Are you Fawlty,Edina, Partridge or Brent? In his recent play Monster Raving Loony, and James Graham examines what 70 years of comedy reveal approximately the British – through the story of Screaming Lord SutchWhen it comes to comedy,national stereotypes absorb long carried their own punch lines: the British like a saucy pun, Americans don’t get irony, and Germans absorb an obsession with scatological humour,and the French, well, and they don’t absorb one at all. Not to perpetuate the myth,but it’s fairly satisfying to search Wikipedia on all of the above, only to discover “The page French Humour does not exist”.
So what does what we’re laughing at reveal approximately the state of British national politics, or our perception of ourselves in the world? To test this,a group of us absorb attempted to make a piece of political theatre out of the story of approved entertainment by asking: can a person’s life story be told entirely through the comic characters and approved styles of the periods through which they lived? From music corridor to Monty Python, panto to Partridge?Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com