Only one letter to explain why inflation was too high and even then it was only because it exceeded bounds by just 0.1% and immediately came back to within bounds.
So Brexit has not only made us a happier and more contented country, it has also saved us from deflation.
Hurrah!!
In their Brexit delusion, David L and Philip T are increasingly like the proverbial Japanese soldiers still fighting the war in the Filipino jungle.
Sorry, folks. Hirohito abdicated a while back. Brexit is a crock.
If your analogy is applicable then we are the Yanks and you and @Scott_xP are the Japs, still fighting a war that has been hopelessly and irredeemably lost whilst everyone else gets on with life.
Never mind, there will be a new disaster to point to tomorrow, I have no doubt. I am sure we will all have second thoughts then.
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
Interesting. I still find Fawlty Towers amusing, but it was never because of any middle-class status stuff to begin with. Basil's stupid attempts to extricate himself from awful situations is what cracks me up. I suppose it all depends on what you get out of these things.
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
I think a cyber nat once cracked a similar joke about David Mundell and his son. The Unionists didn’t find it funny. Even ended up in court iirc.
In the PriMin's reshuffle, I would say the ChanEx is pretty safe, but the EdSEc, HomSec and ForSec could all be on thin ice. The CHanDuch could be a PromProsp though.
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
Yeah, comedy dates terribly. Has anyone alive ever genuinely laughed at a Shakespeare "comedy"?
We've debated this before. The few funny movies (say) which don't date are magnificently rare, but they exist.
I think we all agreed that Airplane and Life of Brian remain funny, decades later. And Spinal Tap? Blazing Saddles too perhaps. And early Woody Allen: Love and Death
Jonathan Liew pours a bit of cold water on Emma's triumph.
Raducanu did not have to play a single top-10 player or previous grand slam finalist. All the seeds, including world No 1 Ashleigh Barty, were cleared from her section of the draw. None of which should detract from the scale of her accomplishment, the stunning cleanness of her groundstrokes, her seeming immunity to pressure. But it should at least inform what it is realistic or reasonable to expect from her in the immediate future.
Iga Swiatek won last year’s French Open in similar circumstances: a new teenage star sweeping all before her (including grand slam winners Simona Halep and Sofia Kenin) without dropping a set. As Poland’s first ever grand slam winner, she found herself imprisoned in a cage of expectations that left her drained, exhausted, seeing tennis balls when she closed her eyes at night.
I think that's fair enough. We are in danger of turning Emma into a kind of female Don Bradman / Muhammad Ali / Pele of tennis after one match. And you can bet that the moment she has a poor performance in the future the vultures will be out in force.
Sorry - he's the talentless, classless tw%t who thinks Jonathon Agnew is racist. No time for him. I'm not claiming ER will will 20 slams, or even with another, but its not her fault that others got knocked out as she won a slam without dropping a set. Amazingly for an 18 year old she has a game without obvious weaknesses. She played at a high level throughout.
Womens tennis is in transition - the Serena age has ended, and in the space left behind the slams have been widely spread. Time will tell for ER, but she has the talent and game for this.
I think a bit of cold water pouring does a service. Things get stupidly OTT otherwise. I was as blown away as the next man by Rad's achievement, and I think she's the real deal and remarkable, yet at the same time I'm thinking to myself, gosh, a total novice, a teenage qualifier, wins a slam without dropping a set, this OTOH is great for women's tennis, it's box office, BOTOH it's telling me that women's tennis is right now, and putting it mildly, probably not the strongest it's ever been.
Yes - women's tennis is a bit similar to golf at the moment - there really aren't 3-4 players that you expect to be at the quarters/semis of the big tournaments. Whats been interesting to me is that in men's tennis the big three drove each other on to higher levels, and for the regular, good, but not great players around them, it was impossible to bridge the gap on a regular basis. What happens now will be interesting, as there isn't a new wave of players coming to replicate the Federer, Nadal, Jokovic era, rather men's tennis is heading to a much more even (and in some ways more interesting) place. Women's tennis has been there for some time.
I'm sure I'm not alone in having not watched a women's tennis match for several years prior to Saturday evening.
I comment on this before that I do watch women's tennis but only because I watched Wimbledon and started to notice that the women have rallys while the men's game is either Ace or serve and volley return. If not a total mismatch a women's tennis match is usually a lot more interesting to watch.
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
Interesting. I still find Fawlty Towers amusing, but it was never because of any middle-class status stuff to begin with. Basil's stupid attempts to extricate himself from awful situations is what cracks me up. I suppose it all depends on what you get out of these things.
I still love the insults, "spitting venom like a benzedrine puff adder", and "an ageing brilliantined stick insect."
In the PriMin's reshuffle, I would say the ChanEx is pretty safe, but the EdSEc, HomSec and ForSec could all be on thin ice. The CHanDuch could be a PromProsp though.
Is there anything more pointless than people debating whether something is funny or not? Humour is so subjective – if you find something funny, great, if you don't, fine. That's it really.
Actually, it is quite revealing of the person. Humour is subjective but a person who finds slapstick clowning funny, or fart jokes, is interestingly different to a person who likes early Woody Allen. That might sounds like snobbery, but it is also true
I'd say the public here are more likely to be into slapstick clowning than early Woody Allen. Hence Brexit. And of course "Boris".
I prefer early Boris.
“Routemaster 2.0” - even if it was a sequel - was much better than “Killing 130,000”.
I know you are making a funny, but I really do hate this idea that somehow, uniquely among the European nations, Britain has somehow killed way more of its population. It didn't. Covid did. Johnson didn't kill the French, Spanish, Italians. Governments made hard decisions and made mistakes. Some of them were made many many years ago - such as running the NHS 'efficiently' for bed occupancy, so there was no surge capacity when needed. That's not just on the current government, its on all of them, and on the NHS leadership too.
It's so unfair. Probably all of the European leaders were thinking "Let the Bodies Pile High", but only one of them ended up being quoted in the press.
Is there anything more pointless than people debating whether something is funny or not? Humour is so subjective – if you find something funny, great, if you don't, fine. That's it really.
It only really gets tricky with intentionally offensive comedy, but even then someone not finding a particular dead baby joke funny doesnt mean much.
I am pretty sure comedy has deteriorated in the last decade, because of Wokeness
Cruelty, offensiveness and taboo-breaking are essential elements of comedy, and they have all been ruled offside. What is left?
On some recent boring train journeys through Swiss tunnels I watched some episodes of two recent US comedy series (now finished): Community and Parks & Rec. They have dud moments but they are consistently witty and clever, sometimes genius (especially early Community)
However they tell jokes that would simply be unacceptable now. About wife-beating and alcoholism and race. They are edgy, so they are funny.
I do not envy comedy writers working right now. What the fuck can you say that is funny AND acceptable?
Quite an interesting discussion by three comedians,
I personally I think one big reason, a load of comedy clubs went busto 10 or so years ago e.g. Jongleurs over expanded and went tits up. Now all the guys and girls on that circuit had to be good or they blew up quickly. I used to go fairly regularly to the ones in London, and the crowds could be really brutal and as you were on the rotation you had to play the same venue every few weeks and you couldn't just do your 30 min set over and over again.
Loads of people who then became pretty big in the 00s and early 10s came out of that world. To survive it and move up, that had to be sharp.
Now it is much more centred around these big shows in arenas and theatres, which you prep one show to last you 1-2 years and your tour it into the ground. And as the world changes quickly, it lends itself to quite stale material that won't date inbetween the time you wrote it and perform it. And also you don't want the outrage mob, jumping a bandwagon and finding your income for the next year has been torpedoed.
Now, one guy who is still really good, Ross Noble, but because his material is semi-improv, so it is exactly the opposite of that, it can be flexible and change night to night.
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
Comedy since the year 2000 has generally been rubbish IMO.
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
Yeah, comedy dates terribly. Has anyone alive ever genuinely laughed at a Shakespeare "comedy"?
We've debated this before. The few funny movies (say) which don't date are magnificently rare, but they exist.
I think we all agreed that Airplane and Life of Brian remain funny, decades later. And Spinal Tap? Blazing Saddles too perhaps. And early Woody Allen: Love and Death
After that it gets difficult...
I don't think "Stonehenge" from Spinal Tap will ever cease to be funny.
Ruthless People is another film which remains very funny.
