Yeah, um, I don’t know how to describe how amazingly adorable this video is. All creatures should aspire to be this cute when they eat. Well played, guinea pigs, well played.
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Posts Tagged ‘Comedy’
Cute/Ridiculous Animal Thing Of The Day: Guinea Pigs Eating Watermelon (VIDEO)
July 12th, 2009 |
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Reel Review: ‘Funnier than Borat’
July 10th, 2009 |
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Spike: the voice of Hitler humour?
July 10th, 2009 |
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As the Goon Show creator’s wartime memoirs are put on stage, it is time to reassess Milligan’s comedy legacy?
“Hitler: his part in British comedy,” anyone? A show opens this week in Bristol that may conclusively establish the Fuhrer’s influence on the development of UK humour. And no, this has nothing to do with Dad’s Army or Monty Python’s sketch about Adolf holing up in an English B&B with Von Ribbentrop and Himmler. The show in question is Adolf Hitler: My Part in His Downfall, an adaptation of the wartime memoirs of Goon Show creator Spike Milligan.
Would Milligan’s sense of the absurd have evolved in quite the same way without his wartime experiences? “When you know what he went on to do after the war,” says the show’s director Tim Carroll, “you can see the seeds of it here.” Carroll – whose Twelfth Night at Shakespeare’s Globe I still remember as a minor comic masterpiece – describes Milligan’s series of WWII-set books as “laughter in the face of death”; they are companion pieces to Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 in their dredging of mind-bending comic illogic from the abjection of war.
Can we trace a whole strand of anarcho-absurdist UK comedy back to Milligan’s WWII experiences? Okay, so the losers’ humour that characterises much British sitcom owes its origins to the likes of Galton and Simpson (the writers behind Steptoe and Son and Hancock’s Half Hour). But it’s Milligan who’s hailed as “the godfather of alternative comedy” – by Eddie Izzard, no less. And it’s easy to imagine the free-associative comedy we associate with Milligan – daring to speak crap, submitting to the reign of the subconscious – as a response to the boredom of service, as a little rebellion against the disciplines of war. At any rate, Spike’s mix of nonsense and iconoclasm (and all that merciless Goon Show ribbing of the officer class) prepared the ground for the 60s satire boom and directly inspired the Pythons.
It also fed directly into British theatre. Few now recall Milligan’s hit play The Bed-Sitting Room, co-written with John Antrobus, which foresaw a post-apocalyptic London (World War III lasted a mere two minutes and 28 seconds – “including the signing of the peace treaty”) in which characters mutate into parrots, wardrobes and, er, a bedsit. His West End appearance in an adaptation of the 19th-century novel Oblomov is better remembered; Milligan used the story, of an inert Russian melancholic, as a launchpad for his own wild improvisations. In Milligan’s theatre, wrote the no-less-eminent Peter Brook, “the imagination flies like a wild bat in and out of every possible shape and style”.
That’s the spirit Tim Carroll’s production (London-bound at the end of the month) hopes to revive, with its promises of a Milligan-style collision of tragedy and idiocy, jazz music and comedy sketch. After all, it’s hard for us later generations to judge claims of Milligan’s genius, not least because the BBC destroyed the tapes of his ground-breaking TV sketch series Q. To us, he’s just the old-stager who called Prince Charles a “little grovelling bastard” at the British Comedy awards, or tried to have his headstone engraved with the words “I told you I was ill”. Was he really that brilliant? And what part did Hitler play in refining his comic sensibility? By putting Milligan’s wartime memoir on its feet, Carroll and co may help us identify the DNA of a major strand in UK comedy.
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Bruno: beauty, poetry, threesomes
July 6th, 2009 |
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Mollie Sugden: her career in clips
July 2nd, 2009 |
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Best known for her portrayal of Mrs Slocombe in Are You Being Served?, Mollie Sugden’s comic talent lives on in these YouTube clips
The death of Mollie Sugden at 86 after a long illness will sadden everyone of a certain age who remembers her 1970s blue-rinsed prime. As game as they come, memorable and talented, Sugden was a much-loved part of the TV landscape for decades. Best remembered as Mrs Slocombe in Are You Being Served?, she lives on through the medium of streaming video. Take heed, modern comic actors, and watch a master at work.
