I’ve been watching a lot of the BBC version of Whose Line is it Anyway recently. For those who don’t know, it’s a comedy show where four comedians are asked to improvise according to a rotating series of mostly unrelated themes. The last one in most/all episodes is the Hodown, where the comedian guests take turns improvising rhyming lyrics about a topic suggested by the audience, over what apparently passes for “cowboy Western” music over there.
Clive Anderson has made a couple of odd comments going into the Hodown segment that took me aback because nobody laughed, but nobody reacted like they were bad jokes, either, leading me to believe that either I’ve been badly whooshed or those lines were actually serious. The first was “And now for the Hodown, a style of music popular in America”. Do Brits think that most modern Americans enjoy “hodown” music? Do they think we go to hodowns? Do they think we have famous hodown singers? The oddest part was that two or three of the guests on that show were Americans, plus a Canadian, and none of them said a peep or looked the slightest bit weirded out. Nor, again, did they give any indication that they perceived the comment as a joke. This can’t seriously be the perception of American music over there, can it? I thought Americans and Brits listened to mostly the same music.
The second was something among the lines of “Everyone enjoys the Hodown, except for the Knesset”. Huh? Again, I would write it off as just not being funny, but nobody even treated it as a joke. I can’t for the life of me figure out why he would have brought up the Israeli parliament.
I think this is just a fairly common reaction to one of Mr Anderson’s humorous remarks. The best way of dealing with them is probably not to give them too much thought – simply let them wash over you.
I don’t know. I mean, I would understand if it were just me (and maybe Ryan Stiles and Colin Mochrie) who didn’t get it–like there were some sort of strange British meme about square-dancing Israelis or something that we were just not privy to here. But nobody, himself included, even acted like he was trying to be funny. Usually the guests–Greg Proops in particular, but not exclusively–give him all kinds of shit when he bombs out on a joke like that. Sometimes he even gives himself shit for it. Anyway, sometimes he’s funny and sometimes he isn’t, but I’ve rarely found him bewildering, and it seems like the audience and the guests usually don’t either. That’s what gives me pause about this whole thing.
You mean that a ‘hodown’ is a bit like an Israeli Hora ( ?sp ) ??
Is not a hodown some sort of square dance with a lot of verbal instructions ?
The only thing I can think of is that the Israeli president is currently being accused of treating some of his female staff like whores - since most heads of States have that facility thoughtfully provided for them, and job descriptions vary from ‘intern’ to ‘cabinet minister’ to ‘researcher’ … ad nauseum.
Puzzling.
Possibly Clive Anderson’s gag writers have been on something interesting.
They stopped making that show about ten years ago, so possibly the Knesset joke is something that was topical at the time. And a couple of nitpicks - it wasn’t a BBC programme (not all BBC America shows are), and its “hoedown”.
It’s “hoedown.” I was going to link the Wikipedia article on the subject, but that article gets things wrong. (For one thing, it mistakenly equates “hoedown” with “square dance.” For another, whoever wrote the article seems to believe -mistakenly- that hoedown is a dance style.)
A hoedown is a rural dance party, featuring a string band (which would include some combination of fiddle, banjo, guitar, upright bass, mandolin, dobro-- not necessarily all of those).
A square dance is one of the types of dances that you might have seen at a hoedown. Square dancing involves an emcee “calling” the dance. (Anyone familiar with Bugs Bunny cartoons has seen him “call” a square dance in the feuding hillbilly episode.) The performers on Whose Line is it Anyway seem to be emulating the “call” part of a square dance.
Besides square-dancing, a hoedown might also feature two-steps and waltzes, as well as some free form buck-dancing or clogging (which is akin to Irish step dance).
Getting back to the OP, string music was once very popular in the US (at least in rural areas), and there were a number of hit records by string band artists back in the 1920s. (E.g., Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers.) In the 30s and 40s, string band music evolved into what we now call bluegrass music (largely through the influence of Bill Monroe, who added a backbeat and a racing tempo to traditional string music).
So while “hoedown” music (i.e., string music) doesn’t rule the charts these days, its descendant bluegrass music is still around, and still has an enthusiastic following.
It was a fairly common remark about this segment so it’s not as though it was something new and amazingly startlingly witty being heard for the first time.
Hugh Laurie’s ability to mimic an American accent has always blown me the hell away.
BTW, that’s not a hodown song. Hodowns are dances.
Huh?
No, a square dance is a square dance with a lot of verbal instructions.
The way I understand it–and the way I’ve mimicked it in the few parodies I’ve participated in–is that there’s a band, or maybe just a dude with a guitar or banjo, strummin’ away while massive numbers of country folk light bonfires and dance wildly and scream and throw food, etc.
Gah! Channel Four, of course. Sorry.
I’ve never seen that spelling in my life. I guess it’s feasible, but given the nature of the thing itself as an activity for the uneducated, I’ve always figured its spelling was fluid.
Lots of good info, spoke-, thanks.
I’ve seen many, many episodes of the show and can’t recall hearing it more than once. I guess it’s possible that I wasn’t paying attention, but you’d think I’d remember it one other time considering I’ve been watching the show since I was 8 years old.
I used to watch the UK Whose Line a lot. That’s just Anderson’s style of humour. He makes all sorts of outlandish or exaggerated claims, usually with a flat tone as if it was factual. Sometmes it’s funny, most of the time it’s just random stuff that’s part of a patter of speech.
However, he wasn’t totally wrong either because. “Hoedown” music is the roots of bluegrass and has its roots in American folk music tradition. It would be like saying “didgeridoo music, which is popular in Australia…” It’s not necessarily “popular” in the sense that Australian Top 40 radio stations are playing it, but it’s going to be a lot more prevalent there than in, say, Russia.
I can tell you that the correct spelling is