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News item: Still Friends? The trouble with old sitcoms
Reading the above article this week, I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, be angry, gloat, shake my head, or just do a little sideways head-tilt that older people do when they want to do a generational comparison thing.
It seems that those that grew up with “Friends” and who loved the show back when it first aired, are now feeling uncomfortable about the targets of the gags.
Apparently, they now see Ross as “sexist” and “homophobic”, Joey as “creepy”, and the entire show as “white”. And there are comments about “fat Monica” and “gay Chandler” jokes too.
I never was a fan of “Friends”, but I know millennials who were, and it was mandatory viewing. My generation’s mandatory viewing was Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Fawlty Towers, among other classics. Do I feel uncomfortable about some of the humour of those shows? Yes, but mostly only because other people are.
If I were to defend Basil’s “Don’t mention the war!” outburst, or the ignorance of Mrs. Scum’s declaration in response to having guessed the name Henri Bergson in the “Spot the Braincell” quiz show (Monty Python live at Drury Lane), I’d have the PC police down on me like a 16-ton weight.
However, the thing about the two examples above is that the humour comes from poking fun at the people who do hold views that condone comments like Mrs. Scum’s; or at least, that’s how I interpret the lines. But now I’d be in trouble for condoning the use of bigots as targets for humour—after all, even bigots deserve respect, don’t they.
Fortunately, if I did hold such liberal, enlightened, non-PC views, I wouldn’t be alone. A clip from Fawlty Towers in which the Major puts us all straight on the ethnicity of the Indian cricket team is up on YouTube, and a large number of comments point out that the joke is on the Major and his cohort, not the people his insensitive remarks insult.
By the way, the clip in question was cut from recent re-runs of Fawlty Towers, according to the BBC’s “Friends” article.
I struggle with the juxtaposition of criticism of this type of humour with the culture of graphic, sadistic violence on TV, in films, and on video games. If you apply the “sticks and stones” adage to this juxtaposition, you’d think it was the so-called insensitive humour that would be the “names will never hurt me” and the lopping-off of limbs and exploding of entire bodies that would be the “sticks and stones”.
Perhaps we need a new adage. How about “Bombs and guns are loads of fun, but names can mortally wound me”?
But maybe society is conditioning itself so that future wars will be fought using so-called insensitive humour as weapons of mass destruction.
Which brings us nicely round to Monty Python’s “World’s Funniest Joke” sketch, which imagined World War II engagements between British and German forces in which a joke, translated into German, was deployed with devastating effect—effectively neutralizing staggering numbers of enemy forces. It also portrays Hitler telling the “My dog doesn’t have a nose” joke. So far, I haven’t seen any blatant criticism of this sketch, but give it time…
If you’re interested in what the “funniest joke in the world” is, you’ll probably have to go to the “dark web”, because If you type the German version of the joke into Google Translate, it returns “[FATAL ERROR]”. The folks at Google have a sense of humour!
How Google translates the world’s funniest joke
There’s lots more I could write on this topic, but (a) there’s little of entertainment value in it and (b) I might offend the two green-skinned, high-functioning genius dolphins who read my columns regularly in the comfort of their fish-shaped reclining chairs in the shallows of Montego Bay. And that just wouldn’t do, would it…
I cannot let the following thought go unsaid though.
Please sit and give some careful, unbiased thought to the logical conclusion of the witch hunts currently going on in comedy. At some point in the proceedings, witches are going to register their offence at the persecution of their sisterhood being used in such a derogatory manner. The resultant increase in the toad population will precipitate a “#realtoadsarecool” campaign, which might escalate to an amphibian inter-racial Armageddon. And those of us whom the witches left in human form will have to deal with the froggy fallout.
Frogs’ legs, anyone?