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
Yeah, comedy dates terribly. Has anyone alive ever genuinely laughed at a Shakespeare "comedy"?
We've debated this before. The few funny movies (say) which don't date are magnificently rare, but they exist.
I think we all agreed that Airplane and Life of Brian remain funny, decades later. And Spinal Tap? Blazing Saddles too perhaps. And early Woody Allen: Love and Death
After that it gets difficult...
No it doesn't.
Four Lions is one of the funniest films ever made. And best satires. And best commentaries on life, the universe, and everything. And hasn't dated a millisecond.
There are others, of course. None on your list, interestingly.
37.4% of all deaths of unvaccinated people are caused by COVID-19 0.8% of all deaths of fully vaccinated people are caused by COVID-19
French statistics but will be similar everywhere. You are twice as likely to go to hospital as an unvaccinated 20 year old than as a vaccinated 80 year old !
Is there anything more pointless than people debating whether something is funny or not? Humour is so subjective – if you find something funny, great, if you don't, fine. That's it really.
Actually, it is quite revealing of the person. Humour is subjective but a person who finds slapstick clowning funny, or fart jokes, is interestingly different to a person who likes early Woody Allen. That might sounds like snobbery, but it is also true
I'd say the public here are more likely to be into slapstick clowning than early Woody Allen. Hence Brexit. And of course "Boris".
I prefer early Boris.
“Routemaster 2.0” - even if it was a sequel - was much better than “Killing 130,000”.
I know you are making a funny, but I really do hate this idea that somehow, uniquely among the European nations, Britain has somehow killed way more of its population. It didn't. Covid did. Johnson didn't kill the French, Spanish, Italians. Governments made hard decisions and made mistakes. Some of them were made many many years ago - such as running the NHS 'efficiently' for bed occupancy, so there was no surge capacity when needed. That's not just on the current government, its on all of them, and on the NHS leadership too.
You’re right, I was being sarcastic.
But Boris was late into lockdown three times.
His negligence does seem to have led to tens of thousands of avoidable deaths.
March 2020 may be forgivable (although many on here, including me, were calling for a lockdown up to two weeks earlier than we eventually did), but the mistakes in late 2020 were not.
Is there anything more pointless than people debating whether something is funny or not? Humour is so subjective – if you find something funny, great, if you don't, fine. That's it really.
Actually, it is quite revealing of the person. Humour is subjective but a person who finds slapstick clowning funny, or fart jokes, is interestingly different to a person who likes early Woody Allen. That might sounds like snobbery, but it is also true
I'd say the public here are more likely to be into slapstick clowning than early Woody Allen. Hence Brexit. And of course "Boris".
Boris can be genuinely funny, tho. He has an actual comic gift: with real comic timing
He knows exactly how and when to pause, and then deliver the line. Even if it is not particularly witty, he does it in a way which makes you smile
Of course people that hate him won't ever smile, but that's just political loathing, and not a judgement of his humour. He is funny - in a way that appeals to many, highbrow and lowbrow. It's a significant reason he is where he is
He does have a comic gift, I find him funny at times, but it's all rather mundane and it drips with condescension and entitlement. I'd worry about anybody who regularly creases up at his output. I'd assess such a person to be a complete wanker.
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
Yeah, comedy dates terribly. Has anyone alive ever genuinely laughed at a Shakespeare "comedy"?
We've debated this before. The few funny movies (say) which don't date are magnificently rare, but they exist.
I think we all agreed that Airplane and Life of Brian remain funny, decades later. And Spinal Tap? Blazing Saddles too perhaps. And early Woody Allen: Love and Death
After that it gets difficult...
I don't think "Stonehenge" from Spinal Tap will ever cease to be funny.
Ruthless People is another film which remains very funny.
Kind Hearts and Coronets is astonishingly good for something made in the 40s.
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
You say that, but I still find Not the Nine O'Clock News bloody funny, and largely still relevant most of the time even today.
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
Yeah, comedy dates terribly. Has anyone alive ever genuinely laughed at a Shakespeare "comedy"?
We've debated this before. The few funny movies (say) which don't date are magnificently rare, but they exist.
I think we all agreed that Airplane and Life of Brian remain funny, decades later. And Spinal Tap? Blazing Saddles too perhaps. And early Woody Allen: Love and Death
After that it gets difficult...
I don't think "Stonehenge" from Spinal Tap will ever cease to be funny.
Ruthless People is another film which remains very funny.
Just thinking about "Stonehenge" makes me chuckle. Genius
I often avoid movies and TV shows I found hugely amusing as, say, a 20 year old, for fear they will gravely disappoint me now
I recently checked out a comic American novel which I loved as a late teenager, and I found it dire: laboured and mediocre. Like the Daily Mash extended to 300 pages. Sad
Is there anything more pointless than people debating whether something is funny or not? Humour is so subjective – if you find something funny, great, if you don't, fine. That's it really.
It only really gets tricky with intentionally offensive comedy, but even then someone not finding a particular dead baby joke funny doesnt mean much.
I am pretty sure comedy has deteriorated in the last decade, because of Wokeness
Cruelty, offensiveness and taboo-breaking are essential elements of comedy, and they have all been ruled offside. What is left?
On some recent boring train journeys through Swiss tunnels I watched some episodes of two recent US comedy series (now finished): Community and Parks & Rec. They have dud moments but they are consistently witty and clever, sometimes genius (especially early Community)
However they tell jokes that would simply be unacceptable now. About wife-beating and alcoholism and race. They are edgy, so they are funny.
I do not envy comedy writers working right now. What the fuck can you say that is funny AND acceptable?
So 12-15 year olds with finally get a jab....all that wasted time, when we could have sorted this in the summer holidays.
It’s truly bewildering.
I really do think this is a marginal call. If there were no downsides to vaccination for 12-15 year olds it would be a no brainer, but there are documented health problems in a tiny minority. So its not simple. I think the JCVI wimped out of making a decision, and I am happy that we are choosing to do this, but I think it unfair to think it 'obviously' the right choice.
I get the impression that (a chunk of) JCVI are opposed to boosters and child vaccination on the grounds that they want the vaccinations to go to the developing world. But that is not in their remit, so they'e dragged this out as far as they can.
At a guess Javid has kicked the ball to the CMOs....
Yes - Adam Finn is one, the UEA guy possibly too. Not their remit, but I still agree that its a marginal call for the individual 12-15 year old. Less marginal for society, and probably for the kids education too.
It all rather reminds me of a discussion at a dinner I was at. I bought up the comment by a Cameron era SPAD, that he couldn't see why he should prioritise the lives and well being of UK citizens over, say, people in a developing country.
A number round the table were approving. Until we got to the HAC officer. Who said he liked the idea of dynamic loyalty and given that it happened that he was on duty in London and a large number of armed men under his command, did I have any suggestions for his allegiance?
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
Yeah, comedy dates terribly. Has anyone alive ever genuinely laughed at a Shakespeare "comedy"?
We've debated this before. The few funny movies (say) which don't date are magnificently rare, but they exist.
I think we all agreed that Airplane and Life of Brian remain funny, decades later. And Spinal Tap? Blazing Saddles too perhaps. And early Woody Allen: Love and Death
After that it gets difficult...
Yes Minister. PG Wodehouse. Still tremendous.
But I tried watching The Young Ones recently, and Bottom, Up Pompei, Red Dwarf… it was just too much like hard work.
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
Comedy since the year 2000 has generally been rubbish IMO.
I struggle to name that many comedians I really really have to see these days. And I past 10 years, I would say, I have only seen a few that have been top notch (and top notch for more than one show).
I have seen a few that have a good hour that got them where they are, and then they have nothing else e.g. Henning Wehn. He had a great 30 mins of funny material about being a German in England...and that is literally what he still lives off. He has such little material his first half of a new show, is the old show cut down....
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
Yeah, comedy dates terribly. Has anyone alive ever genuinely laughed at a Shakespeare "comedy"?
We've debated this before. The few funny movies (say) which don't date are magnificently rare, but they exist.
I think we all agreed that Airplane and Life of Brian remain funny, decades later. And Spinal Tap? Blazing Saddles too perhaps. And early Woody Allen: Love and Death
After that it gets difficult...
I have laughed at Shakespeare in that smug, bourgeois, more-tea-vicar sense. I’m sure you have too.
