The United States of Funny

When it comes to comedy we Brits like to think that we’re the best at it. We gave the world Monty Python! Or at least five sixths of it. It’s something of a cliché to comment on the good old British sense of humour, but we are funny people, or so we keep telling ourselves. There’s not much evidence these days of our hilarity, we appear to have stopped being funny.

Turn on your television and it’s just panel shows, we’ve stopped writing comedy and focused purely on commenting on stuff. How many times can we watch six comedians make jokes about a number? Comedians don’t even have to be funny anymore, they just have to look trendy. Put a pair of converse on and gel your hair and you’re a comedian! Jack Whitehall has somehow managed to forge a career in comedy without being funny.

Forget about panel shows and Michael “I’m so funny I can’t stop laughing when I point out stuff that happens” Mcintyre’s comedy road shows and what’s left on our screens? BBC One family sitcoms. Shows that aren’t offensive but also not funny. Even good sitcoms like How Not to Live your Life, Lead Balloon, and Him & Her aren’t hilariously funny. We can’t even claim the IT Crowd as our own because it’s written by an Irishman. Yeah we have Peep Show but we’re not getting a new series until next year. The Scottish have made some great sketch shows this year (Burnistoun and Limmy’s Show) but it’s not enough.

I might never tire of the IT Crowd (we‘re claiming it!) or Peep Show but this drought of British Comedy has prompted me on a perverse expedition across the Atlantic into the treacherous territory of…American comedy! America makes such a large quantity of programmes that it’s like throwing wet tissue at a wall, some of it has to stick.

American comedy can sometimes come across as brash, people will gleefully deconstruct it as mindless shouting and dancing, and while this may be true for some cases, American comedy is in many ways becoming superior to British comedy, and I think we should take the credit. The Office is one of the best comedies we’ve ever produced and has been incredibly influential in turning American comedy funny.

More and more comedies are moving away from canned laughter and live studio audiences and adopting a tone more akin to The Office, focusing on characterisation over a constant stream of one liners. Perhaps the most obvious example is the US version of The Office, and I assume the mere concept of remaking our beloved series has put many Brits off ever watching it. Barring the first episode, the two shows are completely different and comparing the two is redundant.

The US Office might be zanier than we’re used to, it’s inevitable that some people will be incapable of getting it (such are the woes of comedy‘s subjectiveness), but for the ones who do, they will love it. There is a perfect balance between comedy and tragedy for every character in the show, the more tragic the character’s life, the funnier they are. It’s amazing how many characters they’ve crammed into the show, and how detailed their idiosyncrasies are. We don’t usually get to see much character development in British comedies because they usually only last two or three six episode series‘. So far the US Office has made it to 152 episodes, and while there may be some weak episodes now and again, it’s rare that ten minutes will go by without a huge laugh. To put this into perspective, Two Pints of Lager ran for 80 episodes, and how many times did you laugh watching that?

Greg Daniels, the dude who adapted the US version of The Office, went on to create Parks and Recreation, another US comedy worth all of your time. Like The Office, P&R is filmed in the style of a documentary and focuses on an ensemble of idiots, this time based in the parks department of a small town in Indiana. It may be very similar to The Office (I could just copy any paste the previous paragraph) but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There are of course differences but if you like The Office, you can pretty much guarantee that you’ll like P&R. Just watch them both.

It’s likely that you haven’t seen these two shows, it’s almost certain that you haven’t seen Community. A quick look on Wikipedia tells me that Community started airing in the UK last October, on Viva. Viva! Isn’t it a music channel? It’s no place for comedy. This is one of the funniest shows I’ve seen in a long time, at least put it on FX, a channel one of us might happen to stumble upon. Community is all about an American community college, a place of education for the more unfortunate people of the world.

So far this has been one of the hardest blog posts to write, I like these shows, what more is there to say? I can’t express my affection in a witty manner, it just comes across as if I’m a teenage girl doting on N Sync (or whatever the kids are listening to these days). All this praise on one page is sickening, it’s hard to express how much I like Community. I love The Office and P&R, but I really love Community. It’s fuckrilliant. It’s so good I’ve made up a word to describe it. It’s intelligent and stupid in equal measures, the characters are flawed yet loveable, it has countless callbacks and makes endless film references. If ever a show was made for me, it would be Community. It’s totally bewildering that it isn’t being shown on a much more popular channel in the UK, Channel 4 likes to think it’s hot stuff when it comes to American comedy, so does Sky One, why haven’t they picked this up? I’ve only discovered it yet it’s been running since 2009.

Maybe it’s time we take a look at American comedies and see what we can take from them. Perhaps we should band together and write as a team rather than individually, have a go at writing more than six episodes, and work on characterisation as opposed to puns. Whatever the solution is, we need to up our game. The Americans are already more powerful than us, we can’t allow them to be funnier than us.

Stained Pants

It was reported this morning that councillors of Staines Town are considering changing the name to Staines-on-Thames as they believe this will make the town seem more attractive to investors. Residents of Staines will no doubt be donning their “this is an outrage” caps and furiously tutting and shaking their heads at such a notion while the rest of the nation, world and universe couldn’t give a shit.
If the theory that adding “-on-Thames” to a name increases the attractiveness why not add it to more things? Newport-on-Thames, Baghdad-on-Thames, and what about Susan Boyle-on-Thames? They are probably employing “style consultants” as we speak (I bet some prick has given himself that title), charging thousands of pounds to make Staines sexy with every idea inevitably being absolutely terrible yet costing unspeakable amounts of money.
Slough is going through something similar and is failing miserably. People may remember a few years ago the programme “Make Slough happy” and if you watched it and are wondering if it worked the answer is a resounding no. Slough is of course famous for The Office which gave the town quite a bad name yet it would benefit greatly if people like David Brent and Gareth Keenan actually lived there.
In the past year banners have been put up everywhere in Slough with slogans like “Proud to be Slough”. There are a few meanings of the word slough in the dictionary, my favourite being “A state of deep despair or moral degradation “ which sums Slough up perfectly. So does “Proud to be in a state of deep despair” really make Slough seem like a better place? Another banner simply says “The heart of Slough is beating”, I always read this as “The heart of Slough is beating you up and stealing your phone”. You can plaster every slogan thinkable over Slough but you will never make it sexy because it is a massive slab of concrete with a permanent grey cloud hanging over it not to dissimilar to my stereotypical image of Eastern Europe which I believe is what England looked like in the 70’s.
The landmark feature in Slough is Brunel Bus station which is currently having the Gok Wan treatment done to it and if true to the plans will end up looking like a giant chrome piece of abstract art.
Of course the simple solution is to change the name. Slough is a horrible name and not even Slough-on-Thames would improve it, maybe Rape-on-Thames but that’s not going far enough. My suggestion is to change it to something like Unicorn, or Ribbons, you know, something nice that doesn’t say despair.
Staines will still have a horrible name if it changes to Staines-on-Thames because the word Staines conjures connotations of dirt and mess and uncleanliness. Keep the -on-Thames bit, just change Staines to something nicer, or what about just naming it Stainless? That sounds better already.
Certain people are arguing that Staines has been given a bad name as the fictional character Ali G resided there but I’m sure that real people who are like Ali G do actually live in Staines. Ali G mentioned my home town a few times and like every place he mentioned it’s a shit hole so maybe he has given it a bad name. If Staines isn’t a very nice place then would changing the name make it a better place? No, of course it wouldn’t.