage. I once met Russia’s finest circus clown — a
man with the sophistication to base entire skits on Othello or War and
Peace. I asked what inspired him to go into comedy. “I have all of Benny
Hill on video,” he replied with a proud smile.
This anecdotal evidence is confirmed by a survey that Reader’s Digest
did a couple of years ago. They asked 4,000 Europeans to rank each
other’s nationalities according to traits such as bossiness (the Germans
came top), efficiency (the Germans came top), and loveability (the
Germans came last). The British ended up mid-table for everything
except “sense of humour”, where we soared to the top. Oh, and
“sexiness”, where we plunged to the bottom. (In every sense, if you went
to a private school.)
So, are we the funniest people on the planet? It’s certainly true that
if you were to compile a list of British geniuses acclaimed around the
world in the past 50 years, the comedians on it — Tony Hancock, Peter
Sellers, Peter Cook, Kenneth Williams, Spike Milligan, Eric Morecambe,
Ronnie Barker, Leonard Rossiter, David Jason, the Monty Python team,
Jennifer Saunders, Dawn French, Atkinson (probably for Blackadder rather
than Bean) and, maybe, the Little Britain crew — would far outnumber the
chefs, composers, painters or industrialists.
But if the world finds us funny, why? And are we as funny today as we
were? These are deep questions. They probe to the heart of a national
psyche that seems to be changing, indeed fracturing, by the month. The
trouble is that a lot of what foreign audiences find funny about the
British relies on dated stereotypes that would be well-nigh
unrecognisable to many people living in Britain today.
That became clear to me last month. Leafing through the estimable
Brisbane Courier-Mail, the way one does, I came across an article
analysing why Aussies find British comedy irresistible. It was
wonderfully revealing, though perhaps not as its author intended. She
decided that the appeal of shows like Little Britain lay in their
“merciless lampooning” of “England’s veneer of propriety, its class
system, stiff-upper-lip mentality and grey bureaucracy”. Our humour
works so well, she claimed, because it shows “repressed people” trying
to bottle up their feelings in a “stitched-up, controlled society” — and
going bonkers in the process.
Hmm. Fifty years ago, she would have been spot-on. Classic British
comedy certainly used to derive its manic energy from exploiting the
tensions of a “stitched-up, controlled society” — or, more accurately, a
country comprising any number of restrictive environments where
behaviour was governed by arcane (though often unspoken) conventions.
The spectacle of incurably polite people behaving with dogged
rationality and impeccable decorum when confronted by ludicrous
situations has been the staple ingredient of British comedy since the
days of W. S. Gilbert and Jerome K. Jerome. It surfaced again in P. G.
Wodehouse; was there ever a more pronounced example of a closed,
restrictive society than a weekend party at an Edwardian country house?
And it was the prime motivating force in the great radio comedies that
shaped my boyish imagination, my language, and even my notion of what it
meant to be that bizarre, self-mocking creature called an Englishman.
That’s not surprising. Examine the backgrounds of those who created
shows like Round the Horne and you find that most of them honed their
Absurdist humour while chafing under not one repressive regime, but two.
First, they were mostly gay men in a country where homosexuality was
still outlawed. And secondly, they had all been through National
Service. Some of the 20th century’s greatest surreal comedy — from
Catch22 to M*A*S*H to Bilko — drew its inspiration from the unbending
insanities of military life. Round the Horne had that same feeling of
anarchic spirits making a dash for freedom. And how brazenly they did
it! Four decades on, their outrageous double-entendres (“He was bent
over his work — but off duty, straight as a die”) still echo in my mind.
After people stopped doing National Service, it was a generation of
comedians drawn from equally character-warping male environments —
namely, the public schools and Oxbridge — who made the pace. As Eric
Idle once commented, at Cambridge you were either recruited by the BBC
comedy department or the KGB.
But even in the British sitcoms not created by people who had been
through Footlights, the humour nearly always depended on people trying
to cope (or going off the rails) in smotheringly oppressive
environments. It could be prison ( Porridge), a ghastly hotel ( Fawlty
Towers), suburbia ( The Good Life), a mind-numbing office ( The Fall and
Rise of Reginald Perrin) or a department store ( Are You Being Served?).
It could be all of these things. But really it was England.
To some extent the most successful British comedies of today — The
Office and Little Britain — follow in the same vein. The trouble is that
little Britain itself has undergone a social revolution. Today, it’s not
a country of bottled-up emotions. The British have learnt to blub like
Italians and blather psychobabble like Californians. It’s not a nation
of stiff-upper-lip decorum. Try picking your way through the brawling
drunks in any British town centre, any Friday night.
It’s not, by and large, an oppressive regime towards minorities. It’s no
longer an island of people embarrassed by the merest whisper of sex.
Indeed, to judge from every media outlet except The Church Times, we are
obsessed by sex (and The Church Times is pretty hot stuff too, some
weeks).
We can’t even be regarded any more as the world’s leading repository of
snobbery — unless the snobbery is inverted, as in the Prime Minister’s
adopted Estuary accent. Today you can find much more shameless displays
of elitism in Manhattan or Moscow than in Mayfair.
All this may be liberating for the British psyche, though I’m not
totally persuaded. But it’s not much good for comedy. Without taboos,
inhibitions and ridiculous rules of conduct, comedy has nothing to
lampoon. Not the classic British style of self-debunking comedy, anyway.
So perhaps our comedy needs to be turned on its head. In the old days it
showed an over-regimented world being subverted by closet anarchists,
usually nursing some hideous psychological flaw dating from a dark
boyhood incident in a boarding-school dorm. But modern Britain is a
country of reasonably well-adjusted individuals coping with a system in
chaos. That calls for a different sort of comedy, one closer to the
savage satire that acted as a safety valve for the sane in the Soviet
Union. Perhaps that’s the way British comedy should go. But either way I
can’t see a future for Mr Bean. Oh well. In Kansas, Kathmandu and Kiev
they will undoubtedly continue to believe he’s the very model of a
loveable, laughable British twit.

 
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