Talk double Dutch to a real double duchess

[cosmolinguist]

"Your ... baboushka," Andrew called it last night, and he also successfully got me to wonder if that isn't the funniest thing about it.

Can there possibly be a thing I find at all amusing that Andrew does not? I wouldn't have thought so, what with his ever-growing collection of DVDs I never want to see and the fact that he actually knew enough not to bother me about going to see Richard Herring in a few weeks because he has finally learned it's not worth the effort.

Still the answer seems to be yes, and it is The Mighty Boosh.

I first became acquainted with it when diffrentcolours was doing complicated things to my laptop, so we had time to watch many of them. Andrew showed up for the last few and I was surprised later on when he was more bemused than amused. I generally assume that anything I like he will like, but then I realize now this is largely because they're all things he already knows about and he isn't going to show me things he doesn't like. Plus he's picked really good things: Blackadder, Red Dwarf, various incarnations of The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy that I didn't know about, Spaced, Black Books, Father Ted... who doesn't like those? And, not having a TV or anything, I have no way of finding out about other things on my own most of the time. So this is an anomaly.

"Monkey whimsy," he also called it, with great scorn and derision in his voice. Oh ho, that's rich!, I thought. If anybody in this house is going to think that anything about our primate friends is funny, it is him. Consider the evidence:

• He keeps going on about how great comics are if they have talking gorillas in them. (I know gorillas are not monkeys, but I think they're tarred with the same brush as far as entertaining Andrew goes.)
• He insisted our credit card have the purple picture of a gorilla on it rather than something I would actually want to look at, and has often called it "the monkey card."
• He lovingly regaled me with an entire Richard Herring sketch about the hilarious consequences of replacing part of a fast-food chain's jingle (namely "We're having a Wimpys") with "We're fucking a monkey." And now, I think, it is on one of those DVDs that I don't want to watch; I know I've heard it since.
• He cannot hear the phrase "monkey monkey monkey monkey William Shatner" without giggling. Even if he's already heard it so many times, and laughed so much, that he is in severe danger of vomiting.

But he insists this is an accepted phrase for "that sort of thing," the phenomenon of people expecting things to be funny just because they're random. The (first0 problem with this being, of course, not only is there nothing funny there, but that monkeys have become a cliché for this sort of thing so they're not even random, any more than ninjas or zombies or pirates.

I don't know if he just brought to my attention something that was already there, if it was just the headache I couldn't shake, or if we were just watching a couple of intrinsically sub-par episodes last night, but it took the shine off for me. Unrelenting randomness would be bad enough — it's something I expect from the internet, where I used to complain about seeing idiots who advertised their blogs as "random" just because they belonged to a slightly different pop-culture subculture fandom niche from their friends and would make stupid references to anime that their friends had not yet watched. It's not a shorthand for anything genuinely funny or amusing.

And this is worse than that, because as Andrew said it feels like people who are just on TV because their friends at unversity said they were funny. Of course that made my next move all too obvious, but before I could even mention Monty Python or Fry and Laurie or the billions of other things, most of which I know about only because of him, that depend on people at university thinking they were funny. But he rightly pointed out, before I could even speak, that the Pythons and such actually worked hard writing sketches for things, being involved in other people's shows, and didn't just ... I dunno, go to universities full of people doing Media Studies and a world of millions of cable channels that need filler.

Plus, they all had brains. Things to say. These guys don't. And I get the feeling that if I want to hear men talk about their hair and how much better it is to be cool than to be weird, I could just start paying attention to the people I work with. They are, not to put too fine a point on it, the things I want to escape from in my audiovisual entertainment.

There are two problems with my newfound enlightenment about The Mighty Boosh:

• I finished off the first series just now (which was actually the first two episodes I saw with diffrentcolours and greyeyedeve) and I'm sure I'm going to borrow the second series from Andrew's brother when we give this one back to him, and
• I know that no matter how much I might grow to despise this show, I am addicted to the theme song. I don't know why! I don't think it helps that it's so entertaining to watch greyeyedeve sing and dance along with it. But it just sounds perfect. I love it so much. It's an affliction.

