The Death of British Comedy

3,007 words

British people are not doing a great deal of laughing at the moment. Innocents are being butchered or raped in the streets or on trains, the economy is being frog-marched to the cliff’s edge, and there are more bad actors in the Houses of Parliament than there are on British television. And there isn’t even anything funny on telly to take a nation’s mind off its decline and fall. It would at least be a consolation if battered and beleaguered Brits could switch on the “idiot box”, as we did when I was a kid, and escape into a world where someone made you laugh and forget the country’s woes (and your own) for half an hour.

Real comedy, the type that actually makes you laugh rather than checks that your ideological responses are the approved ones, seems to have been banned in the UK. The BBC, before it became dominated by ideologically driven cultural Marxists and Fabians, produced comic master-works in the second half of last century, but it is instructive to see what they think is cutting-edge comedy today. Currently the BBC is offering up a fat Moroccan Muslim woman with a fake black accent and a hijab she she won’t stop mentioning. “What makes you funny?” an interviewer asks her. Pulling one of many goofy faces, the 43-year-old replies; “’Cos I pray five times a day.” My, how we laughed. I can’t get BBC content where I am, but a British YouTuber called Daniel Boland put this piece together about Fatiah Al-Ghorri, who is going to be the head judge on a new BBC comedy talent show. You only need to watch the first three minutes to get the general idea, if you can make it that far. I don’t know who killed British comedy, but whoever commissioned this lady was certainly an accomplice.

British comedy from the second half of last century is rightly world-famous. Situation comedies such as Steptoe and Son, Only Fools and Horses, Porridge, The Young Ones, Dad’s Army, Blackadder, Till Death Us Do Part and many others had viewing figures that today’s TV executives would give a limb for. English comedians with their own shows, such as Benny Hill, Morecambe and Wise, The Two Ronnies, Bernard Manning, and Dave Allen (who was actually Irish) also hit record viewing figures, particularly with Christmas specials. Just about all the classic shows from the 60s onwards are available on YouTube, which is both a tonic in desperate times for Britain, and makes the native viewer sadly nostalgic for the vanished world they summon up. If you like British comedy, you may as well watch them, because there is nothing even vaguely humorous about today’s offerings. A particular show from the 1970s stands out if you wish to get an authentic taste of British—actually, English—humor. It vies with other TV classics in critical polls as the greatest UK situation comedy of all time, and the passing of one its most famous characters (or at least the actress who played her) prompted another visit to England’s most famous fictional hotel.

English actress Prunella Scales passed away in October at the grand old age of 93, and will be sadly missed by my generation and older. With due respect to the deceased, Ms. Scales was only really known for one role, but the name of Sybil Fawlty was known in every household nationwide in the 1970s. There were only 12 episodes made of the comedy series Fawlty Towers, but they have passed into comedy legend. Sybil played the blowsy, shrewish wife of hotel manager Basil Fawlty, played by the show’s co-creator, John Cleese.

At first, the BBC did not seem to have their usual eye for a winner. On reading the first script of Fawlty Towers, a commissioning editor pronounced it “as dire as its title.” Given the show’s subsequent success and elevation to national treasure, this is the equivalent to the chap who turned down managing The Beatles. Fortunately for comedy history, Fawlty Towers was commissioned, and the first episode aired in September, 1975. Cleese was drawn to something which, although it lacked the altered reality of his erstwhile comedy colleagues, produced its own blend of comic madness.

Cleese was one of the founders of the comedy collective often known simply as Monty Python, although the original TV show’s full title was Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It was a program which revolutionized the British comedy industry from its debut in September of 1969. The Pythons, as they became known, were all English university graduates (with the exception of the American cartoonist and film director, Terry Gilliam, and Welshman Terry Jones), and there was an element of schoolboy humor about them from the start. The Pythons introduced the surreal into comedy, which had only really been done prior to their arrival on the equally famous radio comedy, The Goon Show, starring Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe and (originally) Michael Bentine. Nowadays, comic surrealism is old hat, but it is not easy to appreciate the impact it made on what was still quite a staid country half a century ago. And the team were subversive in other ways. The Pythons got into hot water over their film, The Life of Brian, to which the Anglican Church did not take kindly.

A typical Python sketch (and one of the funniest) sees Graham Chapman as a mill-worker attempting to explain to an upper-class woman in an Edwardian drawing-room that there has been “trouble at mill.” She doesn’t understand his thick northern accent, and quizzes him until he loses his temper. “I was just trying to tell you the cross-beam’s gone askew on the treadle”, he moans. “I didn’t expect a kind of Spanish Inquisition.” The Spanish Inquisition promptly burst into the room in full, bright-red regalia, with Michael Palin declaiming that “No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!” If you haven’t seen it, I envy you, and if you don’t find it funny, then I can’t help you.

