The Scene: a kitchen in Elizabethan London. Sir Edmund Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson) is trying to teach his idiot servant Baldrick (Tony Robinson) to add.
Using beans as counters, he fails repeatedly—with Baldrick concluding that four beans must add up to “a small casserole.”
“I see, Baldrick,” Sir Edmund says, giving up with a sneer. “The Renaissance was just something that happened to other people.”
After reading this you probably realize that this is from a British TV comedy. One way to tell is the historical reference (the Renaissance), whereas an American sitcom plays on, at best, pop culture knowledge. Another way to tell is the condescending put down by a more intelligent figure. All that this scene needs is a bawdy insult or a slap upside the head to make it a model of British Comic dialogue.
American humor focuses more on physical and slapstick comedy. There is less stress put on understatement, so the humor tends to be a little more open; instead of satirizing the social system through exaggeration, American humor takes more observational techniques. On the other hand, British humour uses verbal humour as a key element. It generally features puns, nonsense, black humour, eccentricity, satire and sarcasm, understatement, and irony. Due to the last two, many jokes go unnoticed in British humour unless you are familiar with it.
Dennis Kratz, dean of undergraduate studies at the University of Texas at Dallas and a professor of literature, states, “British humour has long been more pointed than American humor. Americans really have a general fear of offending sensibilities, a fear of the insult, while British comic performers are masters of it.” American TV producers want people to welcome characters into their homes every week, so the characters being likeable is, in a sense, enforced. However, the British feature lead characters are manipulative, obnoxious, contemptible and self-indulgent. It is hilarious to watch their artfulness, self-delusions, nasty insults and the educated way in which they slander each other.
Kenneth Rexroth, a 1957 journalist, stated, “Great humor has a savagery about it. This is why British humor stands up better than American in this century—particularly British bawdry.”
The British class system is the reason the lashing out flourishes on the network level. “They’re stuck where they are,” says Kratz. “They’re not going to advance. So they take it out on the people around them because ultimately it doesn’t matter. It’s a comedy of frustration.”
One of the most watched American sitcoms is The Simpsons. You may think that this uses savagery, which it does in its own right, but even it keeps its characters lovable. Episodes commonly end with Bart admitting to pranks and Homer and Marge rekindling their love. It is not to say that no American sitcoms have had mouthy main characters. In fact, All in the Family and Sanford & Son had mouthy main characters. However, nearly all of the shows like this, including these two, were modeled off of British originals.
Kratz says, “American culture gives lip service to breaking rules, but it’s really much happier when the social order is firmly re-established at the end. American popular culture is more moral and conservative than we think it is. We get sidetracked by the sex or violence on the surface. What our popular culture is always telling us is that the nice person wins. It’s better to be good. I like to tell my classes that America is where Catholics, Protestants and Jews can all be Calvinists together.”
The British, in the end, will always be a step ahead when it comes to comedy. They use historical references to add humour into their shows, and their storylines are knit together tight. The show The Blackadder is a great example of this. The Blackadder started out with Edmund Blackadder as the illegitimate son of a medieval king who is constantly plotting to take over the throne. At the end of the series you see that Edmund is brought down to the rank of soldier in the trenches of World War I.
Then you have the shows that make the Brady Bunch seem toxic. These are the Britcom “cozies”: Good Neighbors, ‘Allo, ‘Allo; Are You Being Served?
Why would people want to watch these shows with mean-spirited losers and gay German Nazis? It could possibly be because there is something sadly heroic in their hopeless efforts.
“It’s very British,” Mr. Rankin, one of the stars on The Monty Python Show, says. “Basil is a quintessential type of Englishman, the way we often see ourselves—the heroic failure. The entire British Empire was a heroic failure.”
However, we will cut the Americans a break. British television series only have six episodes to a season in some cases, whereas American television seasons last much longer. Lenny Henry, the star and creator of Chef!, says, “You guys do a very long run so I think anybody abrasive or mean or nasty after 12 episodes, you start thinking, ‘Well, yeah, I’ve seen that. What else have you got?’”
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