Merry Wives of Windsor remains a laff riot. Also the amateur dramatics bits of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
Yeah, comedy dates terribly. Has anyone alive ever genuinely laughed at a Shakespeare "comedy"?
We've debated this before. The few funny movies (say) which don't date are magnificently rare, but they exist.
I think we all agreed that Airplane and Life of Brian remain funny, decades later. And Spinal Tap? Blazing Saddles too perhaps. And early Woody Allen: Love and Death
After that it gets difficult...
There’s Something About Mary is a timeless & hilarious, classic
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
You say that, but I still find Not the Nine O'Clock News bloody funny, and largely still relevant most of the time even today.
Oh, parts of it are still very good, like Constable Savage and My Body is My Tool. Not to mention Alas Smith and Jones' "They're not my teeth."
Is there anything more pointless than people debating whether something is funny or not? Humour is so subjective – if you find something funny, great, if you don't, fine. That's it really.
Actually, it is quite revealing of the person. Humour is subjective but a person who finds slapstick clowning funny, or fart jokes, is interestingly different to a person who likes early Woody Allen. That might sounds like snobbery, but it is also true
I'd say the public here are more likely to be into slapstick clowning than early Woody Allen. Hence Brexit. And of course "Boris".
I prefer early Boris.
“Routemaster 2.0” - even if it was a sequel - was much better than “Killing 130,000”.
Yes, his later stuff has got a bit 'dark' for my taste.
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
Interesting. I still find Fawlty Towers amusing, but it was never because of any middle-class status stuff to begin with. Basil's stupid attempts to extricate himself from awful situations is what cracks me up. I suppose it all depends on what you get out of these things.
I still love the insults, "spitting venom like a benzedrine puff adder", and "an ageing brilliantined stick insect."
Fawlty Towers still works I think because the jokes about class are still painfully relevant.
Some parts (the Irish jokes, about the guests thinking Basil/Manuel might be gay and the racial epithets used by the Major) would never pass today.
On the other hand the Germans sort of does at some level because there's still a bit of that which goes on.
Is there anything more pointless than people debating whether something is funny or not? Humour is so subjective – if you find something funny, great, if you don't, fine. That's it really.
It only really gets tricky with intentionally offensive comedy, but even then someone not finding a particular dead baby joke funny doesnt mean much.
I am pretty sure comedy has deteriorated in the last decade, because of Wokeness
Cruelty, offensiveness and taboo-breaking are essential elements of comedy, and they have all been ruled offside. What is left?
On some recent boring train journeys through Swiss tunnels I watched some episodes of two recent US comedy series (now finished): Community and Parks & Rec. They have dud moments but they are consistently witty and clever, sometimes genius (especially early Community)
However they tell jokes that would simply be unacceptable now. About wife-beating and alcoholism and race. They are edgy, so they are funny.
I do not envy comedy writers working right now. What the fuck can you say that is funny AND acceptable?
How much of Airplane would be made now?
Airplane is genuinely and eternally the funniest film ever made.
Is there anything more pointless than people debating whether something is funny or not? Humour is so subjective – if you find something funny, great, if you don't, fine. That's it really.
Actually, it is quite revealing of the person. Humour is subjective but a person who finds slapstick clowning funny, or fart jokes, is interestingly different to a person who likes early Woody Allen. That might sounds like snobbery, but it is also true
I'd say the public here are more likely to be into slapstick clowning than early Woody Allen. Hence Brexit. And of course "Boris".
Boris can be genuinely funny, tho. He has an actual comic gift: with real comic timing
He knows exactly how and when to pause, and then deliver the line. Even if it is not particularly witty, he does it in a way which makes you smile
Of course people that hate him won't ever smile, but that's just political loathing, and not a judgement of his humour. He is funny - in a way that appeals to many, highbrow and lowbrow. It's a significant reason he is where he is
He does have a comic gift, I find him funny at times, but it's all rather mundane and it drips with condescension and entitlement. I'd worry about anybody who regularly creases up at his output. I'd assess such a person to be a complete wanker.
The Viz character “The Male Online” perfectly captures the essence of the current crop of Tory fan boys: complete wankers.
Is there anything more pointless than people debating whether something is funny or not? Humour is so subjective – if you find something funny, great, if you don't, fine. That's it really.
It only really gets tricky with intentionally offensive comedy, but even then someone not finding a particular dead baby joke funny doesnt mean much.
I am pretty sure comedy has deteriorated in the last decade, because of Wokeness
Cruelty, offensiveness and taboo-breaking are essential elements of comedy, and they have all been ruled offside. What is left?
On some recent boring train journeys through Swiss tunnels I watched some episodes of two recent US comedy series (now finished): Community and Parks & Rec. They have dud moments but they are consistently witty and clever, sometimes genius (especially early Community)
However they tell jokes that would simply be unacceptable now. About wife-beating and alcoholism and race. They are edgy, so they are funny.
I do not envy comedy writers working right now. What the fuck can you say that is funny AND acceptable?
How much of Airplane would be made now?
I don't think it could be made now.
Lines like "I like it black. Like my men", uttered by a nine year old girl?
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
You say that, but I still find Not the Nine O'Clock News bloody funny, and largely still relevant most of the time even today.
Constable Savage is alive and well.....
He is probably arresting TSE for wearing a loud suit in a built up area, as we type....
Is there anything more pointless than people debating whether something is funny or not? Humour is so subjective – if you find something funny, great, if you don't, fine. That's it really.
Actually, it is quite revealing of the person. Humour is subjective but a person who finds slapstick clowning funny, or fart jokes, is interestingly different to a person who likes early Woody Allen. That might sounds like snobbery, but it is also true
I'd say the public here are more likely to be into slapstick clowning than early Woody Allen. Hence Brexit. And of course "Boris".
I prefer early Boris.
“Routemaster 2.0” - even if it was a sequel - was much better than “Killing 130,000”.
I know you are making a funny, but I really do hate this idea that somehow, uniquely among the European nations, Britain has somehow killed way more of its population. It didn't. Covid did. Johnson didn't kill the French, Spanish, Italians. Governments made hard decisions and made mistakes. Some of them were made many many years ago - such as running the NHS 'efficiently' for bed occupancy, so there was no surge capacity when needed. That's not just on the current government, its on all of them, and on the NHS leadership too.
You’re right, I was being sarcastic.
But Boris was late into lockdown three times.
His negligence does seem to have led to tens of thousands of avoidable deaths.
March 2020 may be forgivable (although many on here, including me, were calling for a lockdown up to two weeks earlier than we eventually did), but the mistakes in late 2020 were not.
You may be right - we await the inquiries with baited breath, but I'd still caution that the decisions were taken at the time, and much of what happened in the autumn was about trying to find a way to live with the virus (schools open, as much normal life as possible) in the context of not having vaccines. I know some will claim that we knew we would have them, and that they would be great, that's not entirely true. It was a possibility that the vaccines would fail, or be poor. You cannot lockdown for ever. I contend that the tiers were working until the Kent variant cropped up. And now we have delta.
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
You say that, but I still find Not the Nine O'Clock News bloody funny, and largely still relevant most of the time even today.
Oh, parts of it are still very good, like Constable Savage and My Body is My Tool. Not to mention Alas Smith and Jones' "They're not my teeth."
Is there anything more pointless than people debating whether something is funny or not? Humour is so subjective – if you find something funny, great, if you don't, fine. That's it really.
It only really gets tricky with intentionally offensive comedy, but even then someone not finding a particular dead baby joke funny doesnt mean much.
I am pretty sure comedy has deteriorated in the last decade, because of Wokeness
Cruelty, offensiveness and taboo-breaking are essential elements of comedy, and they have all been ruled offside. What is left?
On some recent boring train journeys through Swiss tunnels I watched some episodes of two recent US comedy series (now finished): Community and Parks & Rec. They have dud moments but they are consistently witty and clever, sometimes genius (especially early Community)
However they tell jokes that would simply be unacceptable now. About wife-beating and alcoholism and race. They are edgy, so they are funny.
I do not envy comedy writers working right now. What the fuck can you say that is funny AND acceptable?
How much of Airplane would be made now?
Airplane is genuinely and eternally the funniest film ever made.
Princess Bride.
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Comedy has all become a bit inverted...it used to be slog the clubs, get a really good reputation, get good reviews at the Fringe for a few years, then you might get some tv work.
