March 27, 2006
Does humor stand up over time?
This little back-and-forth on National Review's The Corner got me to thinking:
DEAD HUMOR [John Derbyshire] I used to think Peter Sellers was the funniest man alive. The other day, however, I watchedA Shot in the Dark, the 1964 movie that established the Inspector Clouseau character. It really wasn't very funny at all.
We all know, of course, that humor is perishable, and that what made our parents -- or even our younger selves -- laugh can leave us stone faced. There are degrees of perishability, though, and the very best humor can stay funny for decades. I thought Sellers was in that league. Nope. His repertoire was narrower than I'd remembered -- really just two or three funny voices and a couple of facial expressions. It's sad... Though now I don't feel quite so bad at never having found Charlie Chaplin the least bit funny.
RE: DEAD HUMOR [Warren Bell]
I often wonder about that, Derb. I think I've written here before about the disaster that is viewingBlazing Saddles at age 42, after having wallowed in its glory at age 13. I think our memories tend to put a rosy glow around things we laugh at, and then in revisiting, the reality destroys the glow. ... So how much is the fault of memory, and how much is our own evolution in life? Is Sellers less funny, Derb, or are you?
RE: DEAD HUMOR [John Derbyshire]
Warren: Something of both, I'm sure. We get more critical as we mature, and harder to please.
Gentlemen, agreed. I recently noted with excitement a reunion show of Carol Burnett and her crew. Watching, I was shocked at how mean and sad the Family sketches seemed and how the sketches with Tim Conway as a bumbling handyman went on forever without point.
Coincidentally, we have just finished watching 
the Monty Python "Personal Best" series on PBS. Lamont and I had looked forward to seeing these, and found that they in some, or many, places, did not live up to memory.
At their worst, Python was wordy (to say the least). I remember laughing away at Python as a teen-ager, but somehow today you end up more often thinking, "Clever concept," but not actually laughing. The group had no idea when to end a sketch, and relied excessively on skits that had Graham Chapman as a military commander and/or John Cleese as a TV presenter.
Comedy moves on, and Dave Chappelle now seems to be the gold standard. His skits cover a wider range than the Python's, are far better produced (but of course, it's nearly 40 years later), and make more effort to be daring and surprising.
It was also interesting to see whose material, of the individual Pythons, held up better. It was not explained on the series the criteria for inclusion of various skits. I.e., are the pieces on John Cleese's Personal Best his favorites? Or skits that he wrote? Because many of the bits were clearly not selected because the individual Python actually starred in a major way on them.
That said, I would rank the hour-long specials as follows. They varied wildly in both humor quotient and how the individual Python approached writing the new material that bridged the sketches:
- Terry Jones. What a surprise! The overlooked Welshman had the most original segues between material. And cheers and applause for his Spanish Inquisition ("Fetch ... the COMFY CHAIR!"), one of my favorites. Jones included a hilarious military courtroom scene, the Court Martial of Sapper Walters, that I absolutely don't remember from the TV series shown in the States. Either my memory is bad or a lot of the British material never made it here, especially this one, which is deliciously, subtly raunchy (Presiding General: "How did he oblige them?" Fawcett: (more and more irritated) "He ... um ... used to make them happy in little ways, sir.") Also features the working-class playwright sketch and the world-famous "RAF Banter" -- "What ho, Squiffy?" -- one of the best send-ups of jargon ever.
- John Cleese. Morbidly fascinating to see him a bit age-spotted at home in Santa Barbara, Calif., with wicked intros to his sketches, which included the Exploding Blue Danube, which Lamont laughed at, and I found dated. Features the FABULOUS "Upper Class Twit of the Year." And I enjoyed the old ladies re-enacting Pearl Harbor.
- Eric Idle and Michael Palin. A tie here. I love Palin, the "nice Python" and well known as a sweetheart of a man, and was disappointed a little with the slow pacing of his intros at Teddington Lock, where the fish-slap dance was born. Though we both roared at his "Blackmail Show," which Lamont remembered -- wonderful to see Palin get very wicked! And the Cheese Shop holds up well, an accurate commentary on the Britain I knew in the early 1980s. * Idle seemed just a bit crazy today. But he's found good picks with the Bruces (side splitting to anyone who has been to Australia) and The Lumberjack Song.
* I once visited a pub with my cycling club at lunch and was told the menu was "shepherd's pie and bread and cheese, but we're out of shepherd's pie."
- Graham Chapman. The bits include what may be my favorite skit, ever, Oscar Wilde:
Whistler: "Your Majesty is like a stream of bat's piss."
The Prince of Wales: "What? Who said that?"
Whistler: "It was Shaw."
The Prince of Wales: "Well, Shaw, what did you mean by that?"
Shaw (in exaggerated Irish brogue): "It means Your Majesty is like a shaft of gold, when all around is darkness."
All: "Very good, Shaw, very good!"
Here were the Pythons being intellectual, wordy yet still hilarious, and not being arch and Oxbridge and trying too hard, "too clever by half."
The interviews with other Pythons lent the show real zip. Chapman is of course an ex-Python, in the same sense as a parrot can be an ex-parrot, nudge nudge wink wink, so a lot of his buddies reminisced to put this shown together. The other shows would have benefited I think from just a little bit of commentary by others.
- Terry Gilliam. His animated sketches -- well, we couldn't finish this one, 20 minutes of absurd Yellow Submarine type art and moving hands and feet were plenty.
Indeed, humor is perishable. Sometimes it's best to hold it in memory. Though I do think the Python Personal Best series would have held up superbly had they been better edited, with more commentary and judicious trimming of the sketches to leave only the stuff that still holds up as brilliant today.
That sort of polish helped Richard Pryor's 
I Ain't Dead Yet DVD, for one example, to be quite good.
Though if Python wants to make the point that they are zany and amateurish in a veddy old tradition of the British amateur, that's fine, too.
UPDATE (April 4, 2006): Thanks for all the calls and remarks from people who enjoyed this blog entry! I have heard from my friend Harry Davey, who recently watched some old Mary Tyler Moore shows. What did he think? "They weren't funny." That's it in a nutshell.
My sister Carol noted that she has been buying DVDs of old TV shows, including Dick Van Dyke, and watching them with disappointment.
My husband Lamont, asked to explain what he thinks is going on, gave two explanations. "Humor is perishable, in some cases. And some shows never were funny -- that's why I don't much care for comedy."
I suppose the moral is, try to rent, borrow or Netflix old TV shows that you once loved, rather than buy.
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