‘Real’ humour

“Real Humour is 1000 times funnier than anything you could script” used to be the old adage. Whilst this may always be the case with series like Little Britain and Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps, some scripted programmes will always be almost infinitely funnier than their shit-flinging ‘real humour’ cousins.
Did it start wth Dennis Pennis? I don’t care. His celebrity interviews were the cultural high-point of the genre that most recently gave us the idiotic Balls of Steel and the cultural shitstain that is the Borat movie. Pennis acknowledged completely that mocking people face-to-face requires a brash, loathsome host swanning around in a purple suit. Pennis was supposed to be an asshole, he was.
Much ‘real humour’ takes a loosely-defined script, known only to a select few actors, and uses it to annoy people, y’know, for shits and giggles.. It offers us the entertainment equivalent of televised “Knock-a-door run”, complete strangers having a metaphorical burning turd left on their doorstep and we watch as their house fills with the tang of toasted poo, all the while being told that yes, it’s OK to laugh; this isn’t rude, it’s funny.
The presenters of Balls of Steel, far from having Balls of Steel have miniscule ice-cold chick-pea testicles, wanked into premature uselessness as they planned how to tell their parents about their career choice. “Mum, I’m going to be really, really annoying. Professionally.” Mum was just glad they’d found something they were good at.
Never are we allowed to linger on the lasting societal damage done to individuals or the sense of humour of Britain’s younglings. Needless to say, happy slapping is a direct product of techno-minded scrotes looking to recreate the entertainment they’ve seen on television and have a lasting memory to show their children that they too were once comedy genii.
Borat plays to the ignorant xenophobe market in its “Stupid little foreigner’ performance from Sacha Baron-Cohen. Enoch Powell would have been in stitches and, had he been alive now, would have almost certainly written “Did you see that Borat? That’s the kind of darkie-wogs we should be deporting!” into his “Rivers of Blood” speech. So firmly would the Powellists grip the strange-foreigners zeitgeist they would almost certainly have won him every election they entered. We’d be closing the borders and putting migrants on the next bus back to Albania, and we’d do it with a smile.
In five years time, when teenagers stab pensioners and/or immigrants openly in the street for a TV Comedy hour special, we’ll probably be sitting at home, hooting with joy as the newly dead corpse falls lifeless to the floor and ‘lands all funny’. We’ll dip our hands into artery-hardening buckets of foreign food and drift off to sleep, dribble down our triple-chins.
As we sleep foggy memories of a tall man in glasses and his diminutive wig-wearing sidekick skipping and singing in a giant brightly-lit studio drift into our thoughts and a gurgle of delight emits, momentarily, from our lips. A smile spreads, just for a second, and goes again as the two dance away, never to return again.