The Sacha Baron Cohen movie, ‘Borat’ has made a huge impact at the US box office.
People always tell me that the US people are not big on ironic humour. Well, looking at the popularity of Borat, looks like they are very wrong indeed.
It made “an astounding $26.5 million debut this weekend.”
“It was the biggest opening for a movie on fewer than 1,000 screens since Nielsen EDI has kept records.”
Good to see.
Hey!
We’re not all that clueless. One primary example of that would be the television show Arrested Development. Sure, it wasn’t renewed for a 4th season, but I think the comedy in that TV show was great. And you can’t tell me that every Wes Anderson movie isn’t just chock full of great ironic humor.
The best example of that one is in the movie Rushmore where Max gets drunk and starts to make fun of his crush’s boyfriend. I think his name was max anyways.
Max: I like your nurse’s uniform, guy
Dude: These are OR scrubs.
Max. O, R they? *starts laughing at his own stupid joke"
Such people are imbeciles.
The statement that Americans don’t have X sense of humor just baffles the shit out of me and makes no sense. Look at some very popular shows like The Daily Show, The Simpsons, My Name is Earl etc. Those are hardly dredge slapstick fair and The Daily Show depends on irony at its core. Every conceivable form of humor is already represented in our movies. We don’t need one to come along and “prove” anything. I am afraid I am going to have to turn the insult around and say that many foreigners understand our breath of humor because they don’t even recognize it as humor in the first place. Whoooossshhhh to the world!
People who told you that Americans don’t like irony are, of course, the people most informed about American humor. They have usually lived in the US for a while and have deep and abiding ties to the country. As they well know, in a nation like the USA, where the streets are paved with gold, people have never had any need for the consolation and perspective that irony can bring. One needs systemic inequalities, injustice in life, and other hardships to develop irony. In the United States, such stimuli have, unfortunately, always been lacking.
Irony is completely absent from the very beginning of the American comedy tradition. African-American humor under slavery was devoid of ironic descriptions of property-owning whites and hypocritical, Uncle Tom-like blacks, and Brer Rabbit stories relied on the protagonist’s slipping on banana peels for a laugh. Mark Twain was known for his earnestness, relying on pies in the face for a few yuks while lecturing the public on the minor hypocrisies of 19th century American society. Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary was a slapstick masterpiece, providing the first example of the full “nyuk-nyuk,” which was later adopted by the Three Stooges.
The 20th century brought no changes to the American sensibility. Dorothy Parker, the Marx Brothers, and James Thurber have never used irony in any form. Neither have such classics of American humor as Catch 22, which describes the impeccable logic of using war to address international conflicts of interest. Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, shows a slight use of irony, but most of that was probably due to the influence of Peter Sellers, an Englishman. Terry Southern, the film’s American screenwriter, couldn’t possibly have thought to include such sophistication in the work by himself.
In contemporary American comedy, the presence of irony is still rather hard to come by. Situational irony, as we all know, had nothing to do with the success of such sitcoms as “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” Irony was utterly absent from “Arrested Development,” and was not seen on “The Daily Show” until John Oliver, from the UK, joined the cast. Similarly, cartoons like “Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist,” eschewed irony entirely in favor of a pure, Marcel Marceau-like physical approach to comedy.
This situation may change as the global economy influences comedy production and distribution. The American comedy industry has been slow to embrace outsourcing, but the success of Borat: Cultural Learnings from America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan has shown that American-European collaborations, combined with outsourcing to Central Asia, can produce a successful comedy venture. There has been some talk of moving parody and satire production facilities offshore, where agile 7-year-old fingers can make delicately woven jokes for thirty cents an hour. If cheap Malaysian irony floods the market, we may yet see the introduction of irony consumption in the United States. But until irony is made economically feasible for the middle classes, jokes here will forever be limited to the tried-and-true squirting rose and the joy buzzer.
Here here!
At least one person in America (who may not, of course, have been American) did not get the joke.
Neither did a lot of Romanians.
I don’t think that counts as “not getting the joke.” All the guy who punched him knew was that a tall strange looking man came up to him and asked to buy his clothes because he “want have sex with it.” That’s not clearly a joke until you’re in on who Borat is and watching it happen to someone else in a movie theater.
Scribble, I just wanted to thank you for that post. Truly a work of art.
begins a slow-clap for Scribble
Geez, dude, you sure know how to extract the fun bit out of funny!!
Typical Yankee Imperialist Dog that you are, 
Of course Scribble, the Brits have animated series like Bob the Builder which are laced with irony, but you dont find irony in animated TV in the US. Imagine a cartoon like Southpark, which relies on funny pictures for a laugh, trying to incorporate irony - thats right, it just wouldn’t work.
I do actually qualify for the above.
While I agree that the “irony” thing is misunderstood by Brits, what I will say is that, in my experience, in a personal context, British deadpan sarcasm is often misinterpreted by US recipients. And deadpan sarcasm makes up a large amount of our “humourous” social discourse. This can be difficult to get used to on both sides. Of course, the same may be true in reverse, except we Brits miss it entirely. 
(In minor defense, Bob the Builder vs South Park isn’t a fair comparison.)
I dunno. Maybe I don’t have the right kind of sense of humor, but I really don’t find Borat that funny. Then too, I didn’t find Sacha’s Ali G persona funny, either. *Perhaps it’s because he’s too overt and obvious in his material; it’s not so much wit as just in-your-face, often crude humour. Not that I don’t appreciate that kind of humour, I guess he just doesn’t perform it in a way that strikes me as particularly amusing. shrug
^^ what jjimm said.
When i lived there it was the deadpan humour that, more often than not, just completely wooooshed people. It took a fair while to train myself out of instinctively doing it.
I never saw that as a stunning indictment of the American Sense of Humour ™, more a particular aspect of British humour that didn’t translate. Every nation has its peculiarities when it comes down to it.
Benny Hill is virtually a God in certain parts of Eastern Europe for fucksake.
Is this thread supposed to be some sort of joke?
Because if it is, I don’t get it.
:Lets out a big fart to let Ravenman know what I think of that post. ROTFLOL
Yes we amerca are not such dorks we make right with funny. We prostrate and submit to prisoner austrailia funny yes? This is make funny no?
Also we in the U S and A have the penis long enough to make not fun of Australians. They are like the jews, worthless pigs and backward. It is the funny no? See, you can make a pit thread outside of the pit, and couch it in paternalistics. You will be called on it though.