Recently, of course, Monty Python has been disowned as racist, sexist, homophobic, and doubtless other bullet-points on the inventory of ideological grievance. They must have done at least one sketch with Muslims in, so the new Gestapo can throw in Islamophobia. Actually, today’s cultural commissars disapprove of the show, and other famous comedies of the past, because it is the product of intelligent whites. Although, like jesters throughout history, they may poke fun both at themselves and their fellow Brits, they do not hate them, or themselves. Monty Python regularly satirized the upper and middle classes, and always with humor that was shot through with intelligence, but there was no oikophobia in their work, no hatred of home. In my experience, although not all intelligent people are funny – by a long stretch – all funny people are intelligent, and intelligent humor no longer has a market value in Britain. There is a tremendous level of both skill and talent in knowing how to make other people laugh, and it is a virtuous circle, with both the joker and those doing the laughing benefiting. Happy people tend to be healthy people (although I don’t actually have clinical evidence for such an outrageous claim), and humor is still a great tonic, which is why the liberal left hate it so much. You can’t make people miserable when they are laughing.

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As the various Pythons began side-projects, John Cleese’s came from the source which produces much great comedy: real life. Fawlty Towers came about from a visit to a hotel, and the antics of its manager. The team were shooting the second series of Monty Python’s Flying Circus in the early 1970s. They were shooting on the south-west coast of England, and were staying in the resort town of Torquay. Their hotel, called The Gleneagles, boasted a manager some of the Pythons claim was the rudest man they had ever met. A couple of them couldn’t take it – the English have always valued politeness and shy instinctively from rude people – and decamped to another hotel. Cleese, however, was fascinated, and stayed to study the man who was the original of Basil Fawlty. Fawlty’s rudeness to his paying guests is at an Olympic level, and the country seemed to enjoy his tirades and the absurd and disastrous situations he got himself and others into. That’s why they are called “situation comedies”: people respond with laughter to others who have got themselves in a pickle.

Cleese and his wife, actress Connie Booth, storyboarded early episodes with a central theme – a visit by health inspectors when there is a rat loose in the kitchen, for example, or one of the guests dying in bed. Then they would work minutely on the action and dialogue, rehearsing intensively until the script flew tightly along while being completely comprehensible, and very funny. Fawlty Towers moves at a manic pace. The plot development is agonizingly stacked against Fawlty, who accepts his fate while trying to offend as many guests and staff as the time allows, as well as arguing with his wife, Sybil (who Basil calls “my little nest of vipers”) in almost every scene in which they are together.

Despite the English fear of, but fascination with, rudeness, there are several famous curmudgeons in British sitcoms. Victor Meldrew in One Foot in the Grave, Captain Mainwaring in Dad’s Army, Father Jack in Father Ted (yes, I know he’s Irish), Alf Garnett in Till Death Us Do Part and the sequel, In Sickness and in Health, Rigsby in Rising Damp, Ronnie Barker in Porridge (the only British sitcom without music over the opening credits) and many others. But Fawlty seems almost to enjoy his own misery, and likes to share it around. An exemplary piece of dialogue occurs with a bothersome and very deaf old lady complaining about her room:

Old lady: I don’t like the view.

(Fawlty looks out of the window).

Fawlty: Madam, that is Torquay. What were you expecting to see from a Torquay hotel window? The Sydney Opera House, perhaps? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across –

Old lady: Don’t be silly! I want to see the sea.

Fawlty: You can. It’s over there between the land and the sky.

Woman: I’d need a telescope to see that!

Fawlty: Then may I suggest you move to a hotel nearer the sea? (Then, sotto voce) Or preferably in it.

The English react to excessive rudeness with a combination of appalled horror and mirth. There’s probably a German word for it, but one German, Nietzsche, pointed out that there is always an element of cruelty in a joke. Someone is always the butt of it, and in Fawlty Towers that is almost always, ultimately, Basil. We more than occasionally find the distress of others funny. Even if you rushed to help a person who had taken a nasty fall slipping on a banana-peel, you may have had to hide your smirk first. Even the supposedly reserved English secretly enjoy the non-violent sufferings of others.

Race, of course, is the number one problem with British comedy now in that it can no longer be an object of ridicule of any sort. Till Death Us Do Part featured the fantastically racist Alf Garnett, forever complaining about “Pakis” and “nig-nogs.” Love Thy Neighbour was a sitcom from the 1970s featuring the uneasy relationship between a white couple and their black neighbors. Rising Damp starred the great Leonard Rossiter as a misanthrope who makes jokes about African tribes to his black neighbor. All these programs would be unthinkable today, and will doubtless never be seen again on British TV. The curious thing about all three is that, more often than not, it is the white characters who end up being the butt of jokes, but this is not a dramatic consequence modern liberals would understand.

