The BWAIN

The blog form­ally known as “Andrew’s Thingy”, which my wife thought­fully put in, is now get­ting a more per­man­ent name, as I start to use it more. It is known as “The BWAIN”. Why? Because this is a Blog Without An Inter­est­ing Name.

The scar­i­est thing about this, though, is that all of the good titles I could think of are meta-jokes of one form or another.

Humour takes dif­fer­ent forms at dif­fer­ent ages. To a tod­dler, the fun­ni­est pos­sible thing is call­ing some­thing by the wrong name. To a ten year old, the fun­ni­est pos­sible thing is a long, elab­or­ate and stu­pid shaggy dog story as a lead up for a very weak pun.

It’s also true that humour takes dif­fer­ent forms in dif­fer­ent eras. To the Vic­tori­ans, the fun­ni­est thing was non­sense. This was the golden age of amphi­gory: Gil­bert & Sul­li­van, Lewis Car­rol and Edward Lear. In 1960s and 70s Bri­tain, it was rib­ald humour: Benny Hill and the Carry On films.

When anthro­po­lo­gists look back at us, they will remark about our fond­ness for self-reference and meta-humour.

But they’re really going to talk a lot about is the trend of cringe com­edy. Maybe I’m just an old fogey, but I don’t see what’s the slight­est bit funny about Tom Green, Sacha Baron Cohen or Steve Coogan (though I did think that Tris­tram Shandy was very clever, prob­ably because it was so meta). I recently watched an entire epis­ode of The Cath­er­ine Tate Show without so much as crack­ing a smile.

And don’t get me star­ted on those Ben Stil­ler humi­li­ation com­ed­ies. Ouch.

Maybe the prob­lem is that these shows aren’t clever, because I appar­ently don’t have a prob­lem with clever cringe/humiliation humour. Frasier was no stranger to humi­li­ation com­edy, but it was always far­cical and always clever. Per­haps Little Bri­tain exem­pli­fies the prob­lem for me: When it’s not funny, it’s really not fully, but when it is funny, it’s the fun­ni­est thing you’ve ever seen.

For cringe com­edy to work, I think it needs to have a point. Mak­ing you cringe isn’t enough; it needs to be done in as a means of achiev­ing satire (I haven’t seen Borat yet, but people really do end up unknow­ingly sat­ir­ising them­selves in that film) or oth­er­wise mak­ing some kind of point. And catch phrases only really work if there are some other laughs in the show, oth­er­wise the catch phrases don’t catch on.

Any­way, I’ve rambled enough. The one per­son who has sub­scribed to this blog will, no doubt, read this. Some of the few who sub­scribe later will come back to read it. For those who do, wel­come to the BWAIN, and rest assured there will be no mean­ing­less cringe humour here.