Classic Comedy: Was It Ever Funny? - US comedy doesn't hold up?

[Judge Dredd]

Britbong here.

Steven Colbert was cancelled recently. I don't know who this guy is really. Some late night talk show host or a comedian? Maybe in America that's the same thing? Point is, this guy was supposedly a riot. But the clips of him are nothing but Trump derangement syndrome and sucking establishment cock.

Maybe he was a bad example. Seinfeld is a classic I'm told is side splitting. So much so that you can incapacitate 50% of Americans by saying "green bicycle" or "festivous for the rest of us". And yet my attempts at watching an actual episode, it's a struggle to tolerate it, let alone find it funny.

How about Saturday Night Live? I hear it's incredible comedy that started the careers of comedy titans like Adam Sandler and the guy from Elf. Not a great start. But according to Americans it's absolutely unparalleled. Yet their best of compilations would be mid-tier filler in any British comedy sketch show from the 90s.

I'm not shitting on American comedy itself. I remember enjoying Robot Chicken and South Park back in the day even if they don't reach classic status. Instead, these "classics" like SNL, Vacation, Seinfeld, etc. seem overrated. Were they ever funny, or are they merely dated? (I've never seen Fraiser, but I hear that one is a classic too)

Hale and Pace, a British show remembered as mid tier, still holds up.

vs SNL

Which to me, is just noise and references. And to really hammer it home, compare that to British comedy classics like Mr Bean, Faulty Towers, and Monty Python.

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

Not really. Say what you will about the eternal Anglo, there's just something about the Brit*sh psyche that produces much, much better comedy than us Amerifats.

 

[YoRHa No. 2 Type B]

The Brits tend to be really funny and good at jokes. Australians tend to be similar.
But Americans must have missed it because they are generally not funny and do not understand good humour even when presented. Usually just get offended.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

maybe notsomuch "classic" as "modern(ish) normie-tier shit for casuals and dumbshits" is your issue

 

[TeaBaggins]

Saturday Night Live has always been hit or miss, even in the "good years" that people talk about.

It just had really popular comedians that were apparently funnier, but it still had less funny skits throughout.

 

[Gorton Colu]

You think Seinfeld is overrated? Fawlty Towers is overrated!

Seinfeld is very much 80s and 90s Americana. I wouldn't expect non-Americans to like it nor really understand it.

Comedy is entirely a taste thing. Its ok you dont like some of it from here.

 

[TaimuRadiu]

Seinfeld was very funny; there's even a trope called "Seinfeld is Unfunny" named for how people don't get how it's funny now. It was leagues ahead of anything in its time and was essentially about a bunch of sociopathic New York Jews.

For SNL you have to reach deep into the 70s with the original Not Ready For Prime Time Players. By the 80s it became "safe" after being nearly cancelled after Lorne Michaels left the programme. Oh and after Al Franken got fired by ripping on the head of NBC for, among other things, OKing SUPERTRAIN, a Love Boat style drama about a giant train. (Not lying, I have a huge soft spot for late 80s / early 90s SNL because I grew up with it. By the mid to late 90s it became a pile of crap. Remember that the show just got worse and Norm knew this.)

Same for National Lampoon's Vacation, which is arguably the best of the series. It was about a dysfunctional family going on a road trip, which was stuff you never saw movies being made about at the time, and it wasn't really family friendly either.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

It was leagues ahead of anything in its time and was essentially about a bunch of sociopathic New York Jews.

I get the joke, but I don't want to sit and watch that
I get what foot fungus is doing but that's not amusing to me either

Seinfeld sucks as a performer in general and the world is a much better place because we dodged the bullet of Next Sunday AD beginning with the story of a guy named Jerry, not too different from you and me.

 

[TeaBaggins]

I have to say, Newman being over the top sadistic and evil was the funniest part of Seinfeld.