Now it is they look for people for the panel shows, which the comedian hope to then use to launch their big arena / theatre tours.
Its a bit like bands that have slogged it for a number of years, got really good live, then hit the big time. They have the 90 mins of material, they can really do it live and normally worth you money. Compared to the ones that have the one big hit off the first album and become overnight famous.
I don't massively care for Ed Sheeran music, but he slogged the hell out of it, playing anywhere and everywhere (Mrs U saw him with bugger all people). Frank Turner is another. Both can definitely really do it live, there is no doubt about that.
Exclusive: Three senior producers at GB News quit within days of each other last week, as the station's increasingly populist agenda polarises those within its newsroom
The former BBC anchor Simon McCoy is also believed to be considering his position
Is there anything more pointless than people debating whether something is funny or not? Humour is so subjective – if you find something funny, great, if you don't, fine. That's it really.
Actually, it is quite revealing of the person. Humour is subjective but a person who finds slapstick clowning funny, or fart jokes, is interestingly different to a person who likes early Woody Allen. That might sounds like snobbery, but it is also true
I'd say the public here are more likely to be into slapstick clowning than early Woody Allen. Hence Brexit. And of course "Boris".
Boris can be genuinely funny, tho. He has an actual comic gift: with real comic timing
He knows exactly how and when to pause, and then deliver the line. Even if it is not particularly witty, he does it in a way which makes you smile
Of course people that hate him won't ever smile, but that's just political loathing, and not a judgement of his humour. He is funny - in a way that appeals to many, highbrow and lowbrow. It's a significant reason he is where he is
He does have a comic gift, I find him funny at times, but it's all rather mundane and it drips with condescension and entitlement. I'd worry about anybody who regularly creases up at his output. I'd assess such a person to be a complete wanker.
It isn't a particularly sophisticated comic gift.
Crashing through a polystyrene wall of bricks in a JCB might float some boats. At infant school age my youngest son found Dick and Dom shouting "bogies" at the top of their voices was hilarious. That is the sophistication level of Johnson's comedy.
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
Comedy since the year 2000 has generally been rubbish IMO.
The Office, Peep Show, The Thick of It, Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock, Veep, Curb Your Enthusiasm, all hilarious 21C TV comedies. UK satire has been very weak over this period but The Colbert Report in the US covered the later Bush years and the growing insanity of Fox News and the American Right brilliantly.
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
You say that, but I still find Not the Nine O'Clock News bloody funny, and largely still relevant most of the time even today.
Oh, parts of it are still very good, like Constable Savage and My Body is My Tool. Not to mention Alas Smith and Jones' "They're not my teeth."
Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister still work too because not only are some of the issues still broadly similar but the madness of government is evergreen.
Is there anything more pointless than people debating whether something is funny or not? Humour is so subjective – if you find something funny, great, if you don't, fine. That's it really.
Actually, it is quite revealing of the person. Humour is subjective but a person who finds slapstick clowning funny, or fart jokes, is interestingly different to a person who likes early Woody Allen. That might sounds like snobbery, but it is also true
I'd say the public here are more likely to be into slapstick clowning than early Woody Allen. Hence Brexit. And of course "Boris".
I prefer early Boris.
“Routemaster 2.0” - even if it was a sequel - was much better than “Killing 130,000”.
I know you are making a funny, but I really do hate this idea that somehow, uniquely among the European nations, Britain has somehow killed way more of its population. It didn't. Covid did. Johnson didn't kill the French, Spanish, Italians. Governments made hard decisions and made mistakes. Some of them were made many many years ago - such as running the NHS 'efficiently' for bed occupancy, so there was no surge capacity when needed. That's not just on the current government, its on all of them, and on the NHS leadership too.
You’re right, I was being sarcastic.
But Boris was late into lockdown three times.
His negligence does seem to have led to tens of thousands of avoidable deaths.
March 2020 may be forgivable (although many on here, including me, were calling for a lockdown up to two weeks earlier than we eventually did), but the mistakes in late 2020 were not.
Cynically one wonders whether the government was a bit comfortable with who was dying given the fallout of the idiotic NI increase. Given what's happened everywhere else in the world I think if Boris could wind the clock back and cut the social care bill in half he might just do it.
Exclusive: Three senior producers at GB News quit within days of each other last week, as the station's increasingly populist agenda polarises those within its newsroom
The former BBC anchor Simon McCoy is also believed to be considering his position
Is there anything more pointless than people debating whether something is funny or not? Humour is so subjective – if you find something funny, great, if you don't, fine. That's it really.
It only really gets tricky with intentionally offensive comedy, but even then someone not finding a particular dead baby joke funny doesnt mean much.
I am pretty sure comedy has deteriorated in the last decade, because of Wokeness
Cruelty, offensiveness and taboo-breaking are essential elements of comedy, and they have all been ruled offside. What is left?
On some recent boring train journeys through Swiss tunnels I watched some episodes of two recent US comedy series (now finished): Community and Parks & Rec. They have dud moments but they are consistently witty and clever, sometimes genius (especially early Community)
However they tell jokes that would simply be unacceptable now. About wife-beating and alcoholism and race. They are edgy, so they are funny.
I do not envy comedy writers working right now. What the fuck can you say that is funny AND acceptable?
How much of Airplane would be made now?
I don't think it could be made now.
Lines like "I like it black. Like my men", uttered by a nine year old girl?
So, my back of the envelope impression of the route towards this winter's point herd immunity to delta:
About 1/6 of the remaining distance will be made by vaccinating 12-15 About 1/3 will be made by booster vaccination (which will also re-improve the case:death ratio) About 1/2 will be made by infection (of about 10-15% of the population, depending on the balance of vaccinated / unvaccinated).
A lot of 12-15 will actually have already had it, so vaxxing them will make very little difference imho.
As I say it was very rough, but I allowed for that to a degree in reckoning approximately 1/24 of the population were not previously infected 12-16s who would get around 2/3 protection.
And I reckon the herd effect within schools - I.e. that 12-16 will spread a lot to other 12-16s is both the cause of the greater prior infection rate, but also means that any vaccine given to a not previously infected child is proportionally more useful in reducing spread. I figure these factors broadly balance out, so can be simplified out as a factor.
Jonathan Liew pours a bit of cold water on Emma's triumph.
Raducanu did not have to play a single top-10 player or previous grand slam finalist. All the seeds, including world No 1 Ashleigh Barty, were cleared from her section of the draw. None of which should detract from the scale of her accomplishment, the stunning cleanness of her groundstrokes, her seeming immunity to pressure. But it should at least inform what it is realistic or reasonable to expect from her in the immediate future.
Iga Swiatek won last year’s French Open in similar circumstances: a new teenage star sweeping all before her (including grand slam winners Simona Halep and Sofia Kenin) without dropping a set. As Poland’s first ever grand slam winner, she found herself imprisoned in a cage of expectations that left her drained, exhausted, seeing tennis balls when she closed her eyes at night.
I think that's fair enough. We are in danger of turning Emma into a kind of female Don Bradman / Muhammad Ali / Pele of tennis after one match. And you can bet that the moment she has a poor performance in the future the vultures will be out in force.
Sorry - he's the talentless, classless tw%t who thinks Jonathon Agnew is racist. No time for him. I'm not claiming ER will will 20 slams, or even with another, but its not her fault that others got knocked out as she won a slam without dropping a set. Amazingly for an 18 year old she has a game without obvious weaknesses. She played at a high level throughout.
Womens tennis is in transition - the Serena age has ended, and in the space left behind the slams have been widely spread. Time will tell for ER, but she has the talent and game for this.
I think a bit of cold water pouring does a service. Things get stupidly OTT otherwise. I was as blown away as the next man by Rad's achievement, and I think she's the real deal and remarkable, yet at the same time I'm thinking to myself, gosh, a total novice, a teenage qualifier, wins a slam without dropping a set, this OTOH is great for women's tennis, it's box office, BOTOH it's telling me that women's tennis is right now, and putting it mildly, probably not the strongest it's ever been.
Yes - women's tennis is a bit similar to golf at the moment - there really aren't 3-4 players that you expect to be at the quarters/semis of the big tournaments. Whats been interesting to me is that in men's tennis the big three drove each other on to higher levels, and for the regular, good, but not great players around them, it was impossible to bridge the gap on a regular basis. What happens now will be interesting, as there isn't a new wave of players coming to replicate the Federer, Nadal, Jokovic era, rather men's tennis is heading to a much more even (and in some ways more interesting) place. Women's tennis has been there for some time.