The Erotic Dreams of Mrs Slocombe
In this Are You Being Served? classic, Mrs. Slocombe has dreams in which she and Mr Humphries, played by John Inman, enjoy romantic trysts. “I can’t think what’s come over her,” says the confirmed bachelor. I’m not touching that one.
Mrs Slocombe’s pussy
Mrs Slocombe had a cat called Tiddles. This simple piece of biographical detail was the springboard for seemingly endless single entendres (“having a bath at six in the morning played havoc with my pussy” and the like). Years later, as the show achieved cult status in America, Tiddles would suffer the final indignity: being banned by prudish TV bosses in the post-Nipplegate moral panic.
Molly on Corrie
With its history of strong female characters, Coronation Street was a great platform for Sugden as Nellie Harvey, landlady of The Laughing Donkey. Sparks would fly as she clashed with Rovers Return matriarch Annie Walker. Julie Goodyear, who had a ringside seat, reminisces.
Lost and Found
Ding-dong dell, Mrs Slocombe pussy’s in the well. At least, that’s what the early evidence suggests in the episode Lost and Found, which prompts a swift and unlikely marriage proposal from Mr Humphries. You just know that this can’t end well.
Grace and Favour
The success of Are You Being Served? made a spin-off inevitable. Grace and Favour followed the staff of Grace Brothers adjusting to country life as the proprietors of a manor house. In this episode, Mrs Slocombe stands trial for the theft of a Gypsy cart. Her reactions as a string of character witnesses come forward are comedy gold.
Pusstergeist
Someone unfamiliar with British comedy might imagine that the comic possibilities of a female character owning a cat would quickly dry up. Such naivety is charming. Some seven years after the demise of Are You Being Served?, writers Jeremy Lloyd and David Croft were still contriving situations such as the Grace and Favour episode Pusstergeist, in which Captain Peacock discovers a petrified cat in the attic, apparently prompting a series of supernatural events. “I wish to see the curator of the museum.” Mrs Slocombe barks. “I have a pussy of great antiquity and I’d like him to have a look at it.”
Funny Women
In 1999, the BBC featured Sugden as part of their Funny Women series and former colleagues queued up to pay tribute to her decency, comic timing and professionalism. “She was nice,” said Jimmy Perry graciously. “She didn’t mind showing her knickers.” Featuring some rare footage from her appearances in Love Thy Neighbour, The Liver Birds and The Six Wives of Henry VIII, the tribute showcased Sugden’s versatility, reminding us that she was much more than just a one-trick pony. She will be missed.
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Mollie Sugden, actor, dies aged 86
July 2nd, 2009 |
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The comedy actor Mollie Sugden died today at the age of 86 after a long illness.
Yorkshire-born Sugden was best known for playing Mrs Slocombe in long-running BBC sitcom Are You Being Served?, a role later reprised for Grace and Favour.
She died at the Royal Surrey hospital with her twin sons, Robin and Simon Moore, at her bedside, according to her agent Joan Reddin.
One of a select bunch of British performers to achieve national treasure status, Sugden was renowned for her portrayal of fearsome battleaxes. The first of such roles to achieve acclaim was as Mrs Hutchinson in The Liver Birds, a series so popular it was revived in the late 90s using the original cast.
She was the star of many other comedies, including Come Back Mrs Noah, That’s My Boy and My Husband And I, which she made with her husband.
But it was as the bossy sales lady Betty Slocombe in Are You Being Served? that she was best known. The long-running, innuendo-laden television comedy was such a hit that a feature film was made based on the series, and it was successfully exported to America. Every episode Sugden sported a different hair colour and continually harped on about her “pussy”.
Born in Keighley, West Yorkshire, in 1922, Sugden studied drama at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, where she took three major awards in one year.
