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 Wed Aug 22, 2007 10:10 am American and British humour |
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Hi, Alan
Everybody talks about Britich and American humor but I really dont see any difference. I watched Red Dwarf which is supposed to be a British comedy, I also watched South Park - an American comedy cartoon. I laughted while watching both of them but I cant tell Red Dwarf jokes from those of South Park.... Can anyone define English and American humor for me?
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| Wed Aug 22, 2007 12:04 pm American and British humour |
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Monty Python, Black Adder, Faulty Towers, Mr Bean etc (to name but a few) have travelled quite a bit. I'd say British humor is more eccentric and peculiar in a way that can be subtle and bizarre at the same time. Some people call it black or dark humor. American humor is more accessible. That is probably one of the reason for the worldwide success of American comedies and sitcoms.
"The Office" was a very successful comedy series in Britain, but a different version was adopted in America. In Germany there is yet another adoptation of this programme, but based on the American version.
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| Wed Aug 22, 2007 12:18 pm American and British humour |
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Americans often describe British humor as "dry", which usually means, "I don't think this is funny, but the British seem to think it's hilarious. Since those people on TV have English accents, they must be more intelligent than me, so I must be too stupid to understand the joke." (Many Americans tend to assume that any person with an English accent is automatically intelligent, even if he happens to be an imbecile. Until a few years ago, The Voice of God was always British in American movies. Americans also think anything made in France is "art".) There's a funny episode of the American cartoon show King of the Hill, in which a mother inflicts a British comedy show on a 12-year-old boy, thinking it will make him more sophisticated, while the kid finds the humor kind of stupid.
There are certain types of British humor that don't work in the US, and often we can't figure out what's so funny. After a man from Scotland explained some skits to me, I started to understand them, but I still don't find them funny. This humor usually involves some Englishman who is suffering some outrageous wrong but keeps trying to maintain his dignity and be polite, but then finally loses his composure. A classic example is a Monty Python skit in which an Englishman buys a dead parrot, returns it to the pet shop, and then has to argue with the clerk, who insists the parrot isn't dead. I never understood this skit until the Scotsman explained it to me. The reason is that Americans are very direct and usually don't try to be polite when someone is obviously trying to swindle them. Now that I understand the skit, I still don't think it's funny, but I find funny the aspect of British culture that made it possible.
Also -- and this is only a generalization, not a hard, fast rule -- British humor often involves gags that Americans found funny in the 1950s or so. It's got things falling down women's bosoms, men dressed as women (I don't understand why the British get such a kick out of men in drag), and various violations of social norms that aren't so strict in the US, so that here the violation is more or less normal and not funny. |
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| Wed Aug 22, 2007 13:10 pm American and British humour |
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| Jamie (K) wrote: | | Also -- and this is only a generalization, not a hard, fast rule -- British humor often involves gags that Americans found funny in the 1950s or so. It's got things falling down women's bosoms, men dressed as women (I don't understand why the British get such a kick out of men in drag), and various violations of social norms that aren't so strict in the US, so that here the violation is more or less normal and not funny. |
Fair observation. Has anybody seen a programme called "Little Britain"? I first watched an episode some 3 years ago when I was in Dublin for Christmas, and I didn't think it was funny at all. Then an English mate of mine gave me the DVD containing the full first series, and after watching the whole thing (and in almost every skit you can see men in drags, people falling into each other etc) I could feel the humor growing on me. I watched it again a few weeks later and thought it was hilarious. And then again, I think American comedy shows from the 1950s and comedians like Jerry Lewis are some of the funniest things ever made.
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| Wed Aug 22, 2007 17:51 pm American and British humour |
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There was this British show about an old grumpy guy.... it might have been called something like "One Foot In The Grave".
In one episode, he walks into his bathroom and finds a plant mounted in his toilet.
He immediately launches into an angst-filled soliloquy-tirade along the lines of "What the heck is that doing there?! How daft!"
That was hilarious -- seeing the plant in the toilet and then his reaction.
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| Wed Aug 22, 2007 20:46 pm American and British humour |
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| Ralf wrote: | | And then again, I think American comedy shows from the 1950s and comedians like Jerry Lewis are some of the funniest things ever made. |
The French tend to think Jerry Lewis movies are not only funny, but even great works of art. Americans can't understand this, and it contributes to a generally held belief that the French have something wrong with them. |
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| Thu Aug 23, 2007 10:18 am American and British humour |
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| Jamie (K) wrote: | | Americans often describe British humor as "dry", which usually means, "I don't think this is funny, but the British seem to think it's hilarious. Since those people on TV have English accents, they must be more intelligent than me, so I must be too stupid to understand the joke." (Many Americans tend to assume that any person with an English accent is automatically intelligent, even if he happens to be an imbecile. Until a few years ago, The Voice of God was always British in American movies. |
Hi Jamie,
I remember having a similar discussion about British and American accents quite some time ago and I might have asked the same question back then. Why do Americans consider people with British accents more intelligent than themselves?
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| Thu Aug 23, 2007 11:54 am American and British humour |
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| Torsten wrote: | | Jamie (K) wrote: | | Americans often describe British humor as "dry", which usually means, "I don't think this is funny, but the British seem to think it's hilarious. Since those people on TV have English accents, they must be more intelligent than me, so I must be too stupid to understand the joke." (Many Americans tend to assume that any person with an English accent is automatically intelligent, even if he happens to be an imbecile. Until a few years ago, The Voice of God was always British in American movies. |
Hi Jamie,
I remember having a similar discussion about British and American accents quite some time ago and I might have asked the same question back then. Why do Americans consider people with British accents more intelligent than themselves? |
Hi Torsten,
You could for example look at the situation in Germany and Austria. Since "High-German" is more or less what people speak around the area of Hanover, you may think that this is something like "true" or "real" German and any other variety a mere variation. Which is nonsense, of course, but nevertheless it is a widely conceived belief. Moreover, there are many jokes in Germany about Austrians which hint to intellectual superiority at the expense of Austrian lingo.
