NOT FUNNY.

My Family however is such a simple, albeit hackneyed idea but I find the humour quite refreshing and the script is excellently written.

I cannot believe that someone doesn't find them funny.

what was to dislike about them? i thought they were all pretty cute. i'd admit there's a slight tweeness to them all that tries to display them all as intensely loveable that may have been overbearing (kinda like Belle & Sebastian or Lemon Jelly perhaps), but the surreal quirks and/or ultimately human aspects of their characters prevailed

I mean, come on it's not a new or funny revelation that people working in creative media are often bums or egotistical slackers (like me) so why point it out as if it's the funniest thing in the world?

i dont think they were dragging it out that badly, i dont recall seeing a realsitic depiction of creative types struggling to get motivated and get work anywhere else in a British sitcom in recent times...its not even meant to be 'funny' as in 'look, you must laugh now' - just a well observed, well executed half-comment to me

That bit where the modern artist is explaining how he paints "aggression, pain, frustration" and it's presented as if it's a joke. Very funny - "modern art is, like, really weird man! Look, people covered in paint - they must be mad!". or "Wow! Clubbing is funny. Look people on drugs - they're really funny."

the "pain, fear, aggression" (or whatever it was) thing is funny because its a swift, well executed montage and because of Mark heap's facial expressions (his 'fear' face cracked me up).

the clubbing episode was VERY cliched, but still funny to see Mike in a tight pink leotard and Tracks (the Irish courier) having a flashback and buzzing his tits off to the sounds of roadworks, the telephone and a boiling kettle - yes VERY Human Traffic, but again well executed and just something to make you smile if not roll around on the floor like an epileptic having a fight with a 6ft feather duster

apologies to everyone for getting into another Spaced: Good/Bad thing, i'm sure there have been loads before and opinion is divided probably 50/50

anyone else think My Family is funny tho?!

I can feel my lip starting to curl again.

no-one liked the Alexei Sayle bits tho admittedly, probably not even Alexei Sayle

i dont think they were dragging it out that badly, i dont recall seeing a realsitic depiction of creative types struggling to get motivated and get work anywhere else in a British sitcom in recent times...its not even meant to be 'funny' as in 'look, you must laugh now' - just a well observed, well executed half-comment to me
Anyone who's ever made fun of students has done this. Squaddies aren't funny.

the "pain, fear, aggression" (or whatever it was) thing is funny because its a swift, well executed montage and because of Mark heap's facial expressions (his 'fear' face cracked me up).

Normally I'm a big fan of this kind of expressive comedy, and I think things like League of Gents has this down to a fine art but soz, it didn't float my boat - just made me cringe.

the clubbing episode was VERY cliched, but still funny to see Mike in a tight pink leotard and Tracks (the Irish courier) having a flashback and buzzing his tits off to the sounds of roadworks, the telephone and a boiling kettle - yes VERY Human Traffic, but again well executed and just something to make you smile if not roll around on the floor like an epileptic having a fight with a 6ft feather duster

Okay, I must admit that the show did make me smile once in a while. There's one outtake of them singing "This Beat is Technotronic" which made me titter and some of the clubbing episode was fairly heartwarming. Just not enough in there to make me think of it as anything more than a lukewarm attempt at simplistic observational humour.

Cor I can't half rant about this programme can I? Apologies as well for the repetitiveness of the "Spaced" subject, but I'm just confused at myself for not getting it considering it gets so much good press and has a lot of actors whom I normally enjoy seeing in other programs. I do WANT to like it, really - I bought the DVD for chrissakes. Maybe series two is better?

its hard to appreciate Dad's Army but i'd accept it was a good British sitcom even i probably never laughed at it once - same goes for Porridge, one of the best Uk sitcoms ever really, and i think i did laugh at it once or twice in the past...working under the view that british sitcoms in their traditional format are just utterly redundant these days

NB their dimness was a constant whether they had just smoked pot or not.

our reading of the characters remains quite different tho - i think they're all great, perhaps more cariactures than characters indeed, but this is not a problem

you might prefer series 2 altho i'm not sure i do (so maybe you would ;)

I suppose you could call Blue Jam etc. creepy and unpleasant too but that impressed me in other ways.