But success did not come quickly and she spent many years in repertory up and down the country. It was in 1956, while she was working for Swansea Rep at the Grand Theatre, earning about £12 a week, that she met her husband, the Coronation Street actor William Moore. The couple came to be regarded as one of the establishments of showbusiness, with a marriage that had stood the test of time, until Moore died in 2000.
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The feelbad factor
Light, uplifting comedy has had its day. Give me the bleak, miserable stuff – it suits my crisis better
‘They give birth astride of a grave,” says Pozzo in Waiting For Godot. “The light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” Close your eyes and picture yourself giving birth astride of a grave. You shiver and moan. Your baby, once you’ve squeezed it out, drops six feet onto the ground. Oh yes, your mother was right. You should have gone private.
Beckett’s magnificent line is an example of feelbad. Feelbad confronts you with the darkness, futility and awfulness of existence, but does it with such imagination, bravado, soul and wit that you find yourself exhilarated. Feelbad is The Smiths, feelgood The Smurfs. I rest my case.
Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York is a feelbad classic. I’ve seen it twice and urge you to do the same. Both times it gave me a mid-life crisis. But that’s a recommendation. I’m 56. A mid-life crisis means I’ll live to 112. It’s a masterpiece of anti-formulaic, genre-busting, unmarketable feelbad art, one that deserves the most off-putting advertising strapline to convey its uncompromising, uningratiating vision. I offer up, in all humility: “Delay your suicide two hours to see this film.”
If you haven’t seen it, look away now, as I’m about to divulge the plot. Here goes: a guy dies. That’s it. And, as the film makes clear, that’s not just the story of the guy in the film, it’s the story of everyone. Everyone dies. That’s the only story there is. Thank you, Charlie Kaufman. Thank you, Sammy Beckett.
En route to the Big D, our hero, a depressed, self-obsessed director and hypochondriac, conceives an epic theatre piece on the subject of (wait for it, wait for it) the brutal awfulness of human life. But he never finishes his theatre piece. Of course he doesn’t. This is feelbad. He just can’t get to the end, what with constant interferences from life itself – which have to be included in the piece – and his own dissatisfaction and decline. Decades pass without his completing his work. The film’s a sort of writer’s blockbuster.
You may have heard that it’s relentlessly bleak. This is not true. Feelbad doesn’t preclude warmth or a sly and delicate humour. (That’s why the ladies love Leonard Cohen.) I’m a professional comedy writer, so feelbad humour is a subject very close to my heart, which, of course, is just a few inches away from my wallet. I make my living supplying amusing stuff for popular consumption. I started my career writing jokes for the Two Ronnies, at a time when likeable, unchallenging, diminutive chaps like Ronnie Corbett and Ernie Wise were the giants of BBC Light Entertainment. You were instructed, when writing comedy, to provide three laughs a page. You were instructed, when performing it, to go out there and make them laugh. In other words, your motivation was to make the audience feel good, with comedy of a kind your maiden aunt would enjoy.
But Light Entertainment has transmuted, over the last three decades, into Heavy Entertainment. Darker it’s got and darker. Basil Fawlty had rage but was still unmistakably farcical and funny. David Brent? There were times when his awfulness was so real you had to cover your eyes. And Brent was nothing compared with the gallery of grotesques in The League of Gentlemen, or the savagery in the collected works of Chris Morris, or the cruelty in Nighty Night. It is as if the smile has been wiped off comedy’s face, to be replaced with an expression that’s darker but somehow more truthful.
We’re supposed, in these difficult times, to be crying out for comfort, for blandness, for kindness, for the smiley love of our mummies. But it doesn’t quite look like that from where I’m sitting. For a start, nobody has a maiden aunt any more. She’s doing unspeakable unmaidenly things with your bi-curious bachelor uncle, in the very living room where the telly’s broadcasting Psychoville. “I’ve done a bad murder,” runs a typical line from this series, now running on BBC2 as part of Thursday’s comedy night. Logically, that means there are good ones.
Feelbad is here to stay. People want bleakness, darkness and depression. They crave unpalatable extremes. Where’s it going to end, you ask. We all know the answer. It’s going to end in death. Enjoy.