Comments

[taimatsu]

There are some bits of the early Mighty Boosh storyline that I like (the snake-dancing sequence, for example) but mostly it's just not my thing. I think, partly, it's that a fair chunk of the humour relies on embarrassment/humiliation/being the uncool unincluded person (almost everything re. Howard in the first couple of episodes - the whole chatting up whats-her-face who can't remember him, facing up to the boss, the kangaroo thing) and that makes me uncomfortable, not amused. I'm glad you can enjoy it with the mrs, though :)

[taimatsu]

The difference between this and some of the other series you mention, Red Dwarf or Black Books, for example, is that while some of the humour in that plays on the same ideas of who's in and who's not, any character who is the victim either gets a witty comeback in the end (like the balding guy on BB, can't rmemeber name aaaargh), or some other victory, or is unsympathetic or not affected by it anyway (like Rimmer - he may be the butt of jokes but he doesn't take them to heart). So the 'victim' doesn't wind up *feeling* like a victim.

[cosmolinguist]

I've written before about how disappointing it is that so much comedy is based on embarrassment, and how ineffective that is; you're not the only one made uncomfortable by that sort of thing. I definitely think the "fall guys" in Black Books and Red Dwarf and whatever did get more of a chance to do fight back... and plus I remember it not always being the same guy: everybody gave as good as they got. Boosh seems more unbalanced; everybody's so one-dimensional.

Oh, and his name's Bill Bailey.

[taimatsu]

Oh, another thing, I think, is that I don't generally like comedy about horrible people, unless they are *funny* or witty horrible people. Like Bernard in Black Books is quite horrible sometimes but he's witty. But Bob Fossil is just horrible and dumb. Why do I want to watch horrible stupid people?

[cosmolinguist]

I'm definitely with you there, too. There are enough horrible stupid people in my day-to-day life that I don't need to go looking for them for fun. :)

Plus I hate Bob Fossil because Andrew keeps telling me he's trying to do an American accent. He keeps telling me because he knows it makes me make horrible faces and argue about this. :) The odd thing is, from the "extras" that I accidentally watched a bit of, he really did sound American even when not in character. But his normal voice was not so grating. I bet he sounds worse in the show because he's actually trying to sound stupid. The actor, in the extras, seemed proud of how stupid his character is, and that he didn't do anything in the show but be stupid.

[taimatsu]

Right now I am in love with the word 'horrible' after writing it and reading it so many times. Horrible horrible horrible howwible horrible! Horrible!

I must be overtired or something. Or chocolate overdose. God knows.

[cosmolinguist]

This reminds me of rainmerlot, who's told me that she loves the word hideous. Hideous hideous hid-ee-us hideous! I like it now too. All those vowels!

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

how much better it is to be cool than to be weird

The thing is, other people have said this as well and I've realised that this isn't what I think the series is saying at all. When Howard works hard at something and fails, and then Vince succeeds without even trying, it feels to me like satire on this stupid world which favours cool, stupid fashion victims over ordinary people, rather than saying "Hey, isn't Vince great? You should all be like Vince! Yeah!"

When Red Dwarf put the boot in to Rimmer it felt much more straightforwardly "let's mock the geek" to me.

[taimatsu]

To me, Rimmer isn't 'the geek', he's 'the arsehole'. :) Then again, I haven't seen any Red Dwarf for aaaaaages.

[bluedevi.livejournal.com]

It's true, he's an arsehole too, but when I think of Rimmer I think of him proudly saying "I've always got a pen." I've always got a pen too.

[cosmolinguist]

I wish I saw it like you then, but it doesn't feel like satire at all to me. It doesn't seem that deliberate, and I don't feel like there's any subtext or ur-text or any other layers at all where you can feel like you're in on the joke with the (or some of the) characters. It feels to me like they are actually saying Vince is great and that seems to be the impression other people are getting to (I just realized today why Andrew's mom was saying his brother wants to buy a poncho :) ).

[(Anonymous)]

I've never seen The Mighty Boosh so I'm not qualified to comment on it. Circumstantial evidence says Barratt and Fielding must be good because they were in Darkplace, but must be bad because they're friends with Razorlight. It's all too confusing...

[cosmolinguist]

Hello there! I didn't know you were still reading LJ.

[myfirstkitchen.livejournal.com]

My problem with it is the laziness, too. I was dragged to see Noel Fielding solo 5 or 6 years ago, and it was just a man running up and down saying "mad" things - "look at me, I'm bumming a shadow", "lo, let us get married on the morrow" - rather than the surreality actually being part of any kind of thought out joke like, say, Bill Bailey at his best, or Ross Noble and Eddie Izzard when they were good. It's as if saying the "random" things and dressing up is enough. Even Russell Brand knows that it isn't, love him or hate him he has corruscating honesty on his side when he's on his game, not just tight trousers and daft vocabulary.

