Yaaah! Loved that show! [I couldn’t remember his name, so I haven’t searched, but are any of the shows available on video?] I can’t remember the exact wording from one monologue, but:
[paraphrase]
My friends and I would go to the movies and watch westerns. Afterwards, we would play cowboys and indians. My friends had rifles, I had a sawed-off shotgun.
[/paraphrase]
My sister and I were rolling on the floor during every show. I remember it as being hysterical, escpecially one skit of ‘things to do in stalled traffic’:
pretend to thread an (invisible) needle - everyone else thinks they can do it better
roll up the windows and pretend the car was filling with water
when the guy ahead of you starts to read the paper, honk the horn. He’ll hit the gas, thinking traffic is moving, and crash into the guy in front of him.
Okay, maybe that last one wasn’t too funny, but the threading needles thing does work in traffic.
RE: Punch.
Used to read back issues of that in college, especially “Let’s Parlez Franglais” and the caption contests.
Pity it’s no longer as good.
Back in 1952, Simon & Schuster published a big hardcover called THE BEST CARTOONS FROM PUNCH, COLLECTED FOR AMERICANS.
You come across it every once in a while in used bookshops. And I see there are many copies available on ABE and other booksearch engines, for well under twenty bucks.
Hours of entertainment. Worth every penny. Harrumph. What ho.
I’ve seen one or two US sitcoms that are put on our tv at around 4pm, when the majority are still at work and I’m sorry to say they suck so bad I’ve never bothered to find out what they were. They are usually based on a formula of something that was very good but these things are very predictable and cringingly unfunny.
Any good US comedy finds its way into the main viewing times quite swiftly.
I’ve always been impressed with US stand-up comics.
For many years all ours did was tell jokes along the lines of ‘Did you hear the one about…’ or ‘My mother in law is so ugly…’ whereas US comics used storytelling methods.
The big change came in the middle to late 70’s as people like Jasper Carrott and Billy Connolpy came on the scene.
Their humour was based on observations and less on running down individuals by stereotypes such as race, sex etc.
I liked Freinds at first but several series on it seems to have lost some life, can’t quite put my finger on it.
Other favourites, Taxi, Frasier, Friends, Seinfeld, Police Squad(extremely silly), Kelly Montieth was ok but seems to have gone awol.
I know that ‘Steptoe and son’ was remade over there as ‘Sandford and son’ and I would be interested to know if anyone has seen both and what are the similarities/differances in the humour.
‘Till death do us part’ was probably a bit too Brit to carry it in the US.
I used to love ‘The Goodies’ which was a contemporary of Monty Python. They all knew each other quite well but somehow the Pythons got all the recognition.
I wonder if any of you saw the Spike Milligan Q series. You could really see where Python and the team got their inspiration - come to think of it do any of you remember ‘The Goons’, about as surreal, absurd, slapstick and just silly as it’s possible to get and yet it all made wonderful, if lunatic, snese.
Actually Casdave, a tv show called All in the Family ran a long time over here in the states during the 70’s. It was based on “till death do us part”. All in the Family was one of my favorite shows of all time. Simply hilarious!
In the 70s, I was a total Monty Python devotee. Then for some reason the local PBS station stopped showing it. What did they replace it with? Benny Hill. I tuned out!
“Say, Monty Python was a big hit over here–looks like the audience likes British humor. We’ll give 'em Benny Hill!”
Actually, IIRC, MTV bought the US broadcasting rights to “Monty Python” and PBS lost one of its biggest pledge drive cash cows. [I think this was around the time that MTV was broadcasting “The Young Ones”.]
For a short time, the ABC network was broadcasting “Monty Python” on late-night (11:30 pm on Fridays), and I think this is when/where the words “naughty bits” were bleeped out.
[sidetrack, but the same railway]
Wasn’t there an episode with one of Terry Gilliam’s cartoons (a character who noticed a black spot on his face) censored - the word “cancer” replaced by something like “gangrene”, with an obvious overdub in a different voice? Was this done on the UK or US side?
[/sidetrack, but the same railway]
Is england a foreign country if you are in the uSA? Cause I watched a english video & I told the video guy I didn’t like it cause it seemed foreign & he didn’t mark the box as foreign.
<<For me, I guess this would be most of the skits I saw on French and Saunders. (What the heck is a “wrinkly asshole,” anyway, and why is it supposed to be funny?)>>(Fillet)
This was a skit on Crinkly Bottom, fictional setting of poss the worst early evening prog ever, the dire dire House Party, vehicle of the dire dire Noel Edmonds. If you know the F&S sketch, you have the original pretty much intact. Show and Edmonds both axed two or three years ago - to almost universal relief.
As a gross generalisation with many exceptions on both sides, I think one of the differences is that British Humour is often about things which just happen to be funny whereas American humour relies more on gags.
Am I the only one who thought that the British comedy Chef! was one of the funniest Brit imports since Python’s?
Has anyone else out there seen this show? A can assure you Ike one episode and you’ll be hooked. The central character, a chef named Garreth Blackstock, is able to deliver vitriolic abuse in ubroken stretches for what seems to be up to half the show’s length. The sly, snide digs by his long suffering wife are just as funny.
Couple of others I wonder if you Americans relate to,
One foot in the grave - has been a major success over here.
It broke a lot of comedic conventions when it came out featuring as it did an elderly couple going through lifes travails, just very funny.
Last of the summer wine - I’ve watched this for years, it is set in a part of the country not too far away from me by bicycle, only 30 miles or so and I guess I must have ridden all over that scenery.I’d have thought that it would not catch on in the US.
