What are you laughing at?
By Matt Baker March 30, 2009
The other night I read an article online about The Flight of the Conchords in which the author makes numerous disparaging remarks about the comedic content and lumps them in the “tedious Eddie Izzard genre of hyper-quotable British-Commonwealth whimsy, whose appeal is perilously inextricable from its foreign accent”. Holy shit! What kind of crap is that? First of all, Eddie Izzard is hilarious. The author criticizes the humour for being inoffensive. How is that a problem? It actually takes talent to be funny without just being shocking. Comedy these days consists almost entirely of dick and fart jokes interspersed with references to pop culture. Not parody or spoofs or anything like that, just references. Hey, remember that? Now laugh. Funny. At its best this results in Family Guy (which does have moments of brilliance), at worst you get Epic Movie (which I only use as an example because it is the only ____ Movie I have seen. I’m sure they are all terrible). Comedy is in a sad state when injecting a bit of subtlety and requiring a slight level of intelligence is so subversive. And that is one of the things that makes “British-Commonwealth” humour great: it requires you to know something that didn’t happen in the last 2 years. So in 20 years Eddie Izzard and Flight of the Conchords will still be funny and Epic Movie will not even be a footnote.
The author of the article clearly just does not get the humour of FotC (she seems to believe that people only like the show because they are attracted to Bret and Jemaine), but instead of acknowledging that other people actually might find it funny she just writes the show off as porn for women. Just because you don’t like dry humour doesn’t mean it isn’t funny. And I’m pretty sure that is all it is. “British-Commonwealth” humour is pretty much characterized by its dryness, whereas American humor is rarely dry (The Office and Wes Anderson being notable popular exceptions). I found it amusing that when reading the comments on the article, people who defended FotC often brought up shows like The Office, whereas people agreeing with the article trashed The Office and regularly proclaimed Family Guy the best thing on tv. Personally, I love the dry humour. I don’t need a punchline to tell me when something is funny. I like comedy to naturally flow out of the situation or character. And maybe this is part of being in the Commonwealth. While travelling and staying in hostels I met people from all over the world, and I have to say I got along best with Australians, Kiwis and people from the UK. This is not to say that I did not enjoy the company of citizens of other countries, I just found I had the most in common with other members of the Commonwealth, and a big part of that was a shared sense of humour. On the whole, I would say that Canadian comedy reminds me most of British, Australian and New Zealand humour – a wonderful mix of sillyness and dryness. That said, everyone loves a good dick joke now and then.