Yes, it'll be interesting to see where the men's game goes now. Both Djoko and Nadal could still feature for a while but I sense yesterday's final was a watershed. I think the post Big 3 era has (finally) started.
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
You say that, but I still find Not the Nine O'Clock News bloody funny, and largely still relevant most of the time even today.
Yes, I still remember some of their best gags
eg A video news report showing 1000s of Iranians fervently praying, their noses to the ground, just after the Revolution
Cue Pamela Stephenson, as newsreader:
"In Iran, the search goes on for the Ayatollah's contact lens"
No way that would be allowed now. We've lost so much freedom
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
Yeah, comedy dates terribly. Has anyone alive ever genuinely laughed at a Shakespeare "comedy"?
We've debated this before. The few funny movies (say) which don't date are magnificently rare, but they exist.
I think we all agreed that Airplane and Life of Brian remain funny, decades later. And Spinal Tap? Blazing Saddles too perhaps. And early Woody Allen: Love and Death
After that it gets difficult...
Some Like it Hot and Dr Strangelove are two funny films that are still extremely funny, IMHO.
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
Yeah, comedy dates terribly. Has anyone alive ever genuinely laughed at a Shakespeare "comedy"?
We've debated this before. The few funny movies (say) which don't date are magnificently rare, but they exist.
I think we all agreed that Airplane and Life of Brian remain funny, decades later. And Spinal Tap? Blazing Saddles too perhaps. And early Woody Allen: Love and Death
After that it gets difficult...
No it doesn't.
Four Lions is one of the funniest films ever made. And best satires. And best commentaries on life, the universe, and everything. And hasn't dated a millisecond.
There are others, of course. None on your list, interestingly.
I was disappointed by four lions. Chris Morris in on the hour/day today/jaaaam/Nathan Barley was something else tho. Every bit as funny today as when it was first released. Genuinely groundbreaking.
Somehow he lost his way with four lions and his more recent film.
Perhaps I just don’t find the comedy value in terrorism. Maybe it’s me.
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
Yeah, comedy dates terribly. Has anyone alive ever genuinely laughed at a Shakespeare "comedy"?
We've debated this before. The few funny movies (say) which don't date are magnificently rare, but they exist.
I think we all agreed that Airplane and Life of Brian remain funny, decades later. And Spinal Tap? Blazing Saddles too perhaps. And early Woody Allen: Love and Death
After that it gets difficult...
It's so hard to generalise to what travels, though - I've never found Fawlty Towers or Hitchhikers' Guide remotely funny, and Monty Python only occasionally, but I laugh out loud at some of the old Danny Kaye films (e.g. Me and the Colonel) and I've been watching all 8 series of Big Bang Theory a second time as they still make me chuckle. Isn't it partly that you laugh at something which is familiar (so you get the distorted picture instead of just finding it weird) but you're not actually part of (so you don't find it offensive)? Because my background is continental and a bit American, I simply don't get something like The Office, as it doesn't resemble any office I've ever worked in, while Yes, Minister still seems a real work of art and remains relevant.
Among more recent comedies, Sex Education was pretty good and restarts on Netflix next week. Perhaps its lack of exact reference to any real educational system (essentially it's an American school pretending to be British) takes it out of the offensive zone into the merely funny?
So, my back of the envelope impression of the route towards this winter's point herd immunity to delta:
About 1/6 of the remaining distance will be made by vaccinating 12-15 About 1/3 will be made by booster vaccination (which will also re-improve the case:death ratio) About 1/2 will be made by infection (of about 10-15% of the population, depending on the balance of vaccinated / unvaccinated).
A lot of 12-15 will actually have already had it, so vaxxing them will make very little difference imho.
Agreed. Single dose is a fart in the wind vs delta, but they have clear evidence that advising 2 doses to teenage boys would be inexcusable - so we get this pretty meaningless halfway house.
It made me sick to watch a once-male special forces combat veteran beat up a woman on TV - it’s time to stop this trans sport insanity before women start being killed
Piers Morgan has a number of good points he makes in that piece.
In the end they may well end up with a third category for transgendered males - whether you want to call them Trans Women or TIMs.
I think that has been suggested on PB previously.
I can see a scenario happening when each successive female opponent pulls out of a tournament saying "I'm not fighting someone with a man's body", and the athlete such as Alana MacLauthlin ends up winning the tournament with no fights at all.
It really does seem as though the virus is finally running out of people to infect because of vaccination and prior infection. Barring a significant amount of vaccine escape in a future variant I think we're at the tail end of the pandemic in the UK. Given we've also got booster shots coming it will further nullify any chance of a resurgence over Christmas.
Is there anything more pointless than people debating whether something is funny or not? Humour is so subjective – if you find something funny, great, if you don't, fine. That's it really.
Actually, it is quite revealing of the person. Humour is subjective but a person who finds slapstick clowning funny, or fart jokes, is interestingly different to a person who likes early Woody Allen. That might sounds like snobbery, but it is also true
I'd say the public here are more likely to be into slapstick clowning than early Woody Allen. Hence Brexit. And of course "Boris".
I prefer early Boris.
“Routemaster 2.0” - even if it was a sequel - was much better than “Killing 130,000”.
I know you are making a funny, but I really do hate this idea that somehow, uniquely among the European nations, Britain has somehow killed way more of its population. It didn't. Covid did. Johnson didn't kill the French, Spanish, Italians. Governments made hard decisions and made mistakes. Some of them were made many many years ago - such as running the NHS 'efficiently' for bed occupancy, so there was no surge capacity when needed. That's not just on the current government, its on all of them, and on the NHS leadership too.
You’re right, I was being sarcastic.
But Boris was late into lockdown three times.
His negligence does seem to have led to tens of thousands of avoidable deaths.
March 2020 may be forgivable (although many on here, including me, were calling for a lockdown up to two weeks earlier than we eventually did), but the mistakes in late 2020 were not.
"Late into lockdown" trips easily off the tongue. But you are talking about curtailing a nation's economic and social activity in a way unprecedented in a century.
And whether he was or wasn't will not be known for years.
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
Yeah, comedy dates terribly. Has anyone alive ever genuinely laughed at a Shakespeare "comedy"?
We've debated this before. The few funny movies (say) which don't date are magnificently rare, but they exist.
I think we all agreed that Airplane and Life of Brian remain funny, decades later. And Spinal Tap? Blazing Saddles too perhaps. And early Woody Allen: Love and Death
After that it gets difficult...
I don't think "Stonehenge" from Spinal Tap will ever cease to be funny.
Ruthless People is another film which remains very funny.
I just rewatched the Stonehenge Spinal Tap clip on Youtube. With some anxiety.
Still funny?
YES it is still very funny. However, I doubt it would be allowed now, because it has dwarves dancing around the tiny Stonehenge, in a comical way. Not Woke. So they'd have to get rid of the dancing dwarves, and they are mainly what makes it so hilarious. Even a dwarf is bigger than this pitiful mock-up of a megalith
Cases in England today: 21,077 Cases in England last Monday: 27,202
A drop of 6,125 or 22.5%
Can we stop panicking about kids returning to school now?
It does make the huge increase in cases in Scotland quite mysterious. The schools going back was an obvious but apparently not correct explanation (or there are several moving parts and any effect has been swamped by other factors).
Cases down again, and the last 2 days of admissions data for England are both lower than any other day in the last month.
cases hovering around 30000. Hospitalisations and deaths are crucial over the next few weeks i think. What we dont want to see is deaths continuing to rise relative to cases
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
Interesting. I still find Fawlty Towers amusing, but it was never because of any middle-class status stuff to begin with. Basil's stupid attempts to extricate himself from awful situations is what cracks me up. I suppose it all depends on what you get out of these things.
I still love the insults, "spitting venom like a benzedrine puff adder", and "an ageing brilliantined stick insect."
How old do you have to be to know what Brilliantine is?
Is there anything more pointless than people debating whether something is funny or not? Humour is so subjective – if you find something funny, great, if you don't, fine. That's it really.
