Word for word, this is how I feel, especially the part about Merchant. The more I see him without Ricky, the more I realise it’s him I enjoy, and Ricky I increasingly cannot stand.
I’ve only seen a couple episodes - the Jordon/Israel/Palestine one, and the Mexico one.
But my primary thought on those two…
Karl generally comes out looking better than Gervaise - he’s a bit dim, sure, and reflexively bigoted, but not so dim he can’t learn to not be so bigoted. Ricky, though, is nothing but a jerkass getting off on making Karl miserable…or trying to. Karl takes things better than many people would. He hasn’t had Ricky and Steven killed for the fake kidnapping, for instance. >_>
My friend introduced me to this via his DVR after the Super Bowl last weekend. Granted, I was a bit inebriated, but after watching the India episode and the China episode, I didn’t get that impression at all about him. Perhaps I need some more background into who he is, but Karl seemed to actually be quite capable of taking in and processing cultures different than his own. His on-camera persona struck me as exactly that – a persona. A complete (or mostly a) put-on to make for fun and interesting television. I knew a few characters like this when I lived abroad, who would feign ignorance and act “hyper-outsider”/“dumb tourist” for yucks. This is exactly the same vibe I get from Karl: that he is actually quite intelligent and well aware of his surroundings, but plays on the stereotypical English tourist angle because that makes for funny watching.
Me too. I can understand thinking he was really like that when you first hear or see him, but after watching him in different situations I think it’s pretty clear that it’s a character. It’s especially clear when he is by himself, without Ricky and Stephen - he has to be a bit more aware because he doesn’t have the “smart” people to play off.
I have a few friends and relatives who have a similar sense of humour. They pretend to have attitudes that half make sense on some level but completely (and deliberately) miss the point, or dismiss major aspects of the human experience with a wave of the hand.
I watched the Inida, China and Jordon episodes and thought it was 15 minutes of humor squeezed into an hour. Then I watched the Mexico episode and I laughed out loud during most of it.
Really, if someone’s lack of understanding of the interconnectedness of ecology is where you’re finding fault with them, they might not be that dumb. Come on, who sometimes doesn’t wish the world was rid of centipedes or mosquitoes? Who spends a lot of time thinking about the “interconnectedness of ecology”?
And bear in mind Pilkington’s from the UK, which is one of the least biologically diverse places on the planet, animal-wise.
This is precisely the way most people think, including most people who believe in evolution. It’s a hard subject to comprehend.
But Karl objects to octopuses. And jellyfish. (Because they have no eyes.)
He also seems to regard animals’ natural defense mechanisms as offensive weapons aimed at him personally.
Jumping “beans” come from Northwestern Mexico, so Karl was in the wrong part of the country to find them. Not sure if he would have had better luck if he had known to call them “brincador” to the locals.
I kind of liked that Karl seened to have some fun in the Mexico episode. He was somewhat indifferent to the “wonder,” of course (as he always is), but he did say he enjoyed himself in this one more than he has in any of the others, and he actually seemed to bond with some people.
I still can’t figure out if Karl is really an idiot or not. He does have a way of making observations that are original and interesting, if off kilter, and at times he says things that show some genuine wit. More than you would expect from an imbecile. Example: in the India episode where he has to use a public bathroom, characteristically bitches about it, sees a mop leaning against the wall on his way out and deadpans, “that’s never been used.”
I also find his fascination with insects kind of endearing, even though he anthropomorphizes them endlessly.
Mexico
This one was different. They didn’t spend time on his accommodations at all. At least here in the US they blurred quite a few things like the photos in the newspapers. (I guess too graphic) and they even blurred some sort of advertising. It looked like a Coke sign.
But we did get this.
[QUOTE=Karl Pilkington]
What the hell is wrong with you people?
[/QUOTE]
Perfect
I don’t see the bigotry in Karl at all. I can’t imagine that Ricky and Steve would have anything to do with him were that the case.
If anything, he approaches the people he meets with openness and politeness.
He constantly questions (and is appalled by) the cultural differences he sees but I never get the feeling that any of it stems from a point of view of him seeing them as lesser people.
He is set in his ways and resistant to change, that doesn’t translate into bigotry.
First of all, you’re missing the forest for the trees. I think I have offered plenty of ways in which Karl displays symptoms of faulty logic, ignorance, and just plain stupidity.
Second, the basic concept is one that I learned in the fourth grade in its basic form and that is very easily applied logically to the world around us – that is, living things are part of many complex ecosystems and that removing any one thing can have unforeseen circumstances. Or, to paraphrase Gervais, “Everything is something’s food.”
It’s a very simple concept and one that shouldn’t have to be explained over and over and over and over to a single person. But no matter how many times it’s explained to him, Karl’s brain resets to “Why do we need them? What are they doing?”
Karl doesn’t just wish for the absence of particular creatures who directly affect him, either by grossing him out by crawling on him (centipedes) or biting him (mosquitos). He is offended by the very idea of the vast diversity of species that exist on the planet and repeatedly wishes for them to be culled down to some finite number that feels comfortable to him.
He objects to the idea that there might be two animals that are superficially similar to each other, like, say, woolly mammoths and elephants.
He thinks that we should allow seals to be hunted to extinction, because they’re redundant – just a “cross between a dog and a fish.”
He thinks that the only way that stick insects could have achieved their appearance is that at some point in their development, an insect “had it off with a stick.” He also thinks that stick insects must have a hard time finding mates what with their confusing sticks for stick insects.