Fawlty Towers does feature race and its frictions, principally in the character of Manuel, the hotel’s incompetent waiter and bell-boy. He speaks very little English, and what he does know is pidgin. Manuel answers every request with “Que?” which became a playground catchphrase in the 1970s, along with Sybil’s apologies to guests for Manuel’s general hopelessness. “I’m so sorry, he’s from Barcelona.” It’s notable, or it was then, how culturally powerful television can be. I don’t imagine any British program today (particularly a comedy) would inspire the genuine affection last century’s viewers had for the hapless souls in their sitcoms, or have their catchphrases pass into everyday conversation.

But it was a family of Germans staying at Fawlty’s hotel which led to the most racially controversial episode. Basil has suffered a concussion after being struck by a stuffed moose’s head. This means he is even more deranged than usual, and he keeps mentioning World War 2, to the increasing distress of the German guests. “Don’t mention the war! I did once, but I think I got away with it”, became yet another pub and office staple. The scene culminates in one of British comedy’s most famous visual gags, but I doubt the BBC would show it today. As Cleese struts in and out of the dining-room, goose-stepping and clearly intended to be Hitler, he has a bandaged head and his finger under his nose to indicate a mustache. But it is Cleese’s extraordinary body that turns the scene into memorable slapstick. John Cleese stands about 6’ 7” and was then extremely slim and wiry. Sybil calls Basil “a Brilliantined stick-insect”, and his Hitlerian high-kicks seem to defy human physiognomy. The family finally tell him to shut up about the war, and a near brain-damaged Fawlty informs them that they started it. “We did not”, says the father. “Yes, you did”, Basil snaps back. “You invaded Poland!”

Inevitably, however, it is Basil who suffers the most from his actions and words, despite the chaos he unleashes on his guests and staff. The hotel’s waitress, Polly, is played Cleese’s wife, Connie Booth, and she valiantly attempts to control Basil’s worst sociopathic excesses, but he is a force of nature. Basil’s breath-taking rudeness provides much of the show’s humor of embarrassment, and is linguistically brilliantly constructed, but is also his hubris.

Twelve episodes means there are only around six hours of Fawlty Towers in existence, but the husband-and-wife team of Cleese and Booth use that screen-time expertly. Each episode accelerates to a manic finale, as various distraught hotel guests, staff members, and Irish builders come to terms with the crazed central personality of Basil and the dreadful fury of Sybil when scorned. And the viewer finds themselves wondering whether Fawlty can out-do himself in terms of sheer rudeness. Some lines stay with you for years. A customer asks if he can order breakfast in bed, which Fawlty sees as an outrageous request, and says to the man: “Rosewood? Mahogany? Teak?” “I beg your pardon?”, the man replies. “Oh”, says Fawlty, “I was just checking what type of wood you’d like your breakfast-tray made from.” It is humor of a very English stripe.

There were also very good American comedies as the century drew to its close, at least in my opinion: Frazier and its parent show, Cheers; My Name is Earl; Police Squad; What We Do in the Shadows and a few others are still funny today. I can even raise the occasional smile at old episodes of Friends, and Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi is one of TV’s great comic creations who, like Basil Fawlty, was apparently based on a real person. Does the US still make funny shows, or has comedy been banned there as well? As for the UK, now that about half the actors on TV are black (despite being just 5% of the population), the white sitcom is a thing of the past.

There are funny blacks, of course. Richard Pryor, Chris Rock, and Dave Chapelle are all funny men (well, Pryor was), although their respective acts tend to rely a bit too much on their being black. If white comics based their career around being white, it would have to be self-deprecatory. Blacks are allowed to laugh at themselves, but whites are only allowed to join in the laughter if the fellow cracking the funnies on stage is what my Grandma used to call a “darkie.”

A very unfunny English black comedian called Lenny Henry did actually make me laugh recently. He believes British blacks should get reparations from the UK government (which means taxes mostly paid by whites) to the tune of £17 trillion. This demand is despite the fact that it was the English, and William Wilberforce in particular, who were instrumental in ending slavery. So sorry, Mr. Henry. We paid at the door. Do you have any idea how much blacks cost white people?

So, farewell Prunella Scales, and rest in peace. (British comedy is doing just that.) Looking at her life, she seemed an absolutely charming woman, not like today’s prima donnas. Married for 60 years to fellow thespian Timothy West, the couple lived on a canal boat, which is a wonderful life as travelling canals is one of the remaining beautiful experiences in England. I didn’t agree with her on the subject of Arts Council funding, which actors are always crying out for, because I don’t think the arts should be funded. That said, for an actress to give so much pleasure in such a relatively short spell of stardom, and to produce a unique comedic character, is a rare gift and loved by anyone who has ever seen Sybil Fawlty in action.

All people who have made us laugh deserve a special place in our hearts and memories, as well as in their national consciousness. And, as noted, laughter is a powerful tonic, one in short supply in the UK at present. In one scene from Fawlty Towers, Basil says to his wife: “Do you remember when we were first… manacled together, dear? We used to laugh a lot.” Sybil tartly replies: “Yes, Basil. But not at the same time.”

RIP Prunella Scales.

RIP British comedy.