PS I was well under 25 and an unemployed socialist drunkard so I can see no sociological basis for my dislike.

When I was 10 I didn't really understand that they were students, or at least I didn't understand anything about student life. I don't really know what I thought they were doing in that house.

As a burlesque parody of 80s students I think Rik was pretty good.

And then the was.. Mike.

i suppose i was obssessed with the Young Ones as a kid, and Blackadder also. Vyv was my favourite character in the Young Ones - didnt find Mike funny at all as with Sayle's skits tho. perhaps its so embedded deep in my humour psyche that i refuse to consider the possibility its crap...i mean i could watch it now and not laugh or smile at all because i know it so well, but that dont make it a dud in my book.

i also loved Bottom up until the middle of the third series where it went beyond formulaic, beyond self-parody and into...nothing. by that point i'd realised Mayall and Edmondson together were one trick ponies and didnt care, but from then on, it just stopped being remotely funny.

Sadly Eddie Murphy - i blame the ladyboys

The Young Ones still holds up mostly, I think. A lot of people say it's dated, which is true in certain points (the references to Thatcher, etc) but there are loads of moments that are just plain silliness which continue to be enjoyable today - as Chaki said. Vyv going to Narnia, the whole thing in "Bambi" where the entire cast are amoebas or something which get eaten by an elephant, Rik writing to the lead singer of Echo & The Bunnymen because he thinks MPs are facists... and there are character-based lines which are just fantastic (Neil: "Open uuup, it's the piigs"). I love the exchanges between Rik, Vyv and Neil. But it's true those Alexei Sayle bits are pretty awful, except certain times when he's sticking to the script ("Oh no, some bastard broke your chair!" - the delivery of that is hilarious to me, for some reason).

Blackadder IV, though, is terrible drivel. They were repeating themselves by that point. The whole thing is just really lame.

Can’t decide about this:

Whimsical French woman, written by a man who's never met a woman. #LazySusan pic.twitter.com/FCFXnDhGQK

— BBC Comedy (@bbccomedy) July 30, 2019

Is it something to do with getting older that i feel like i haven't seen anything truly funny coming out of UK TV comedy in ten years?

That "French woman" sketch was okay... It didn't make me laugh but the idea was funny enough. Some of the jokes and observations were well written. But something about the execution made it feel clunky and kinda cringey. It plays on a pretty tired trope for a start, while not really doing anything original with it. As such it's more of an extended meme than a sketch.

And I think that's part of the problem: Comedy writers are now competing with meme artists for the lols, and the memes are winning. Memes can make an observation in an often surreal or oblique way and get it to land instantly. Memes also have an open-source anonymity to them, meaning you know they were made by SOMEONE but you don't know who, which is part of the fun - it feels like an in-joke despite having been shared thousands of times.

By comparison, TV sketches and satirical shows feel like lumbering dinosaurs roaring "The Channel 4 Corporate Board Has Written This Funny Sketch About A Man Who Identifies As Being 7-foot Tall Isn't It Funny Because That Is A Bit Like Trans People Which Is A Topic That Is In The News A Lot These Days HaHaHa".

At the same time, UK comedy still seems to be cribbing off older shows like Big Train, the Chris Morris shows, Armando Iannucci Show, Fast Show etc, but not doing it anywhere near as well. I can see the people behind B@it thinking of themselves as the edgy progeny of The Day Today and Brass Eye. But the anarchic nuance and flair of those shows has dissipated into tired lampooning of wokeness, kink-shaming, transphobia etc, with the thinnest veneer of surrealness or gross-out humour to cover for it.

