Favourite Comedy Program
 

What comedy programs, new and old, are you into?

I'll list some brit ones, coz i'm sure we all know the ubiquitoUS ones ;)
(Oh alright, i like the Simperers of course, and Friends is very well made, and some of the Saturday Night Live stuff can be cool when i get to see it, and i like bits of Scrubs, and that new thing by the guy who wrote for Seinfeld a lot is quality-cringe, and i'm sure there's others i'm forgetting and loads i don't know about.)


Some i've seen over and over:

Yes (Prime) Minister
Monty Python (o'course - tho i haven't quite seen all of them i don't think)
Black Books
Red Dwarf (well i was young, and the concept's fun)
The Fast Show
Porridge
The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy series
Brass Eye / The Day Today (Chris Morris and polemic friends)
The first two series of The League of Gentlemen (modern)

Some other cool current-ish ones:

Slap the Donkey (patchy, but cool, girl-lead comedy)

Dead Ringers (impersonation show - can be spot on, and their main guy does put-ups and crank-calls like no-one else. Russel Crowe as "Gladiator" calls surveyors to some ancient ruins, and they nod as he envisages parapets and boiling oil etc)

Alaister McGowan's Big Impression (some good piss-takes too. And a popularist biology-bloke, mixed with Groucho Marx.)


Some I've seen lots but haven't seen enough of:

Doctor Who (accidental comedy - old sci-fi)
The Young Ones/THe Comic Strip Presents...
Not the Nine O'clock News
TV Go Home

Political Ones:

Bremner, Bird and Fortune
The Mark Thomas Product
Have I Got News for You (current-affairs "quizshow")

Some that are quite endearing in a cuddly kind of way:

The Morecombe and Wise show
Open all Hours.
Faulty Towers (cool construction, but criiiinge)
Harry Enfield's stuff


There's loads more i haven't mentioned or i've forgotten too i'm sure ;)

Married..With Children is my all time favorite show. I have never seen anything I found funnier. But other good stuff is:

The Family Guy
The Young Ones
Get Smart
MST3K
Rocky and Bullwinkle (Old, sure, but it's also funnier than anything else currently)

and I really liked the first year of Friends, but then it became more about who's f***ing who and it lost me totally. Not as funny.

i used to enjoy kids in the hall when it was on.

this is kind of odd because normally i cant stand sketch comedy shows [i dont think i've ever once laughed at something on saturday night live, mad tv or the like].

I like.......


Only Fools and Horses. One of the greatest comedies ever.

Red Dwarf. The last season was a little worse then the others though .

Young Ones. My favourite on my list by far. S.P.G the hamster ruled!

Married with Children. I couldn't help but feel sorry for Al in it. Poor man with a wife and children like that. Teehee.

Monty Python. Sketch show at its brilliance.

Black Adder. A great, great comedy. Rowan Atkinson was inspired as the man of the title. One of the only comedies I've seen where the absolute ending was fantastically sombre. It sticks in the mind that one.

Allo' Allo'. Good Moaning.

2 Point 4 Children. Saddly missed.

Cheers! Darla's witty humour stole the show.

Moonlighting. Spot the now famous actors. ;)


I also like...
Fresh Prince of Bel Air
Get Smart
MonkeesT
he Wonder Years

Personally I can take or leave Friends. Sure its a really funny comedy but I just don't quite love the show enough to catch every episode

In order of being attached to :

1. Only Fools & Horses
2. Blackadder
3. Men Behaving Badly (UK)
4. Nevermind the Buzzcocks
5. Seinfeld

Some other favourites :

-- Coupling
-- Cheers
-- Game On !
-- Monty Python's Flying Circus
-- Fawlty Towers
-- Porridge
-- Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place (later Two Guys and a Girl)
-- KYTV
-- The Office

I'll remember more eventually. I thought British comedy went under but The Office and Coupling proved me wrong ; here's to more great stuff like that.

Gah! How did i forget Blackadder??? It's the antidote to all the international brit-comedy-is-mister-bean attitudes that surface amongst my students (and Benny Hill!! Noooooo). And that final ending was pure quality. All good comedy rests on tradgedy and talks about the real methinks.

2.4 children was the brit-version of Roseanne i think, so it lost a bit of kudos for me there ;)

cool choices :) Never did see much of coupling tho. And yeah, it was good to see some decent (and observational) stuff come out again. I was really starting to despair. The system here is totally screwed up by the inbreeding that's been going on too long. Any new ideas are stolen and reworked by tired and uninspired writer-drones. Both sides of the pond, and all round i'd guess, it's teams built on trust as well as inner diversity that overcome these quality-smothering circumstances. That's where i'd love to be one day. Just setting out on my first real networking forays now i've got shorts to show potential (that no one can nick ;)), and loads of script-writing experience, and stuff to show, under my belt.

Still, i demand you loathe Spaced, coz i think one of its originators has nicked one of my (****tier as it goes) ideas from a script i stupidly gave him and is running with it as we speak. Only time will tell if i'm just being paranoid and arrogant (well, more than normal ;))

The Monkees! I love this show. I'm going to buy the complete first season on DVD soon.