He somehow garners some kind of fact or anecdote and bizarrely interprets its ramifications.
He learned that a jellyfish is 97 percent water and decided it’s pointless – “Just give it another 3 percent and make it water. It’ll be more useful.” The very existence of a creature that is 97 percent water literally makes him angry.
He heard somewhere that an octopus – because it has no skeleton – can climb into a jar. His reaction – “Why would it want to do that? What good does it do for an octopus to get into a jar?” He’s decided that all octopuses do is try to get into jars and he’s decided that they are useless because of that.
He heard about some kind of frog or toad in South America that has enough venom to “kill a thousand men.” Karl’s reaction? “Why would it want to go around killing a thousand men?” He wants to get rid of it, because he seems to be afraid that it’s wiping out people by the thousands, and he might be next.
Karl spends a lot of time thinking about it. The problem is that he never, or rarely, has the urge to seek out the real answers to these questions.
And even when he does seek out real answers, he resists them. In 2002-2003 he did four segments called “Do We Need 'Em?” in which he interviewed actual scientists and asked them whether there was any consequence to eliminating some species – octopuses, jellyfish, snails, and cockroaches.
In each case, the experts tried to get him to understand that you couldn’t eliminate a species without consequences. Instead of taking that kind of information on board, he decided that the scientists were just being difficult or biased and petulantly gave up on the project.
No matter what anyone tells him, he keeps going back to his idées fixes – “Why does it want to get into a jar?” “What good is it if it’s 97 percent water?”
He’s got some kind of idea that the oceans are packed full of too much life and he has this desperate (phobic, perhaps?) idea that we’ve got to do something to reduce the crowding.
(He also thinks it’s unfair that the surface of the earth is more ocean than land – he thinks it means “fish have more rights than us.” Figure out the thought process on that.)
I’m not sure how relevant this is. I don’t think he’s giving British species a pass on their diversity. He said he’s seen more dead hedgehogs than live ones, so if they go extinct, he doesn’t see any problem with it.
And this is precisely why I say that Karl’s idiocy is frightening. To the extent that there are people like him, it’s not comforting to know that they are allowed to make decisions that have any effect on our world.
Yes, he did say he could see living there for a little while. It’s interesting what he finds pleasing. Like the gajar-ka-halwa he had in India. (Of course he’s so stupid, he didn’t think he could find it in London.)
Yes, he has a barroom wit. The problem is that that is the extent of his reasoning skills. He seems to think that if his argument would be good enough to score points with a group of drunken pub-goers that it should hold in the rest of the world.
“There’s always a snidey one.”
He apparently loves watching nature documentaries, but it’s pretty clear that he understands very little of what he sees.
It’s not skin-colour or racial bigotry, but it is bigotry. He starts with the assumption that the way he’s used to doing things is the right way of doing things, and it offends him if he encounters some society that deviates from what he’s used to. It’s bigotry in the sense that he has no room in his mind for people who choose to do things differently from the way he wants things to be done.
Gervais once asked him if it would be okay for a blind person to apply for a job that didn’t require vision. Karl’s reply: “Well, they can apply, but they shouldn’t moan if they don’t get it.” Meaning, essentially, that it was okay for an employer to unfairly discriminate against a blind person.
I agree that he’s a generally nice guy, if a bit of a misanthrope.
But his mind is so sieve-like. He can’t seem to hold onto simple ideas or concepts or words. He once was telling a story about Hurricane Katrina, but the closest he could come to saying “Hurricane Katrina” was “that bad wind over in America.”
Bad wind? He’s like a slow 6-year-old.
He wanted to say that he didn’t like the idea of having an enema. He couldn’t come up with the word enema – “the bum-tube thing.”
I, too, think Karl is just a put-on persona, and is scripted like pro wresting or something.
Secondly, I can’t watch it because every other word is bleeped. I can’t stand beeping noises. Either allow the word or have the actor refrain from using it.
After watching the Egypt episode, the thing I was most struck by was just how crassly commercialized the Giza sites have become, how predatory the tourist industry and how pestilential the street hustlers. Karl literally couldn’t walk five feet through the city without being descended on by hustlers of every description, and he didn’t really know how to defend himself from them. He was trying to be polite to all of them.
acsenray, are you still convinced he is not a character? Because his comments about animals, blind people and hurricane Katrina are pretty funny to me (as ridiculous, joking attitudes). Someone described him as a cross between Ali G and Steven Wright. It’s not a perfect description but it’s close.
I just saw this show for the first time last weekend and I have to say, I didn’t really get it. He seemed relatively normal in Egypt and I wasn’t sure if I’d watch another episode but this
has changed my mind. Comedy gold!
Yeah, who says something like that and isn’t just playing up a character? There’s little doubt in my mind that he’s donning a persona. I never thought of the Ali G and Steven Wright comparison, but that’s about right to me.
If he’s doing a character, he’s a stone genius, but I really don’t think he is. I think he’s just a genuine eccentric, not as stupid as he’s made out to be, but still just a little off. Possibly in the autistic spectrum.
Yeah, all the examples **acsenray **keeps posting just makes me find him even funnier. They sound exactly like something Gervais would say in his comedy routine. I am just not getting any kind of offense from Karl, sorry. He’s playing up the character for the comedy.
I’m starting to think you’re playing the same kind of role here. I can’t believe you can hear (and remember so well, apparently) all those comments he has made and yet believe he is being 100% sincere.