[taimatsu]

Some of the *ideas* are cool - as I said, I love the snake-dancing bit with the music, and the gorilla thing is good - but the way they handle the whole thing really doesn't work for me. Also, yes, the racism or cultural appropriation at best sits badly with me. Though it is a complicated issue (and I can't talk, I'm learning belly-dancing).

[cosmolinguist]

The last two episodes, the ones we didn't watch last night, were also the first two I watched with diffrentcolours and greyeyedeve, and they were better. I think, too, that it improves, and angel_thane has told me that the second is his favorite of the three seasons.

[angeoverhere.livejournal.com]

I think Boosh is one of the most Marmite-y* comedy series ever - people do just seem to 'get' it or just get incredibly irritated.

I got force-fed the second series by plumsbitch on a trip to Brighton last year and absolutely loved it. However, having since watched the first and bits of the third series, I'd say the second one is by far the best. You really do have to enjoy surrealism to go for it though.

On the vince/howard thing (as it were!) I think esp in S2 things go down far more of a Black Books track of taking the piss out of everyone. It's pretty clearly having a go at empty-headed fashion tossers as much as everybody else (including having a gorilla as a flatmate).

There's also some musings in there about how comedy self-references subcultures and if you get those references, it all becomes much funnier. In the same way that Cerebus does this with comics, Boosh (esp 2) does this with music.

*sorry, hugely English expression - Marmite is that spread you put on toast that people either really love or really hate.

[cosmolinguist]

I do know about Marmite, actually. :) I tried it, and I didn't love it or hate it. I just think I might as well shake the salt canister vigorously over my toast, and I'm not inclined to do that in the same way I'm not inclined to consume large quantities of Marmite.

One of my friends was eating Cadbury fingers dipped in Marmite once, to the disgust of another, so I had to try that too. It was more interesting than just having it on toast, but still not worth it. :)

I am definitely interested to watch the second series now because a) I didn't see it all in the first place, and Andrew's brother's favorite episode is one of those I didn't see and b) everybody seems to agree that it's better. If it's better in a more Black Books sort of way as you say, I'm especially intrigued because I love that show even more than most of those I mentioned.

(Spaced is the one I like best, and I can see that seeming really, almost Booshily, odd and surreal to some people, but it's so dead-on in representing so many of my friends that I can't help but adore it even while knowing other people will hate and not understand exactly the things I like and understand.)

[signal-moon.livejournal.com]

I dislike the word "random" and the way it seems to be used to describe anything that isn't vanilla corporate predictable. It reminds me of another word I hate, in the music realm: "cheesy", which is another catch-all for certain popmatic music that the listener likes but wants to avoid saying so directly for fear of being thought of as uncool.

Call me an old fool but culture on every level in this country has become so conservative in the past 10 or 15 years. A pigeon-hole for everything and everything in its pigeon-hole.

[cosmolinguist]

I hadn't thought of "cheesy" in the same context as the vitriol I save for "random," but now that you mention it I can totally see your point. It's stupid useless shorthand for , yes, backhandedly admitting to one's guilty pleasures, but also can be twisted around to some kind of horrible irony: "something I know I shouldn't like but I do and I know it's just so..." well, random. In a sort of sneakily self-congratulatory fashion. Blech.

You may be an old fool but I'm the youngest curmudgeon I know. :)

[signal-moon.livejournal.com]

Being curmudgeonly is but one of the steps toward being wise :)

Also, on the subject of the Mighty Boosh, I like it but I'm also annoyed by it. I much preferred the 2nd season to the first, but it wasn't always consistent enough for me. Sometimes it has the feel of something written while they were performing it, taking whatever flights of fancy that leap to mind, while I'm a sucker for the scriptwriter's craft. Give me seinfeld or Larry Sanders over MB.

[cosmolinguist]

I just noticed how far back this entry is already (I don't half go on these days!); thanks for trawling all the way back here to tell me what you think about the Boosh. :)

It seems everybody thinks the second season is better; I hope Andrew's brother remembers to bring that DVD with him when he visits this weekend so I can approach it armed with this new knowledge and see if it's as god as I remember (tiny little bits of) it being.

I really loved Seinfeld when it was on; it seemed extremely underwhelming to most Britons of my acquaintance (Andrew hates it) so I've largely forgotten about it, but yeah it did seem almost entirely the right side of this "random" line.