š¾ Archived View for idiomdrottning.org āŗ british-comedy captured on 2023-07-10 at 13:56:45. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
ā¬ ļø Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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Sweden trivia! Growing up in the eighties and nineties everyone in Sweden had such a love for āBritish comedyāā¦ which to them usually meant Fawlty Towers or āAllo āAllo or something in that vein. š¤
It was a boring and soul-crushing time, but the boringness on TV wasnāt the worst part. It was that everyone thought they were such a uniquely sofisticated connaisseur of sublime yaks for being into the same basic accent gags and repetitive sarcasm that everyone else was.
Imagine every Benny Hill watcher snootily looking down at every one else for not being as sophisticated, refined, and British, and youāve got Sweden in the eighties and nineties. I liked Charlie Kaufman or whatever but noooā¦ āAmerican humor is so stupidā.
Itās not that British stuff canāt be funny (Discworld, Smack the Pony), itās fine, the problem was more the disparaging of every other genre of comedy.
My own fave kind of humor is nothing special either. Latter Barks (Scrooge/Gyro era), Archie, Nancy, Blondieā¦ Iāve been into the same kinda comedy all my life. Simple & straightforward. Or, Japanese comics like Mr Bride. Maybe itās because I liked American comics that made me so touchy about the purported superiority of Fry, Cleese, Atkinson &co.
Iāve heard people (I think it was Stephen Fry) describe it as how American humor is about smart-alecks and British humor is about self-deprecation. Problem for me is that a lot of the āselfā-deprecating jokes punch not only at self, but down and all around, hitting everyone who shares traits with the character. Or worseā thereās this episode of Misfits where the joke is that a guy has sex with an old woman and that thatās gross. And the joke is āself-deprecatingā for him, the comedian, but itās also really disparaging her and by extension, older women in general.
Conversely, in smart-aleck stories, while there are jokes along the way, it ultimately is based on Veronica developing empathy and social conscience, Scrooge and Gyro solving problems, Nancy and Sluggo thinking laterally about existential issues, Dagwood finding glimpses of zen-like joy in his every day routine like talking to the mailman or making a sandwich. Itās about building the world up, not tearing it down.
But, Iāve seen plenty of smart-aleck stories come out of Britain (Weatherwax and Vimes, of course, or Milliganās run on Shade) and plenty of deprecation humor come out of the US. Sturgeonās law is a harsh mistress š