British humour.
Us Brits find sarcasm funny, and laugh at dark humour. Unfortunately, most Americans do not seem to appreciate this, preferring 'hyper' stuff instead, where the actors make obvious jokes or just act stupid. Psychoville is darkly humourous, and the acting is great seeing as it is a sketch show. Americans should stick to their own comedy if they don't like ours.
As an American I've enjoyed this and many other Brit shows. Unfortunately most Brits like to be stereotypical bigots. see what I did there
Fact: 87.3% of IMDB users belong to the secret society of cynics.
yup
As a brit I find that kind of US bashing embarrassing , especially the comedy angle.
British comedy is often infantile and nothing to brag about
Also the majority of Brits didnt "get" Phychoville or its perdecessor
Americans have been hip to British comedy for ages. It's a big country, my friend, there's a lot going on. I go back to Monty Python being broadcast on PBS back in the 70s, and from there researched even earlier things, like The Goon Show, so you can't call MY British humor bona fides into question! It's simply impossible to make blanket statements like yours about the States.
You gotta love the sour-grapes snobbery still inherit in comments like these from a dwindling empire. It is the same boring and ignorant blanket statement that they make about our chocolate, beer, cheese, etc. As if there is only a single type of each floating around our tiny homogenized country.
All types of comedy have been part and parcel of the American trope since pen and paper hit the New World. Ben Franklin wrote some fantastically dark pieces in the early days of this country. Poe had his share of evil levity strewn throughout his works. Mark Twain was not shy of gallows humor either. Ambrose Bierce. HL Mencken. Vaudeville was not all slapstick either. Every self-deprecating Jewish comedian from Woody Allen to Richard Lewis to Lewis Black has fretted their way to the bank with searing sarcasm, directed mainly at their mothers.
Then there was the brilliantly demented comic illustrations of Charles Addams and Edward Gorey. And the wicked humor of MAD. The jocular irony of practically every Twilight Zone episode. There's the better works of David Lynch, Tim Burton and Wes Anderson all playing extremely dire situations for a laugh. And we have quite a decent track record with horror comedy as well.
The list goes on and on and on.
Stop thinking that the Brits are the inventors or perfectors of humor. Ancients works like those of Euripides and Catullus were very dark and very funny.
But you have to agree that your cheese and beer is awful. I'm not a chocolate fan so you can have that.
share[deleted]
We even have dark humor in shows like Scandal and Sleepy Hollow. It's all over our tv series... The op is a nitwit.
shareWow I've been watching British comedies since I discovered them in middle school, my sister loves them too. We're both black and from the suburbs. Any more unintelligent stereotypes to hurl about viewers you don't know the first thing about, twat? Why do you even care what we like or don't like?
shareMy family has been watching British TV shows for DECADES, via PBS.When they started to dwindle, we bought many, MANY series on videos and then DVDs. We also don't stop at comedies...we love the mysteries, period dramas, and I own all the BBC Shakespeare plays from the 80s..it took me 20 years to get the whole set.
As for comedies, we started with Monty Python...and it was the fierce American support that kept it financially viable to continue on as long as it did, and helped the movies get made. More recently, Martin Clunes himself credits the American audiences with making it possible to go on to make more seasons of Doc Martin. We were far more enthusiastic than his home audiences, and our clamoring for more episodes spurred them on to make more. We watch them all over and over and over. We still watch To The Manor Born, Good Neighbors, Mother and Son (Australian, but still the same genre and style)The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin (both versions), Rising Damp, Father Dear Father, Vicar of Dibley, That's My Boy, Absolutely Fabulous, French And Saunders, Fawlty Towers, The Doctors, The Goodies, The Young Ones, Clatterford...and we have the entire set of Poirot mysteries, Rosemary and Thyme, all the Doc Martin movies,and a whole SLEW of British horror movies. Right now, they're airing Moon Boy, Spy, Keeping Up Appearances, As Time Goes By, Poldark...believe me, we GET it! :/
So put that big fat broad brush you're painting with away for the love of...Britcoms...
Oh...I forgot...I just bought the whole set of Black Books, and Psychoville.
I'm an American and I also enjoy British comedy/humor way more than I do ours. However I certainly believe that Americans can indeed make great comedy as well(when done right obviously). It's simply that my own personal tastes are much more inclined to go the way towards the direction of Brit humor. I absolutely LOVE macabre-style humor/comedy and that's definitely an area where I feel Brits undoubtly excel over Yanks.
"Life IS pain highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something".
Frasier was brilliantly done, Seinfeld and Friends were also great but if Frasier had never existed, so bold to make the show rest on such a character, I think comedy would be significantly more lacking than if the other 2 didn't exist.
Frasier is arguably the full package of American comedy. Erudite, theatrical, upper middle class, it does not use cliche too much for comedy effect. You wouldn't want every comedy to be like it, you might not find it the funniest of all comedies, but you have to admire Kelsey Grammar and all's acting.