This would have been posted earlier, but the internet's been intermittent all day. I woke up at six o'clock to the first of three or four short blackouts that kept switching my air cleaner off and the UPS for the downstairs server on (i.e., goodbye, white noise, hello, ear-piercing electronic beeps) and never really got back to sleep. This bodes slightly ominously for the sci-fi marathon tomorrow, but I can always hope that SMSS tonight puts me in some kind of temporary coma. It is unlikely.
From a recent article in the Guardian, excerpting Philip Oltermann's Keeping Up With the Germans: A History of Anglo-German Encounters (2012):
Spike Milligan famously said that "the German sense of humour is no laughing matter", and it will take time to shift that cliche: a poll last year revealed the Germans are still considered the unfunniest nation in the world. Of course, it's not as simple as that: it's just that German comedy speaks its own language. Even today, most comedy in Germany is generally more physical and knockabout than in Britain, though this is not to say that it is all as crude and basic as a Benny Hill sketch.
[. . .] Slapstick, once the height of comic inventiveness, is now considered passe, the stuff of dusty Benny Hill collections, not primetime TV. Standup was a descendant of the music-hall tradition, of course, but it was a slimmed-down version, which relied almost exclusively on the verbal. With the slippery, bendable qualities of English, the evolution of comedy from physical to verbal was a much smoother transition in Britain than in Germany. German, with its suspension-bridge structure and modal particles, is poorly equipped to create moments of surprise.
"A German comedy is like a German sentence," George Eliot once remarked. "You see no reason in its structure why it should ever come to an end." English, on the other hand, with its malleable sounds and one-syllable words, feels custom-made for comedy. An English sentence can be flipped upside down like a pancake, its meaning completely changed by the mere variation of a syllable. The pay-off at the end of Dinner for One—"Same procedure as every year, James"—gives a hint of what the English language can do, but the Eddie Izzards, Jo Brands or Bill Baileys who found fame in the 1990s were so much faster, so much slicker than that.
From David R. Sutton's A Chorus of Raspberries: British Film Comedy 1929–1939 (2000), which I was also reading yesterday:
While recognizing the purely indigenous appeal of Miller's humour, and suggesting that a national cinema can be made out of such stuff, the review also hints at a vital infusion of American blood into British comedy:
'the production has a snap and sparkle too often missing in our home-made comedies; it also has a full share of wisecracks and perfectly timed gags. The great secret of its success is the rapidity with which the farcical situations follow one another; there is no let up in the action.'
These qualities, of 'snap', rapidity, timing, are not explicitly referred to as American qualities, but there is a sense in which they are felt to be not quite English. Film Weekly also commented that 'Miller wisecracks brilliantly at a speed such as only American comics normally attain.' Miller certainly saw himself as drawing on distinctively American traditions in his own act, no matter how quintessentially English he may seem in retrospect. In a 1937 interview with Harry Watt in World Film News he comments that:
'the trouble with English comics is that they think they've got to repeat a gag ten times before the audience catch on, see. The Americans know that if a gag doesn't catch first time, it's a lousy gag. So they've got another one ready. I know I'm an English comedian, but I use the American style. You've got to nowadays. English humour's out of date. It creaks . . . of course there's a future for British comedies. But they must move fast. And none of this la-di-da stuff . . . Real life stuff you want, of real people. Like you and me see.'
I'm probably not going to find an interview with Ben Hecht talking about where he got his rapid-fire style from, but it did get my attention that comic timing in both these instances is considered the natural purview of other cultures, especially since I suspect most Americans now think of British comedy as zanier and faster-paced than routines here. I could be completely wrong about that. It may just be that I know an unusual number of people who can quote from both The Goon Show and Black Books.
Incidentally, I don't suppose anyone I know [edit: preferably in this city] has Will Hay on DVD? I've never actually seen him and I am beginning to feel deprived.
From a recent article in the Guardian, excerpting Philip Oltermann's Keeping Up With the Germans: A History of Anglo-German Encounters (2012):
Spike Milligan famously said that "the German sense of humour is no laughing matter", and it will take time to shift that cliche: a poll last year revealed the Germans are still considered the unfunniest nation in the world. Of course, it's not as simple as that: it's just that German comedy speaks its own language. Even today, most comedy in Germany is generally more physical and knockabout than in Britain, though this is not to say that it is all as crude and basic as a Benny Hill sketch.
[. . .] Slapstick, once the height of comic inventiveness, is now considered passe, the stuff of dusty Benny Hill collections, not primetime TV. Standup was a descendant of the music-hall tradition, of course, but it was a slimmed-down version, which relied almost exclusively on the verbal. With the slippery, bendable qualities of English, the evolution of comedy from physical to verbal was a much smoother transition in Britain than in Germany. German, with its suspension-bridge structure and modal particles, is poorly equipped to create moments of surprise.
"A German comedy is like a German sentence," George Eliot once remarked. "You see no reason in its structure why it should ever come to an end." English, on the other hand, with its malleable sounds and one-syllable words, feels custom-made for comedy. An English sentence can be flipped upside down like a pancake, its meaning completely changed by the mere variation of a syllable. The pay-off at the end of Dinner for One—"Same procedure as every year, James"—gives a hint of what the English language can do, but the Eddie Izzards, Jo Brands or Bill Baileys who found fame in the 1990s were so much faster, so much slicker than that.
From David R. Sutton's A Chorus of Raspberries: British Film Comedy 1929–1939 (2000), which I was also reading yesterday:
While recognizing the purely indigenous appeal of Miller's humour, and suggesting that a national cinema can be made out of such stuff, the review also hints at a vital infusion of American blood into British comedy:
'the production has a snap and sparkle too often missing in our home-made comedies; it also has a full share of wisecracks and perfectly timed gags. The great secret of its success is the rapidity with which the farcical situations follow one another; there is no let up in the action.'
These qualities, of 'snap', rapidity, timing, are not explicitly referred to as American qualities, but there is a sense in which they are felt to be not quite English. Film Weekly also commented that 'Miller wisecracks brilliantly at a speed such as only American comics normally attain.' Miller certainly saw himself as drawing on distinctively American traditions in his own act, no matter how quintessentially English he may seem in retrospect. In a 1937 interview with Harry Watt in World Film News he comments that:
'the trouble with English comics is that they think they've got to repeat a gag ten times before the audience catch on, see. The Americans know that if a gag doesn't catch first time, it's a lousy gag. So they've got another one ready. I know I'm an English comedian, but I use the American style. You've got to nowadays. English humour's out of date. It creaks . . . of course there's a future for British comedies. But they must move fast. And none of this la-di-da stuff . . . Real life stuff you want, of real people. Like you and me see.'
I'm probably not going to find an interview with Ben Hecht talking about where he got his rapid-fire style from, but it did get my attention that comic timing in both these instances is considered the natural purview of other cultures, especially since I suspect most Americans now think of British comedy as zanier and faster-paced than routines here. I could be completely wrong about that. It may just be that I know an unusual number of people who can quote from both The Goon Show and Black Books.
Incidentally, I don't suppose anyone I know [edit: preferably in this city] has Will Hay on DVD? I've never actually seen him and I am beginning to feel deprived.
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