Those slyboots at Musclefish passed along a link to this dictionary of dirty words. It seems that one of those quintessential British anal stage comics, Viz, was somehow involved. It always comes as a shock to one who made his humorous bones on Beyond the Fringe and Monty Python that there was another darker strain of English humor out there.
Benny Hill and Are You Being Served are darker than Monty Python? You must see something in them that I don't.
Of course Monty Python generally put a ha-ha-hee-hee face on their sketches, but exploding people, witch-burnings, and babies falling out of their tired mothers' wombs without Mum even pausing in her dishwashing (to name a few themes) strike me as much darker than endless tit and gay jokes. (I guess you can tell that I'm not especially fond of AYBS and can't abide Benny Hill.)
Posted by: Prentiss Riddle on July 4, 2003 06:21 PMI was trying to write that this alternate strain revealed a darker humor in the audience who found those latter two shows hilarious. I've striken the offending adjective, but I think I'll just let the whole thing lie. I never liked Benny Hill, but I have met intelligent people whose taste was not suspect who thought him the funniest thing around. Go figure. As for AYBS, it occupied the same place in my theory of funny that the American show, Green Acres, did. Silly, not trerribly funny, but something about it that attracts stares like an auto crash on the road. I never could figure out why the local PBS station here ran it forever, (at least much longer than they did Monty Python in the '70s). Sorry for my confusion.
Posted by: jim on July 5, 2003 09:48 AM