What kind of Humor do you have?

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Me too! My brother uses this a lot to get at me because he knows by the time I feel the pain he's miles away. One of these days I'm gonna let his tyres down to give myself more time to work it out.

dry and sarcastic. i have that sarcastic society poster taped to my door.

i like groucho marx and woody allen as well.

i think groucho marx has a more witty sense of humor and woody allen can be more dry than witty.

Last edited by tinky on 04 Mar 2007, 11:28 am, edited 1 time in total.

W.C.Field, Jacques Tati, Groucho, Boris Vian, Raymond Queneau, John Kennedy Toole, New Yorker's cartoons, humor of the gallows (Kafka). I have none myself.

Dry as a bone.

Oh, I forgot: Augusten Burroughs made me laugh a lot.

Not all British humor is "dry and ironic". It's frequently understated, but also frequently wacky, surreal and off-the-wall. Take Mony Python as an example. Groucho Marx would have gotten on perfectly well with the Goons. Sarcasm need not need necessarily be cruel or target others; it's all part of the same dry/ironic spectrum.
(Frankly, the best example of alleged "humor" that wounds others that I can think of is the American stand-up "comedian" Joan Rivers, whose entire schtick seemed to consist of selecting random victims from her audience and verbally savaging them from the stage. There was nothing funny about her unprovoked assaults; the laughter from her audience wasn't amused, it was nervous, "thank god she went after someone else this time and not me". I don't think she'd know "funny" if it leapt out from behind the stage curtains and bit her in the ass in the middle of one of her attacks. ...Er, I mean, acts.)

A lot of people seem to think Benny Hill is (or was) the epitome of British humor. I beg to disagree. I think he was the epitome of "humor imported cheaply from Hollywood". His sense of humor was right there on the level of what 90% of Hollywood seems to think is "funny" — cheap pratfalls, cheap innuendo, cheap smut, and grade-school humor whose idea of "subtle" is to empty a chamberpot over someone's head. His entire repertoire can be pretty much summarized as "If the joke isn't working, just add scantily dressed women and leer suggestively."
To a large extent, Hollywood invented slapstick in the 20s, and became so inordinately proud of its invention that it's never quite been able to bring itself to outgrow it and move on. But in the post-war years, while Hollywood went with stand-up comics and situation comedy, then got stuck in a seemingly endless rut of "N unlikely room-mates sharing an apartment (for some value of N)", British humor spawned the Goon Show, three completely deranged guys doing sight gags on the radio and MAKING IT WORK, and the Goon Show later inspired the Goodies and Monty Python. (Terry Pratchett, author of Discworld, and Douglas Adams, authot of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, both admit to having been partially inspired by Monty Python.)
So, yeah, Britain produced Benny Hill. (It wasn't our fault, I swear!) But we also produced Monty Python's Flying Circus, Wallace and Gromit, Terry Pratchett, and Douglas Adams. That's my kind of humor.

(On balance, I hope we can be forgiven for Benny Hill.)

Another whole-heated "I agree" from me.

Anything else - fine.

Except... does anyone else find that the current style of excessive swearing, etc, just detracts from the humour (if anything else remains) of stand-up comedians?

For instance, this is why I've never got on too well with Billy Connolly. He's brilliant, but I can't listen - which is a pity.

See "Joan Rivers".


Well, you have to take cultural background into account. Billy Connolly is a working-class Scot, and more than that, he's from Glasgow. In Glaswegian, "f****n'" and "bloody" aren't vulgarity, they're punctuation.

All 3 Listed.

Plus, Toilet Humor, Dark Humor (A lot of it), Wit, and Satire (lots of it).

I have a good sense of humor. It makes Alternative....well Alternative.

Puns, oblique references and dry wit. I think Steven Wright is hilarious.
I can be very sarcastic, but only when I am genuinely angry; I don't see it as "funny" at all.
"Broad" comedy just doesn't connect for me. At all. Ever.

I've spent some time in Glasgow, working. Your perception of Glaswegians is (almost) pure stereotype.
I can't recall hearing anyone there swear at all.

OTOH I remember when I was 17/18 doing a job on "The Christmas Post" in S. London, First time was just letter delivery, on my own. Second time I was on parcel delivery, with the local greengrocer, in his lorry, and the required "real" postman. Approximately 50% of the syllables in the postman's speech were "f*ck". It was distinctly difficult to understand was he was saying.

Can you post a link? I would like to see it too.

Almost forgot...Peter Kay, Eddie Izzard, Bill Bailey.

Dry, verbal, slapstick and anything generally silly and childish, like Mr Bean.

Interesting, Graelwyn. Have you watched Mr. Bean recently?

Now that "I Spy with my Aspie Eye", I've decided I'm not at all sure about him.

I watched a few episodes last year, and stopped watching them.

On viewing critically, Rowan Atkinson seems to be being merely exploitive of Mr. Bean's fallibilities. There are funny bits, but I found too much of it just too uncomfortable to watch.

My favourite jokes are from Red Dwarf. see my sig for one quote, here's another:

"Lister?"
"Yeah?"
"There's a bunch of hi-speed fighter crafts from Binn's Electrical heading out way."
"Smeg Holly, where are they from?!"
"You remember how you left a sandwich in your room before you joined the crew of Red Dwarf?"
"Yeah?"
"During the 3 million years you were in stasis, your mouldy sandwich covers 7/8ths of the worlds surface!"
"Smeg, why couldn't they do anything?!"
"They couldn't afford you. You left a bit of cash in your Savings account, and now own all of the World's wealth!"
"So why Binn's Electrical?"
"You left a light on in the bathroom!"