Quite amusing I thought, but like many Monty Python sketches it went on for too long. Comedy silliness goes back a long way of course. Silent film slapstick for example - all those custard pie fights. Music hall showed comedy silliness too and no doubt slapstick has always been with us.
Yet it raises an obvious question - has comedy silliness become part of our culture to a greater extent than in the past? If it has, then maybe mass entertainment is the cause, but so much silliness seems to have spilled over into areas which are not supposed to be silly.
Maybe comedy has to be silly and silliness is more fundamental and pervasive than we imagine.
6 comments:
The custard pie fight in 'The Great Race' goes on for ages, and is just hilarious!
We've just finished listening to an ISIRTA Spotify and have been in hysterics!
It's over fifty years old...
Back then they intended it to be silly.
Now they are silly, but they do not mean to be and do not realise that they are silly.
Heaven forbid that I should be in the least silly, AKH. 😇😆
Scrobs - I enjoyed 'The Great Race' too, but I enjoyed 'Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines' even more. I'll never forget Terry Thomas as Sir Percy Ware-Armitage.
Doonhamer - as if it has infiltrated our politics. Maybe some of the fans grew up into responsible positions and couldn't quite let go of the silliness because they had chosen careers where they didn't have to.
James - I avoid it like the plague (:
I feel that as standards of stuffy decorum have declined, silliness has increased. Part of it was the rebellion against parental seriousness by the post war generation of the 60s, part by the increasing access of the lower classes to the rest of society through TV popular culture and sport and part, the pernicious effects of the media. It then sort of snowballed, so that every subject under consideration has to be larded with silly humour and that bane of my existence, the stand up comedian.
Tammly - I agree, it does seem to have snowballed and become a damaging aspect of life.
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