Rolling UK Comedy Thread - "Ricky Don't Lose Larry David's Number

I haven't heard the CD, just get bit torrent and download the whole thing, it's the only way to hear it.

I've never seen much of Blue Jam. just wasn't that bothered. then i saw the Adam & Joe pisstake and felt validated.

LOL@Adam and Joe. They weren't really piss-takes, I thought they were quite affectionate, myself. Their Jam was superb, it has to be said.

the opening music is an 'triguing montage. sly and the family stone ('time') also appear in it.

Well, indeed. The actual visuals were always best-left to the imagination, and the television version dropped all the music, which robbed BJ of its soul (if not its content).

Blue Jam was fantastic, jam less so.

otm

but you could say similar about massive attack and their influence on dido.

xpost

it's the new Saturday Night With Lee Hurst or whatever that was called.

You are hinting towards something I myself crave. It's quite a good way of putting it, although perhaps simply 'progressive comedy' might suffice better.

Blue Jam is not comedy of embarrassment, it is comedy of helplessnes and weakness. To claim that it's had any effect on Gervais (who I regard as a charlatan, a funny man but a charlatan) is almost heresy in my eyes.

Nighty Night just didn't have the same vibe. Like Jam, it was dark, but Blue Jam really is something else entirely. Don't base your opinions on the CD, invest some time in the whole thing. Seventeen hour-long comedy concept albums, each one a work of crazed genius.

how does it make helplessness/weakness actually funny? just via surrealism and the inappropriate happening?

"So Roger, I hear you've got a ten-inch cock..."

it also shows what happens when people who look at the world differently clash with those who conform (and therein lies the greater part of its subversion).

you may be right but still not seeing how these convert to roffles, other than in the latter's case the obvious juxtaposition and subsequent confounding of expectations (which isn't/doesn't have to be done dark of course).

i mean a woman crying and when asked what's wrong saying 'i can't feel my cock' IS/was funny provided it's done with the right tone but beyond that it just didn't do it for me...

i think i'll stick with family guy.

i think a big problem is, for me anyway, often the funny comes before the thinking. i admire the satirical intent of brass eye but to be honest richard blackwood saying "i feel suggestible now" or the purves grundy "me oh myra bit" are just funny cos well i'm not sure. or mark heap swearing at a cow, it didn't make me thing about "people who look at the world differently clash with those who conform" but it made me laugh a lot.

You've chosen one of the more obtuse, wilfully 'outrageous' sketches. The majority of BJ has some grounding in logic. Not the logic of any other show, mind.

I mean, the monologues were a slower, richer source of hyuks but, still, there wasn't a point at which I thought, "Oh yes! I was feeling faintly nauseated there for a while but NOW I see how he's challenging convention - ha ha ha!" It was all pretty amusin' to me.

I was talking about this 'sketch' on the TV version (as I hadn't heard it on the radio show). But funny because I do tend to prefer logic/realism in my comedy now (at least I do when it's comedy set in our real world e.g. Peep Show, Extras). But I do need to listen and watch the shows properly to really be sure of all this.

I found it as immediate in its lollacity and rofflage as yr undark tellyMorris.

I think Morris has always traded this way e.g. laughs for the puerile gags (road sign called 'Youngbottom Ride' on the BE TV special) as big if not bigger than the ones reserved for the actual 'satire'. He seems to love the puerile as much as anyone else really.

but an extra on the Jam DVD, in which genuine audience response was played over the sketch. As it turns out, most of this response was hysterical laughter. It gave one of the darkest, most disturbing sketches of recent times a feelgood, 'comedy classic' aura, as we and the audience laughed along to a couple of parents reacting to the rape and murder of their son as if it were a cracked flowerpot (the aforementioned Cann pulling off an astonishing performance). This brilliant challenge to what instant, hilarious, laugh-out-loud comedy COULD be is what makes both BJ and Jam so great IMO.

again isn't this just 'let's confound expectations in a rather obvious way whilst using brutal subject matter for added punch' or am i still missing something? i suppose years later it might not seem as impressive because of copycats, internet stuff etc. but still.

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding you here, but by "genuine audience response" you don't actually mean a recorded response to this sketch, do you? Because it's obviously not - it's canned. I thought it was a fairly cheap gimmick, provoked (possibly) by the response of audience members to playback of BJ sketches at Battersea Arts Centre in '98 (where his brother is/was artistic director) - polite, simpering laughter which Morris apparently thought kinda depressing.

I sort of admire your zeal, Scourage, and I'm sure you're quite sincere in your enthusiasms but trumpeting the show's cultural subversions and its "brilliant challenge[s]" isn't, I don't think, going to convince the sceptics that it's funny. It's one of the hardest (and most futile) undertakings, that of selling a piece of comedy based on its perceived importance and innovation. Having said that, quoting funny lines out of context (another popular approach) doesn't work either. I suppose that's why I find your fandom a bit uncomfortable - you're championing something to people who aren't interested in terms I don't really recognise.

We can't really re-create the conditions in which you or I encountered BJ upon original broadcast for anyone else, so don't be surprised if someone goes away from this thread, downloads a couple of eps and is underwhelmed.

Genre - Ambient comedy

not quite prog then.

Er, some pleasure for the audience? Some gauge of how effective the material was for the creators? I dunno, why do anything ever? They were all on the floor on cushions in complete darkness, apparently. I imagine it was all rather awkward. Apart from the ubiquitous snogging couple.

anyway... LJ's point kinda hold i think the comedy programs held in the most affection tend not to be simply 'cos of the roffles. there's also a gender thing. there's a certain generalization about the ladies liking lolz only as a side order to soapiness or "feeling good" friends or green wing tend to be produced as evidence. there's a real covert thread of that in c & b world. cf there thread on upcoming stand up josie long. theory is kinda bollocks cos loads of gurls like family guy which is like the most unemotional program ever.

back to the main point. the way LJ regards chris morris is kinda like the way "the nation" regards only fools and horses: a non comedic element has become, in talking about it at least, the chief reason for the cherishing of it. possibly.

Father Ted and The Day Today use 'dumbness' in a manner that almost entirely removes the stupidity, because they do it with such unremitting poise.

'Peep Show' is intelligent with regard to the subjects it handles, but I never notice the actual jokes being that esoteric.