In old films, Irish people usually used to serve as the zany village idiot, people "afflicted" with a Birmingham accent are looked down on in England, and people with a strong Saxon accent from southern East-Germany are regarded as "dumme Ossis" (stupid Easterners) in the west of the country.
And then you have a language exported to a new country, the "New World". Consequently, 400 years down the road from the first days of Puritan settlements a different culture and a different accent has developed. It seems only all too obvious that this product will find it hard to receive satisfactory validation.
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| Thu Aug 23, 2007 12:58 pm American and British humour |
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| Torsten wrote: | | I remember having a similar discussion about British and American accents quite some time ago and I might have asked the same question back then. Why do Americans consider people with British accents more intelligent than themselves? |
In colonial times, the people on the East Coast had more contact with England, and their accents still now reflect the accent changes that occurred in England in the time after North American settlement began. For example, when people in England stopped pronouncing their R at the ends of words and before consonants, this change in pronunciation reached the East Coast urban centers (which is why Boston, Maine some New York accents have so much more in common with standard British accents), but the people in the rural areas continued to pronounce all the original R's, as most Americans do today. This would have made many Americans associate that "R-dropping" accent with "sophisticated" people from the urban areas.
Also, before World War II, Oxford English, or whatever you want to call it (don't complain about my terminology, Alan), was looked on in the US as standard English. Rich children who attended elite preparatory schools and later Ivy League universities were trained to speak in something approaching this type of English, and actors were too. If you listen to speeches by President Franklin Roosevelt, who was a member of the Eastern elite, you can hear that he has a British-sounding accent that is seldom heard today in the US. I can remember seeing an interview with a famous movie actor from the 1930s when he was a student at Princeton University, and he spoke in something similar to traditional Oxford English, but later in the movies (and probably at home with his family) he spoke what would now be called General American. You'll also notice that in American movies from before World War II, many of the actors used a British-influenced stage accent, but that this accent was almost gone by the end of the 1950s. Generally, the gangsters in these old films had ordinary American accents of the time, and the "refined" characters had this British-sounding speech.
So, from all this came the general tendency in movies and TV to use someone with a British accent to depict people of superior education and refinement, whether admiringly or derogatorily. I've heard people from the UK complain that in American movies "the villain is always British", but that's only if the villain is an "evil genius". Otherwise the villain has some kind of American accent. I've also mentioned that a British voice was usually used as The Voice of God in American religious movies, but in the past 15 years or so, for completely inexplicable reasons, God has started to be black instead. (I think it's because the industry started using the actor James Earl Jones as The Voice of God, because of his magnificent tone and elocution, and it became a habit in the industry to use a black actor with a deep voice.)
Another factor in the whole situation is the common misimpression that the standard English of England today is the "original" English spoken by the original settlers and that we Americans somehow messed it up over the centuries. This is actually not true. The English planted on the American continent in early colonial times resembled the American English spoken now, in accent, grammar and other elements. Later, in England, the language underwent a fast change, which included major aspects of pronunciation and grammar, so that in many ways "The Queen's English" today is newer than the English spoken in the US, while we Americans use some pronunciations, words and grammatical constructions that are now archaic in England. If you see, for example, a film that takes place in Elizabethan England, the characters usually speak in modern-day RP (keep quiet about my terminology, Alan), but that accent pretty much didn't exist in Elizabethan times. As the author of one textbook on the history of the English language said, many Americans go to the UK to see a Shakespeare play done in "the original English", but for that purpose they'd do better to hear it performed at an American high school. |
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| Thu Aug 23, 2007 23:31 pm American and British humour |
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Jamie, how do you think the California (think surfer and actor) rounding of vowels came to be?
Do they get it primarily from the Brits?
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| Fri Aug 24, 2007 4:53 am American and British humour |
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Oh, do you mean where they pronounce "car" like "core"? They also often pronounce "house" as [h?us].
It's hard to say, because west of the Mississippi, the dialects got all mixed up and blended. The California accents you hear in movies often sound to me as if Canadian and Southern merged and got a little New York Jewish mixed in. I don't suppose that's a very far-fetched thought, is it. That vowel rounding almost surely came from Southern dialects.
But it's certainly disorienting to see Mulan's love, the son of a Chinese emperor and heir to his dynasty, open his mouth and talk like a California beach boy. |
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Jamie (K)
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| Fri Aug 24, 2007 16:11 pm American and British humour |
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yeah
I hear British, Irish and French vowel sounds down here.
If I have time I'll try to explain it later.
But yeah, if the vowel-rounding started here in the Say-euth... it makes sense that that's partly where the Californians got it.
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| Sun Aug 26, 2007 16:07 pm American and British humour |
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Alan,
I used to enjoy Mr.Bean when I was small. And do you know Sesame street? I don't know whether it can be considered as humorous, but Elmo's voice never failed to make me laugh.
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| Sun Aug 26, 2007 22:07 pm American and British humour |
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Hi Alan!
Aside the discussion about pronounciation I?d like to add that my wife and I occasionally enjoy looking Agtha Christie?s "Mrs Marple" personated by Margarete Rutherford.
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