(no subject)

[avevale_intelligencer]

I've been reading "Spike & Co.", by Graham McCann, an account of the life of Associated London Scripts, the company formed by Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson from which emerged a good chunk of the radio and television comedy that everyone remembers from the pre-Footlights-invasion days: The Goon Show, Sykes And A..., Hancock's Half Hour, Steptoe And Son and Till Death Us Do Part. They also gave Terry Nation his start, but to quote the man's own brainchild, everyone's entitled to one really big mistake. :)

And I read about how funny the Goon Show was, and how funny Eric Sykes was, and how funny Hancock was, and how funny the Steptoes were, and how funny Alf Garnett was, and I realised I'd run the entire spectrum from fervent agreement to what-is-the-man-blethering-about in the course of one book. I loved the Goons and Sykes, always have and always will, but I'm so-so about Hancock, never liked Steptoe and Son and hated Till Death. And it occurred to me that that's why so much modern comedy leaves me cold. It's not just that I'm an old fart whose tastes were formed while I was still in the womb. Many of the shows I dislike, or simply fail to find funny, are the ones like The Office and The Royle Family, Little Britain and The League Of Gentlemen, that follow to one extent or another the tradition of Steptoe and Till Death. Those two shows opened the door to a kind of comedy that is alien to my nature, a bleak unrelenting view of unpleasant characters in unpleasant situations doing and saying unpleasant things to each other and unable ever to stop. You might say the same about the Goons, of course, but the Goons never were or pretended to be real people, or to inhabit a real world.

This, of course, only pushes the problem a little further back, in that I have no idea why my sense of humour is deficient where the cruel or disgusting kind of humour is concerned, the kind that I can only imagine causing an uneasy snigger or a smirk. Still, that's me for you, I suppose.

Comments

[fleetfootmike.livejournal.com]

Well, if yours is deficient, mine is too. And I'm perfectly happy with mine.

[inamac.livejournal.com]

Word. You're by no means alone. I always preferred the wit and wordplay of Muir and Norden to the slapstick and cruelty* of Galton & Simpson. Fortunately, in those days there was M&N. About the only person doing witty sitcom these days is Andy Hamilton (Old Harry's Game) - and that's not likely to be on TV any day soon. The rest have diverted to what is left of satire.

*I can't watch these sorts of programmes - including Fawlty Towers without feeling like a Victorian child being dragged round the lunatic asylum for the amusement of the adults.

[keristor.livejournal.com]

I agree with the exception of Fawlty Towers, which I enjoy. Possibly because in FT they aren't all that 'real', just as the Goons are non-real, they are cariacatures, whereas in Steptoe and TDUDP I have known real people like that. Basil Fawlty is slapstick, Alf Garnet is abuse, IMO. It's not just 'old' versus 'new' either, I find Chaplin and a lot of Laurel and Hardy to be pathetic (in the original sense of pathos) and so sad not funny.

Humour is a funny thing...

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

I'll swap you some Laurel and Hardy for all of Fawlty Towers.

[hobbitblue.livejournal.com]

"...a kind of comedy that is alien to my nature, a bleak unrelenting view of unpleasant characters in unpleasant situations doing and saying unpleasant things to each other and unable ever to stop."

Wow. You've put your finger on exactly why I don't like the new programmes you listed, I'd not realised they were in the same continuum as Steptoe etc or what my problem with them is, when everyone seems to love them. Thankyou for that. I wish there were more clever, wordplay-like humour being popular still...

Tragedy and Comedy

[(Anonymous)]

I know what you mean about modern comedy (I cringe at the sight of Alan Partridge...) but I'm willing to defend STEPTOE and TDUDP because they were really tragedies in the guise of comedy. It was clear in the pilot episode of STEPTOE that it was really HUIS CLOS (Sartre's play about 'Hell is other people') rewritten in a half-hour sit-com format. The last five minutes were unadorned tragedy as Harold desperately tries to pull the cart out of the yard, knowing that if he doesn't get out now he never will.

Similarly Alf is trapped by his own strengths and loyalties into a situation where he is both impotent and ridiculous.


The later iterations of this do it with less and less style and less and less seriousness, alas.

Michael Cule
(Who really doesn't have the time to tend a LiveJournal account...)

Re: Tragedy and Comedy

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

Never been that big on tragedy. Drama, yes, melodrama even, but if someone's going to suffer I prefer it to have a purpose and I do love a happy ending. Moreover, there are ways I like to have my expectations confounded (see the end of the film Interview With The Vampire) and there are ways I don't.

There are of course exceptions to all those generalisations, but Steptoe and Till Death don't fall within them. I didn't like any of the characters, I didn't want to know what was going to happen to them, and I especially did not want that scene that you describe.

And I didn't like Huis Clos either. :)

Pleb, basically. Petit bourgeois pleb with delusions of intelligence. But at least I know it.

[rdmaughan.livejournal.com]

Like most things comedy is a matter of taste. It would be a much less interesting world if we all liked the same stuff.

What annoys me is when someone insists that I am wrong for not liking something.

[valydiarosada.livejournal.com]

What he said!

I never liked Tony Hancock, or Steptoe (or Dad's Army for that matter). In fact I mostly don't like sitcoms as a genre, and I really didn't like Fawlty Towers. However I must admit to having watched and enjoyed Till Death Us Do Part when it was on, though I never got into the American version, All In The Family. I probably wouldn't like it so much, now.

I used to like Round the Horne, and still listen to it on BBC7. And given that it was written by Marty Feldman and Barry Took, it's no surprise that I watched Marty Feldman when he finally turned up on TV.