Actually, it is quite revealing of the person. Humour is subjective but a person who finds slapstick clowning funny, or fart jokes, is interestingly different to a person who likes early Woody Allen. That might sounds like snobbery, but it is also true
I'd say the public here are more likely to be into slapstick clowning than early Woody Allen. Hence Brexit. And of course "Boris".
Boris can be genuinely funny, tho. He has an actual comic gift: with real comic timing
He knows exactly how and when to pause, and then deliver the line. Even if it is not particularly witty, he does it in a way which makes you smile
Of course people that hate him won't ever smile, but that's just political loathing, and not a judgement of his humour. He is funny - in a way that appeals to many, highbrow and lowbrow. It's a significant reason he is where he is
He does have a comic gift, I find him funny at times, but it's all rather mundane and it drips with condescension and entitlement. I'd worry about anybody who regularly creases up at his output. I'd assess such a person to be a complete wanker.
It isn't a particularly sophisticated comic gift.
Crashing through a polystyrene wall of bricks in a JCB might float some boats. At infant school age my youngest son found Dick and Dom shouting "bogies" at the top of their voices was hilarious. That is the sophistication level of Johnson's comedy.
It really isn't. Humour is about the confounding of expectations. If the way you confound expectations also confounds expectations, you're onto a winner. This is a rare insight into Boris's humour: https://reaction.life/jeremy-vine-my-boris-story/
If you instinctively loathe him, you're going to struggle to find him funny. But I don't.
David Nobbs' character Henry Pratt mused thus on the most successful comedians: it's those who present a false picture of themselves, but one which is close enough to be believable. This Boris does. Though how he does it so constantly, I don't know.
Doesn't mean to say I want him as Prime Minister, though he's firmly on the long, long list of people who would have made a far better prime minister than Jeremy Corbyn.
Is there anything more pointless than people debating whether something is funny or not? Humour is so subjective – if you find something funny, great, if you don't, fine. That's it really.
Actually, it is quite revealing of the person. Humour is subjective but a person who finds slapstick clowning funny, or fart jokes, is interestingly different to a person who likes early Woody Allen. That might sounds like snobbery, but it is also true
I'd say the public here are more likely to be into slapstick clowning than early Woody Allen. Hence Brexit. And of course "Boris".
Boris can be genuinely funny, tho. He has an actual comic gift: with real comic timing
He knows exactly how and when to pause, and then deliver the line. Even if it is not particularly witty, he does it in a way which makes you smile
Of course people that hate him won't ever smile, but that's just political loathing, and not a judgement of his humour. He is funny - in a way that appeals to many, highbrow and lowbrow. It's a significant reason he is where he is
He does have a comic gift, I find him funny at times, but it's all rather mundane and it drips with condescension and entitlement. I'd worry about anybody who regularly creases up at his output. I'd assess such a person to be a complete wanker.
The thing is that a lot of Bozza's comedy (and it is a genuine talent) is in the timing and physicality. And because of that, it wears thin on repeated exposure. (One of the big political hacks tells the story of seeing him at two boozy dinners; the first time round his act is genuinely amusing, but the second time you see it, you notice the boilerplate and the [FORGET, THEN INSERT NAME OF ORGANISATION HERE] bits, and it's less funny. Who was it?)
One of the things that is doing for BoJo is our collective increasing familiarity with his shtick, and he's not quite clever or diligent enough to keep the act fresh. A bit like some of the old music hall acts when TV started. Or Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em; a work of genius, but Michael Crawford doing the same thing for more than three series would have been just sad.
Compare BoJo's appearances on Have I Got News For You with William Hague's.
It made me sick to watch a once-male special forces combat veteran beat up a woman on TV - it’s time to stop this trans sport insanity before women start being killed
Piers Morgan has a number of good points he makes in that piece.
In the end they may well end up with a third category for transgendered males - whether you want to call them Trans Women or TIMs.
I think that has been suggested on PB previously.
I can see a scenario happening when each successive female opponent pulls out of a tournament saying "I'm not fighting someone with a man's body", and the athlete such as Alana MacLauthlin ends up winning the tournament with no fights at all.
Morgan: I once asked a UK government minister who supports trans women competing in women’s sport if she would be OK if Floyd Mayweather announced he was transitioning and got in the ring to fight women born with female bodies.
She refused to say it would be unfair because she was too terrified of upsetting the very vocal and aggressive trans activist lobby.
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
Yeah, comedy dates terribly. Has anyone alive ever genuinely laughed at a Shakespeare "comedy"?
We've debated this before. The few funny movies (say) which don't date are magnificently rare, but they exist.
I think we all agreed that Airplane and Life of Brian remain funny, decades later. And Spinal Tap? Blazing Saddles too perhaps. And early Woody Allen: Love and Death
After that it gets difficult...
I don't think "Stonehenge" from Spinal Tap will ever cease to be funny.
Ruthless People is another film which remains very funny.
I just rewatched the Stonehenge Spinal Tap clip on Youtube. With some anxiety.
Still funny?
YES it is still very funny. However, I doubt it would be allowed now, because it has dwarves dancing around the tiny Stonehenge, in a comical way. Not Woke. So they'd have to get rid of the dancing dwarves, and they are mainly what makes it so hilarious. Even a dwarf is bigger than this pitiful mock-up of a megalith
Comedy is slowly being strangled to death
I wonder if Jimmy Carr or Ricky Gervais would get booked these days if they weren't already too big and profitable not to?
I could certainly see some in the business saying we might not take a risk on them, lets just book the safe option that has been on the telly doing totally forgettable material about their passion for cardigans.
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
Comedy since the year 2000 has generally been rubbish IMO.
The Office, Peep Show, The Thick of It, Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock, Veep, Curb Your Enthusiasm, all hilarious 21C TV comedies. UK satire has been very weak over this period but The Colbert Report in the US covered the later Bush years and the growing insanity of Fox News and the American Right brilliantly.
Yes good point. great call on those TV shows. I'd add the Larry Sanders Show, Modern Family, and, yes, Seinfeld. Also Friends is actually very funny also.
Just fed the data into my model and it's saying we're about 7-10 days away from the hospitalisation funnel turning negative again (as in more people leaving hospital than entering) which would be a huge win in the run up to autumn and winter to clear COVID patients out of hospitals.
Medium term prediction of the inpatient number is 3.5k at the end of October for England.
Cases in England today: 21,077 Cases in England last Monday: 27,202
A drop of 6,125 or 22.5%
Can we stop panicking about kids returning to school now?
It does make the huge increase in cases in Scotland quite mysterious. The schools going back was an obvious but apparently not correct explanation (or there are several moving parts and any effect has been swamped by other factors).
Reversion to the mean? Scotland had a 'better' early pandemic so it therefore gets a 'worse' late pandemic. England simply has greater levels of infection-conferred immunity.
Dunno if that's true but Ozcam's Razor and all that?
I'm genuinely interested if anyone has any theories as to why cases could be dropping other than the virus running out of people to infect?
No - I think this is the crunch point now. Despite all the noise about double jabbed still getting infected (and there always would be some, even with 99% protection against infection) I think vaccination does protect to some extent, as does prior infection (probably better). The numbers with neither are getting smaller and smaller each day.
One other theory - a friend is of the opinion that his kids socialise more out of their bubble in the holidays, and less in school time. Admittedly the Scotland picture seems to have been different but I think I recall the Scottish restrictions also eased around the time the schools went back.
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
Yeah, comedy dates terribly. Has anyone alive ever genuinely laughed at a Shakespeare "comedy"?
We've debated this before. The few funny movies (say) which don't date are magnificently rare, but they exist.
I think we all agreed that Airplane and Life of Brian remain funny, decades later. And Spinal Tap? Blazing Saddles too perhaps. And early Woody Allen: Love and Death
After that it gets difficult...
No it doesn't.
Four Lions is one of the funniest films ever made. And best satires. And best commentaries on life, the universe, and everything. And hasn't dated a millisecond.
There are others, of course. None on your list, interestingly.
I was disappointed by four lions. Chris Morris in on the hour/day today/jaaaam/Nathan Barley was something else tho. Every bit as funny today as when it was first released. Genuinely groundbreaking.
Somehow he lost his way with four lions and his more recent film.
Perhaps I just don’t find the comedy value in terrorism. Maybe it’s me.
It was so much more than a "comedy" about terrorism but that's all good. Not for everyone.
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
Comedy since the year 2000 has generally been rubbish IMO.