But I couldn't really see Armando's "Hallo Hugh!" sketches being successfully turned into a meme, for example. The format of those sketches only really work on TV, and because they're so well executed, they land perfectly.

resoundingly otm

i watched the Amelia Gething show on iPlayer - why because she has an often very funny TikTok channel. very visual, very surreal. and the TV show is DREADFUL. i mean just beyond bad. and there are EIGHTEEN EPISODES. it’s just wild to me.

As for satire on TV, what a lot of writers who think they're the next Chris Morris forget is that TDT and Brass Eye rarely attacked cultural figures, politicians or specific news topics of the day, save for things like "Feel my nose and put my specs there roars drunken Major".
Chris Morris lampooned the medium of the media itself. By amplifying the sensationalism, the overbearing audiovisual bombast, and the ridiculousness of the presenters and correspondents, he was making fun of the news itself, as opposed to what was in the news. That's what makes those shows rare in that they're satirical pieces which remain funny today. You don't really need to know what was happening in the news in 1994 to get the jokes.
Compare this to stuff like The Mash Report or Jonathan Pie, and there's no comparison. These are the Oasis's to Chris Morris's Beatles in that they're copying ideas wholesale ("I know, let's shout the word 'FUCKMUFFIN', people love that"), without really pausing to think WHY those ideas were good in the first place.

There must be something going on at UK TV headquarters, cos it's not as though funny, talented people don't exist.
I'd not heard of Amelia Gething before, but the fact her TV programme doesn't work as well as her TikTok either means her humour isn't meant for TV (I doubt this), or her humour has been retconned to fuck by external committee.

Also, budgets for comedy must be extremely low these days. Everything looks like an old Children's ITV show. Cheap-looking props, sets, special FX through-and-through. Instead of giving these shows an edgy Young Ones-style DIY feel, it just feels insincere. Those B@it sketches are supposed to look like real news reports in order to get people sharing them, but you can tell from just looking at them that they're sketches.

Is it something to do with getting older that i feel like i haven't seen anything truly funny coming out of UK TV comedy in ten years?

Was thinking the very same when I saw this thread bumped. I don't think I find any of the innumerable comedians who infest every square inch of UK TV these days funny or engaging.

yep. panel shows are especially repulsive to me. i'm sure a lot of these comics are talented and put a lot of time into their craft. but these shows have the affect of razing everything into a middle-ground. i don't want to listen to these personality-free chumps trying to be funny in front of each other. it's cheap celeb-driven telly. easy to make, easy to put out, easy to watch, but in no-way nourishing or particularly funny or original

resoundingly otm

Perhaps cheap to put her in this discussion since I May Destroy You is kind of a different thing, but Michaela Coel's Chewing Gum series is from the past ten years and very good.

I think a big problem tho is stand-up comedians, who are good at that, getting crammed into sitcoms or sketch shows, which are different things. Love Sarah Kendall but her show was terrible. Love James Acaster but the one episode he guested on for Josh Widdicombe's sitcom (nb I don't rate that guy as a stand up either) was horrible.

Re: panel shows, I always have to mention that these are far worse in every other European country whose tv I've been acquainted with. Like House of Games level lineups on prime time.

I think a big problem tho is stand-up comedians, who are good at that, getting crammed into sitcoms or sketch shows,

And the rest. I got so used to seeing Romesh Ranganathan's face everywhere I almost expected to find him staring back at me from the mirror in the morning.

Dr Oz going into "Wegner's" for a head of broccoli, some whole carrots, asparagus, fresh salsa and guac for his wife to make a "crudite" platter is legit pretty funny, however the click economy had completely smothered and stomped the joke before I even got to see the original.

It plays on a pretty tired trope for a start, while not really doing anything original with it.

This is the problem with so much sketch comedy. I suppose there was a germ of a funny idea in there somewhere. The clip takes that germ and rather than developing it just repeats it over and over for much too long (about 1:30 too long, in fact). It's the same dynamic that has drained much of the humor from sketch shows like SNL.

I saw a clip of Jimmy Fallon "interviewing" "Ron Burgundy" and it was some really bad "comedy"