The end of the fifth book of the Hitch Hiker’s trilogy was kind of a downer for me.
One word: Seymour.
Jam - Symptomless Coma
Not the ending, the whole movie. I just found it to be a cry of despair. And yeah, I saw the entire thing.
Doesn’t help that I seem to keep seeing near-duplicates of “Ow My Balls” all the time on TV.
Not a sketch, but the final scene in City Lights is incredibly sad.
A little background: Chaplin had raised money so that the blind flower girl can see again. He goes to jail for it, and the scene take place some time later, after Chaplin has been released and as the girl is wondering who her benefactor is. Their meeting is one of the great moments of all film.
This episode is one of the most emotionally impactful things I’ve watched in years. In one fell swoop, they turned the Ice King from a simple buffoonish villain into one of the most tragic characters I’ve ever seen. Completely unexpected, and wonderfully executed. And great music, too.
That sketch was fucking brilliant. Seriously, seriously fucking brilliant.
Steve Martin & Gilda Radner in Dancing In The Dark. I even found the script for it.
Good on you for correctly identifying it as a short film; it’s called Don’t Look Back In Anger and I am unable to find a copy online at the moment (it was on Hulu a couple of years ago, I know). It aired in the 3rd season of SNL (show #59).
Never heard of them before.
That was very well acted and produced.
Touching.
A short, well-written blog article about that sketch here.
Available here. Surreal as hell. Especially the parts where Belushi says that they all thought he was the “live fast, die young” type.
That was excellent and very tough to watch.
The caption under the video says “I know that the serious part of this sketch is still taking the piss…”, which I take to mean that the actors are still intending to be comedic during Holmes’ moment of clarity, but I can’t find the comedy in that moment. Can someone else point it out?
I don’t see it either.
“Watson’s” facial expression when he first comes into Holmes’s room is exactly the facial expression worn by all friends and family of old people when entering that very situation. It’s a wonderfully acted sketch demonstrating both gentleman’s acting talents beyond just telling jokes.
Explained earlier in the thread. The show had earlier mocked Blackadder for turning all maudlin at the last fwe minutes.
It’s “still taking the piss” because the previous episode had been devoted to taking the piss out of Sudden Genre Shifts meant to tug the viewers’ heart strings in cheap or unexpected ways.
So after having spent a whole episode mocking other shows who did it, and did it in facile fashion to boot (like Black Adder) they did it themselves partly to show them how it’s done right ; and partly out of ironic, self-aware self-deprecation which is a big part of Mitchell & Webb’s repertoire.
IOW, the piss taking of the “serious” bit takes place at a more meta- level rather than within the sketch itself.
And in that way, the ending becomes funny *because *it’s tragic and gut wrenching and no laughing matter at all - the people who’ve seen the previous bits expect them to drop a punchline or blow a raspberry that never comes. Instead you get punched straight in the gut. Ha ha !
Which itself is of course contrasted with the whole “Dementia is funny ! Old people do weird stuff and forget things all the time, isn’t it funny ?” tone of the beginning of the sketch - which would *actually *be quitetragic if you removed the laugh track. When you think about it from a non-comedic PoV, the great Holmes searching for the slipper that’s on his foot and Watson just pretending along isn’t funny, it’s pretty fucking bleak and sad.
Futurama episiode “Jurassic Bark” is a tear jerker for the dog lovers out there.
Ah, now I get the connection to Blackadder that was mentioned earlier. Thanks for the detailed explanation.
Two of my favourite sketches:
This is my favourite, football, football, football.