My other favorites:
The Golden Girls
Mama's Family
Roseanne
Seinfeld
Sex and the City
3rd Rock From The Sun
ALF
Keeping Up Appearances
Married with Children
Saved by the Bell (old school days)
The Simpsons
Bewitched
Gilligan's Island
Dennis the Menace (old TV show)
Fresh Prince of Bel Air

mmm... gotta go. can't think of anymore

Yes, you're right. Some stereotypes are being overexploited and the humour is degrading itself to the debilitating slapstick of modern American series such as Friends. Which, in my opinion, have no jokes whatsoever of real value : you are supposed to laugh when Chandler or Joey make a funny face, to laugh at mere novelty. Good example of such soulless modern Brit shows is "2 Pints of Lager and a Pack of Crisps", just another spinoff on British pub culture/bloke bonding which comes out totally flat. The intellectual jabs of Blackadder are the real comedy gold - ditto the subtle combo of comedy and tragedy intertwined with cruel reality in Office. I swear to you, I had no idea if I should laugh or cry throughout that show - because I'm damned sure people like that DO exist and pollute the corporate areas...but yet it's so funny. That show profited big time from omitting laughtrack, IMO.

Spaced ? Que ? :D

Red Dwarf

The Office

Phoenix Nights

South Park

Bo Selecta

The best comedy currently on the schedule with new episodes is Larry David's brilliant "Curb Your Enthusiasm" (HBO). It's even better than his work on "Seinfeld".

Best of all-time, I'd have to go with "The Larry Sanders Show", "The Simpsons", "The Bob Newhart Show", "Newhart", "Barney Miller", "Monty Python's Flying Circus", "Get A Life", "Your Show of Shows", "Roseanne", "The Kids in the Hall" and "Late Night with David Letterman".

yeah, i was so proud of how brave the Office guys were in doing it the way they did. Even the trailers reeked of the boredom and drudgery they were realistically simulating. And believe me, people like this definitely exist :yup: . Hardly anyone went with it at first, but they re-showed it, and thank god they did. It's in that cringe territory that shows you that it's talking about real issues.

I must guiltily admit that i was laughing at Two Pints.. t'other day, coz, like Friends, it's fluff for the most part. The only "real-life" element that seems to enter either is the relationships thing (which has just so lost the plot in friends it seems to me - but, although i didn't rate much of the earlier Pint stuff, i think they're at their zenith now, where the characters are established enough to be fleshed out, despite being cartoon-cut-outs really). There's something to be said for that type of comedy when it's at its best - but it never compares to the real-life pathos-humour which makes you think/feel differently. That's the kind of stuff i'd love to make. (and i think i'd love the irony of a writer's life - having to be behind the keyboard a lot, but by definition having to throw yourself out into the world to gather your material. That's sort of where i'm at now anyway, but i think i'd love to be free to throw myself into different environments [tho i do fear that that would be the biggest challenge for an unstructured person like myself- knowing where to throw myself ;). Tho i always think the desire to be living and experiencing and learning would still be there and would force me out of the house])

As for Spaced - it's pretty bland ultimately. And the execution is pretty similar. It's pretty much in the fluff territory in that there's nothing driving it other than an attempt to reflect the meaningless millieu of modern living. Solutions are what we need - not bland replications that have some recognition value. That's just a form of fairly useless escapism and distancing it seems to me (most ironic really)

I became great friends with one of the Irish exchange students at SIU a few years ago, and he introduced me to The Fast Show (but it's called Brilliant! over nyah), I'm Alan Patridge, People Like Us, and Father Ted.

That is my sum total of Brit/Irish show knowledge--aside from Python, of course. And I did love them all, especially The Fast Show and Father Ted.

"I'll just get me coat..."

I'm also a fan of Black Adder. I'm paraphrasing, mind, but:

"C. A great blue bobbly thing with mermaids in."

American-wise...

South Park
Crank Yankers
The Simpsons
King of the Hill
Late Night with Conan O'Brien
Married... with Children
Futurama
The Family Guy
Saturday Night Live (depending on the cast)

I didn't realize how many cartoons would be on my list. I'm sure there are more, though. Shows, I mean--not necessarily cartoons. :D

Oh, I forgot to put Alan Partridge on my list...thanks for the reminder.

Heheheh...

"Dog. Not a cat."

Heheheh. "I'd like to extend my combobulations..."

I forgot about Father Ted as well!!! Argh!! ("...those cows are faaar faaar away")

Funny thing about the cartoons isn't it. What i love about all the ones Mary mentioned is that they all said things live actors would not have been "allowed" to say. i.e. we let it slide in cartoons. If we really had homer swinging bart around by his neck being acted out, amongst all the other digs and slapstick, it'd never happen. Distancing can be a funny thing. Sometimes a medium that distances us can allow us to actually be more affected by the content. While content that tries to engage on an emotional level through a more "relationable" medium (is that one for marlowe's dictionary?? - ****, was it marlowe? I don't know my own history. The blackadder thought-experiment has failed ;) :rolleyes: ) ....can actually cause emotional/unconscious distancing/not-relation/absorbtion coz of it's fauxness (i.e. friends). Unless your very shallow ;)

Erm, i think all of that has some vague truth to it. All i know is that working with old footage allows me to talk about now far more stridently than i could otherwise without loosing my audience. This is the type of symbolism and subconsciously-absorbed-analogies i believe in - not the fixed-idea-in-the-head idea, but the relationableness of what's on the screen and our waking-brain-dreams

Alright, now it definitely doesn't make sense ;) :rolleyes:

Actually my favourite episode is the one with actors-turned-anarchists. Memorable quotes galore...

And then, the probably best part in the whole damned series...

And I just remembered AbFab and Keeping up the Appearances.

i'm 32 and i never go a week without watching an episode or six :D

also Blackadder (ooooi have a cuN-Ning plaaaan!!!)
3rd rock - although we haven't had in in Oz for yeeeears
Bewitched (i think someone mentioned that)
Rosanne was aaaalways a fave (but again haven't seen it in years)

3rd Rock From The Sun

Married with Children

The Simpsons

SNL

South Park

n7of9...............third rock is on foxtel....... :)

The Simpsons beats everything else.