Off the Cuff / My Other Journal

Sense of Humor and British Comedies

This morning I read an article titled, “Titters, Snickers and Guffaws, With a British Accent,” in NY Times. Its byline belongs to Ben Brantley and I suspect the article, about the British TV and summer theater season in London, has also ran in the Times. Although the author snickers about some British productions, he admits to enjoying their penchant to provoke laughter. He also addresses the differences between the American and the British sense of humor.

I agree there is a difference. The difference, however, is not in the silliness or seriousness or the understanding of comedy. It is in the originality.

Anything original, here in US, we use it non-stop and abuse its originality until it stops being original. British, on the other hand, try to find novel ideas and approaches to comedy, taking it to new heights while we hash and rehash same formula with nauseating frequency. I believe this is true because our right-wingers are also tight-wingers, and their raised eyebrows can scare away brilliance. Accordingly, since they mostly own the media, their approval or disapproval halts artistic expression in its conception. The British, on the other hand, are not afraid of rattling a few sensitivities.

In US, we do create different situations and settings, but the general formula usually stays the same. Do not the British stoop to formulaic situations? Surely, they do, but with what little I saw in their productions, their reverting to a formula stays inside the same production or sit-com series.

I adore the British comedies on TV. Since I can’t go to London for theater each season, I watch or tape the British sit-coms when we run across them on PBS or on a cable channel. One of my old favorites is “Alo, Alo,” a sit-com series, starring a Frenchman, a resistance-aiding but greedy café owner. About ten or more years ago, I used to watch it on the PBS channel. The storyline of the series were repetitive but cleverly and candidly repetitive, within the same series’s framework.

Coming back to the article, although the author hints at Shakespeare’s lack of inventiveness for not coming up with original plots, he also says, in comedy, the tale does not count as much as how it’s told. What he has so eloquently said on this subject made me smile, because it so corresponds to the way we revise our items in this tiny cyber community of ours in order to learn writing. “Adjust the volume, tweak the contours, refine the timing and, if need be, fiddle with the setting, and the hoariest yuck-fest can seem as dewy as a morning in May.” Still, the author's faulting Shakespeare did not sit too well with me, but to each his own.

Maybe in US, we needed to come up with our own Shakespeare, or at least, some version of him. Maybe then, our response to the hunger of our citizens for comedy would not stop at producing a horde of stand-up comics who think shocking the audience with foul language can mean a solid sense of humor.

At the end of the article, after wondering why the hit play “Boeing, Boeing,” shown in London’s West End, did not survive Broadway, the author says about London: “Who knows? Maybe it’s something in the water here, a microbe that breeds receptivity to silliness.”

I must be as silly as the British, even if I don't drink their water.