The Office, Peep Show, The Thick of It, Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock, Veep, Curb Your Enthusiasm, all hilarious 21C TV comedies. UK satire has been very weak over this period but The Colbert Report in the US covered the later Bush years and the growing insanity of Fox News and the American Right brilliantly.
Yes good point. great call on those TV shows. I'd add the Larry Sanders Show, Modern Family, and, yes, Seinfeld. Also Friends is actually very funny also.
UK? Well I didn't mind Extras.
Seinfeld had long periods of being merely droll, at best, then suddenly they would do something sensationally funny, or come out with an immortal line - some of the best TV comedy ever. A strange show, but excellent
Is there anything more pointless than people debating whether something is funny or not? Humour is so subjective – if you find something funny, great, if you don't, fine. That's it really.
Actually, it is quite revealing of the person. Humour is subjective but a person who finds slapstick clowning funny, or fart jokes, is interestingly different to a person who likes early Woody Allen. That might sounds like snobbery, but it is also true
I'd say the public here are more likely to be into slapstick clowning than early Woody Allen. Hence Brexit. And of course "Boris".
I prefer early Boris.
“Routemaster 2.0” - even if it was a sequel - was much better than “Killing 130,000”.
I know you are making a funny, but I really do hate this idea that somehow, uniquely among the European nations, Britain has somehow killed way more of its population. It didn't. Covid did. Johnson didn't kill the French, Spanish, Italians. Governments made hard decisions and made mistakes. Some of them were made many many years ago - such as running the NHS 'efficiently' for bed occupancy, so there was no surge capacity when needed. That's not just on the current government, its on all of them, and on the NHS leadership too.
You’re right, I was being sarcastic.
But Boris was late into lockdown three times.
His negligence does seem to have led to tens of thousands of avoidable deaths.
March 2020 may be forgivable (although many on here, including me, were calling for a lockdown up to two weeks earlier than we eventually did), but the mistakes in late 2020 were not.
"Late into lockdown" trips easily off the tongue. But you are talking about curtailing a nation's economic and social activity in a way unprecedented in a century.
And whether he was or wasn't will not be known for years.
I am fiercely against unnecessary lockdowns and infringements of civil liberty.
But it was/is not a matter of tripping off the tongue but of preservation of life.
Boris utterly failed that test (compare with Jacinda Ardern) not once but several times.
No we don’t need “years” to make that judgment. Only apologists say that.
Cases down again, and the last 2 days of admissions data for England are both lower than any other day in the last month.
cases hovering around 30000. Hospitalisations and deaths are crucial over the next few weeks i think. What we dont want to see is deaths continuing to rise relative to cases
Keep trying. Cases down across the UK, and definitely in England, despite brexit schools going back. Admissions falling too now.
I'm genuinely interested if anyone has any theories as to why cases could be dropping other than the virus running out of people to infect?
People have stopped wearing masks?
it could well be without restrictions that cases will rise and fall like this all winter depending on the level of mixing, rather than the sharp peaks and declines we saw with lockdowns
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
Interesting. I still find Fawlty Towers amusing, but it was never because of any middle-class status stuff to begin with. Basil's stupid attempts to extricate himself from awful situations is what cracks me up. I suppose it all depends on what you get out of these things.
I still love the insults, "spitting venom like a benzedrine puff adder", and "an ageing brilliantined stick insect."
How old do you have to be to know what Brilliantine is?
About the same age as you need to be to know what benzedrines are.
I'm genuinely interested if anyone has any theories as to why cases could be dropping other than the virus running out of people to infect?
Behaviour modification has always been a factor that's hard to quantify, but has a large impact. It's possible that the steady increase in death numbers has caused enough people to be just that bit more cautious that R tips below 1.
If that's the case you would expect to see the figures oscillate up and down for a while.
Anecdotally I don't hear much evidence of behaviour modification, but it's hard to be sure. Particularly as changes in behaviour among the unvaccinated population will have a disproportionate effect.
It made me sick to watch a once-male special forces combat veteran beat up a woman on TV - it’s time to stop this trans sport insanity before women start being killed
Piers Morgan has a number of good points he makes in that piece.
In the end they may well end up with a third category for transgendered males - whether you want to call them Trans Women or TIMs.
I think that has been suggested on PB previously.
I can see a scenario happening when each successive female opponent pulls out of a tournament saying "I'm not fighting someone with a man's body", and the athlete such as Alana MacLauthlin ends up winning the tournament with no fights at all.
My friend's daughter plays rugby.
She's got huge concerns about the scrums with one side having all birth females whilst the other side has one or more trans women in their scrum.
That's serious injuries/paralysis waiting to happen.
Is there anything more pointless than people debating whether something is funny or not? Humour is so subjective – if you find something funny, great, if you don't, fine. That's it really.
Actually, it is quite revealing of the person. Humour is subjective but a person who finds slapstick clowning funny, or fart jokes, is interestingly different to a person who likes early Woody Allen. That might sounds like snobbery, but it is also true
I'd say the public here are more likely to be into slapstick clowning than early Woody Allen. Hence Brexit. And of course "Boris".
Boris can be genuinely funny, tho. He has an actual comic gift: with real comic timing
He knows exactly how and when to pause, and then deliver the line. Even if it is not particularly witty, he does it in a way which makes you smile
Of course people that hate him won't ever smile, but that's just political loathing, and not a judgement of his humour. He is funny - in a way that appeals to many, highbrow and lowbrow. It's a significant reason he is where he is
He does have a comic gift, I find him funny at times, but it's all rather mundane and it drips with condescension and entitlement. I'd worry about anybody who regularly creases up at his output. I'd assess such a person to be a complete wanker.
The thing is that a lot of Bozza's comedy (and it is a genuine talent) is in the timing and physicality. And because of that, it wears thin on repeated exposure. (One of the big political hacks tells the story of seeing him at two boozy dinners; the first time round his act is genuinely amusing, but the second time you see it, you notice the boilerplate and the [FORGET, THEN INSERT NAME OF ORGANISATION HERE] bits, and it's less funny. Who was it?)
One of the things that is doing for BoJo is our collective increasing familiarity with his shtick, and he's not quite clever or diligent enough to keep the act fresh. A bit like some of the old music hall acts when TV started. Or Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em; a work of genius, but Michael Crawford doing the same thing for more than three series would have been just sad.
Compare BoJo's appearances on Have I Got News For You with William Hague's.
Stuart - it was Jeremy Vine. You've just made the opposite point to me using the same examples.
I'm genuinely interested if anyone has any theories as to why cases could be dropping other than the virus running out of people to infect?
I don't see what else it could be, double vaxxed are now 81% of adults (66% of the population), add in prior infection and we're surely approaching 80-85% of the population with a very high degree of immunity.
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
Yeah, comedy dates terribly. Has anyone alive ever genuinely laughed at a Shakespeare "comedy"?
We've debated this before. The few funny movies (say) which don't date are magnificently rare, but they exist.
I think we all agreed that Airplane and Life of Brian remain funny, decades later. And Spinal Tap? Blazing Saddles too perhaps. And early Woody Allen: Love and Death
After that it gets difficult...
I don't think "Stonehenge" from Spinal Tap will ever cease to be funny.
Ruthless People is another film which remains very funny.
I just rewatched the Stonehenge Spinal Tap clip on Youtube. With some anxiety.
Still funny?
YES it is still very funny. However, I doubt it would be allowed now, because it has dwarves dancing around the tiny Stonehenge, in a comical way. Not Woke. So they'd have to get rid of the dancing dwarves, and they are mainly what makes it so hilarious. Even a dwarf is bigger than this pitiful mock-up of a megalith
Comedy is slowly being strangled to death
I wonder if Jimmy Carr or Ricky Gervais would get booked these days if they weren't already too big and profitable not to?
I could certainly see some in the business saying we might not take a risk on them, lets just book the safe option that has been on the telly doing totally forgettable material about their passion for cardigans.
Hence the entire and stellar career of Michael Mcintyre
Is there anything more pointless than people debating whether something is funny or not? Humour is so subjective – if you find something funny, great, if you don't, fine. That's it really.
Actually, it is quite revealing of the person. Humour is subjective but a person who finds slapstick clowning funny, or fart jokes, is interestingly different to a person who likes early Woody Allen. That might sounds like snobbery, but it is also true
I'd say the public here are more likely to be into slapstick clowning than early Woody Allen. Hence Brexit. And of course "Boris".