 

[Rango Dango]

i wanted to say some funny american comedies
i cannot list any other than chicken robot and south park

i really like how americans try to steal british comedies and pretty much always fail
they only succeeded with the office because they changed the formula from british style comedy to american style
I like how they attempted to copy it crowd (my favourite) twice, the pilot of one of which was literally carbon copy of the first episode of the original and even casted ayoade as moss, so it was just ep 1 but with american accent

 

[Iron Jaguar]

M*A*S*H* and Hogan's Heroes still hold up as funny. So does Bewitched.

 

[TaimuRadiu]

I get the joke, but I don't want to sit and watch that
I get what foot fungus is doing but that's not amusing to me either

Seinfeld sucks as a performer in general and the world is a much better place because we dodged the bullet of Next Sunday AD beginning with the story of a guy named Jerry, not too different from you and me.

The point is they're a bunch of sociopaths who sometimes get what's coming to them, except they're not astonishingly stupid like the Gang in Always Sunny

 

[TeaBaggins]

Speaking of Seinfeld, in my opinion, Curb Your Enthusiasm by Larry David is one of the funniest American comedies in years.

I'd even say it's funnier than Seinfeld.

 

[Jerk Sausage]

compare that to British comedy classics like Mr Bean, Faulty Towers, and Monty Python.

Yes compare randomly selected SNL sketches and Stephen Colbert to the highlights of those, completely fair. Does all British comedy hold up? Every Monty Python sketch is gold plated? Or is this just Brit snob shit?

American mainstream comedy has been shit for ages and late night television is far beyond its golden age anywhere in the world. This is not a mystery. But please give me some hilarious British comedy of today that I'm missing out on, I'm ready to laugh.

 

[Honka Honka Burning Love]

M*A*S*H*

"Captain Tuttle heard about a wounded soldier on the front lines, while we were all relaxing he was trying to save someone's life....he went in a helicopter with His Medical Kit, Plasma, Surgical Tools...everything a Doctor needs to jump from a helicopter to save a life....except his Parachute."

 

[Lovely Kin]

Steven Colbert was cancelled recently. I don't know who this guy is really. Some late night talk show host or a comedian? Maybe in America that's the same thing? Point is, this guy was supposedly a riot. But the clips of him are nothing but Trump derangement syndrome and sucking establishment cock.

Some say his older stuff was decent, but even then, he really has no humor. I don't think anyone really found him funny unless you were some HR lady or American neoliberal.

 

[ParasiteSteve]

Yes compare randomly selected SNL sketches and Stephen Colbert to the highlights of those, completely fair. Does all British comedy hold up? Every Monty Python sketch is gold plated? Or is this just Brit snob shit?

He is comparing our classics to your fodder, of course he will win.

Plenty of shit from my wonderful country of the UK if you want to find it, just that most people forgot it existed.

Crazy how many of my fellow Brits only ever bring up the mainstream comedy, ignoring good shit like Monkey Dust, Nathan Barley etc.

As I understand SNL is pure wank and has always been pure wank, I would say its similar to the quiz shows in the UK, which are mostly pure wank as well.

 

[Red Saltire]

The UK makes some good shows that go under appreciated here in the US, but the state of British comedy in general seems to be frozen where American comedy was in the 80s.

 

[Jerk Sausage]

He is comparing our classics to your fodder, of course he will win.

That's my point . British comedy has just as much fodder and dated garbage with the shelf life of milk, and just as much political humor that stinks like a fart if you are on the other side of the aisle, other side of the ocean, or don't care for political humor. I don't seek it out and I don't compare it to timeless classics.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

I kinda liked the episodes of Dad's Army that I saw

I've seen a couple of times Eastern Euro types who really just didn't dig MST3k. They got the premise and there's enough general pop culture awareness to get enough of the jokes, but they were in exact agreement about it just not clicking for them on a "hahaha" level
Until they found out one was Ukraine and the other was Russian. Then they spent the rest of the episode taking bitchy jabs at each other's nations