Boris can be genuinely funny, tho. He has an actual comic gift: with real comic timing
He knows exactly how and when to pause, and then deliver the line. Even if it is not particularly witty, he does it in a way which makes you smile
Of course people that hate him won't ever smile, but that's just political loathing, and not a judgement of his humour. He is funny - in a way that appeals to many, highbrow and lowbrow. It's a significant reason he is where he is
He does have a comic gift, I find him funny at times, but it's all rather mundane and it drips with condescension and entitlement. I'd worry about anybody who regularly creases up at his output. I'd assess such a person to be a complete wanker.
The thing is that a lot of Bozza's comedy (and it is a genuine talent) is in the timing and physicality. And because of that, it wears thin on repeated exposure. (One of the big political hacks tells the story of seeing him at two boozy dinners; the first time round his act is genuinely amusing, but the second time you see it, you notice the boilerplate and the [FORGET, THEN INSERT NAME OF ORGANISATION HERE] bits, and it's less funny. Who was it?)
One of the things that is doing for BoJo is our collective increasing familiarity with his shtick, and he's not quite clever or diligent enough to keep the act fresh. A bit like some of the old music hall acts when TV started. Or Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em; a work of genius, but Michael Crawford doing the same thing for more than three series would have been just sad.
Compare BoJo's appearances on Have I Got News For You with William Hague's.
Is there anything more pointless than people debating whether something is funny or not? Humour is so subjective – if you find something funny, great, if you don't, fine. That's it really.
Actually, it is quite revealing of the person. Humour is subjective but a person who finds slapstick clowning funny, or fart jokes, is interestingly different to a person who likes early Woody Allen. That might sounds like snobbery, but it is also true
I'd say the public here are more likely to be into slapstick clowning than early Woody Allen. Hence Brexit. And of course "Boris".
I prefer early Boris.
“Routemaster 2.0” - even if it was a sequel - was much better than “Killing 130,000”.
I know you are making a funny, but I really do hate this idea that somehow, uniquely among the European nations, Britain has somehow killed way more of its population. It didn't. Covid did. Johnson didn't kill the French, Spanish, Italians. Governments made hard decisions and made mistakes. Some of them were made many many years ago - such as running the NHS 'efficiently' for bed occupancy, so there was no surge capacity when needed. That's not just on the current government, its on all of them, and on the NHS leadership too.
You’re right, I was being sarcastic.
But Boris was late into lockdown three times.
His negligence does seem to have led to tens of thousands of avoidable deaths.
March 2020 may be forgivable (although many on here, including me, were calling for a lockdown up to two weeks earlier than we eventually did), but the mistakes in late 2020 were not.
"Late into lockdown" trips easily off the tongue. But you are talking about curtailing a nation's economic and social activity in a way unprecedented in a century.
And whether he was or wasn't will not be known for years.
I am fiercely against unnecessary lockdowns and infringements of civil liberty.
But it was/is not a matter of tripping off the tongue but of preservation of life.
Boris utterly failed that test (compare with Jacinda Ardern) not once but several times.
No we don’t need “years” to make that judgment. Only apologists say that.
Nah. I wouldn't categorise myself as a Boris apologist.
And if you are seriously holding up Jacinda "prison island" Ardern as a role model in how to handle the pandemic then that sadly loses you a lot of credibility.
Boris errs on the side of liberty (or "it'll be fine" to be less charitable) which is a side that plenty of the country errs on also. To simply cut off a nation's normal activities would give most people, and especially most Brits pause for thought.
It made me sick to watch a once-male special forces combat veteran beat up a woman on TV - it’s time to stop this trans sport insanity before women start being killed
Piers Morgan has a number of good points he makes in that piece.
In the end they may well end up with a third category for transgendered males - whether you want to call them Trans Women or TIMs.
I think that has been suggested on PB previously.
I can see a scenario happening when each successive female opponent pulls out of a tournament saying "I'm not fighting someone with a man's body", and the athlete such as Alana MacLauthlin ends up winning the tournament with no fights at all.
Morgan: I once asked a UK government minister who supports trans women competing in women’s sport if she would be OK if Floyd Mayweather announced he was transitioning and got in the ring to fight women born with female bodies.
She refused to say it would be unfair because she was too terrified of upsetting the very vocal and aggressive trans activist lobby.
That’s how crazy this debate has got.
There's anecdata and there's Piers anecdata. Some of the lads on here would give him a run for his money, mind..
I'm genuinely interested if anyone has any theories as to why cases could be dropping other than the virus running out of people to infect?
Behaviour modification has always been a factor that's hard to quantify, but has a large impact. It's possible that the steady increase in death numbers has caused enough people to be just that bit more cautious that R tips below 1.
If that's the case you would expect to see the figures oscillate up and down for a while.
Anecdotally I don't hear much evidence of behaviour modification, but it's hard to be sure. Particularly as changes in behaviour among the unvaccinated population will have a disproportionate effect.
Having been out and about I don't buy that. I think finally we are running out of fresh people to infect.
I'm genuinely interested if anyone has any theories as to why cases could be dropping other than the virus running out of people to infect?
Behaviour modification has always been a factor that's hard to quantify, but has a large impact. It's possible that the steady increase in death numbers has caused enough people to be just that bit more cautious that R tips below 1.
If that's the case you would expect to see the figures oscillate up and down for a while.
Anecdotally I don't hear much evidence of behaviour modification, but it's hard to be sure. Particularly as changes in behaviour among the unvaccinated population will have a disproportionate effect.
There was precisely zero evidence of 'behaviour modification' when I was out in town on Saturday. Soho was absolutely jumping. Perhaps the 'behaviour moderators' don't live in London and never visit it?
Perhaps relevant to that article but I'm not going to read it (the Graun's).
I'm old enough to remember when the Daily Mash used to be funny.
It's bloody funny still as witness the above.
Interesting to me is that it is making fun of remainers whereas it has in the past (I don't look at it all the time) made fun of Brexiters. Such as this, one of my favourites (a long time ago so you will find it funny).
it is feeble, It makes a decent point, but it is not comical
Look at this:
"What are we going to do next, build affordable housing? Pay a living wage? What if he’s serious about this ghastly plan to stop the North being a ghetto where you’re born poor and die early?"
It's like a middlebrow sixth former's laborious version of satire. It's funny if you're not a particularly funny person, and don't really understand humour, but you try quite hard
It is also like AI generated music, a computer which has been taught the essence of music but just doesn't get "music". Yet. Listen to this for 12 seconds, then the computer takes over the composition
Indeed, it occurs to me that GPT3 could churn out Mash articles by the million, no problem, and has already written things much funnier than any Daily Mash piece
The difficulty I find with all these kinds of sature is that the headline - i.e the punchline - comes first, not last like in a joke. Writing an article which develops the joke further when the punchline has come and gone is pretty hard.
Yes, and written humour is bloody hard. I'm not being particularly mean to the Mash in saying they don't quite hack it, 99% of people don't hack it
The Onion is the best example of funny news satire - along with The Day Today in the UK
The Onion has headlines which alone make you laugh. OK they make me laugh
"Dwarf falls equivalent of 10 storeys"
They've actually deleted this (it seems). Too offensive now?
And I find THIS very funny. The Onion news channel taking the piss out of Apple. Superbly done (to my mind)
Humour can date very rapidly. I don't find Fawlty Towers nearly so funny as I used to, because that middle class angst and obsession with loss of status is just not relevant now, in the way it was in the 1970's.
Satire in particular dates very rapidly, because it is so specific to its time and place. Admittedly, Peter Cook's "Entirely a Matter for You" still cracks me up, but it would be meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with the trial of Jeremy Thorpe.
Gentle satire, like Pride and Prejudice, is probably timeless.
So, too is some black humour. Gibbon can be very funny in places, as can Tacitus. Hence his reaction to Nero marrying his boyfriend Sporus, and then castrating him, in the hope this would make him into a woman:
"Men wished that Nero's father had taken such a wife".
Yeah, comedy dates terribly. Has anyone alive ever genuinely laughed at a Shakespeare "comedy"?
We've debated this before. The few funny movies (say) which don't date are magnificently rare, but they exist.
I think we all agreed that Airplane and Life of Brian remain funny, decades later. And Spinal Tap? Blazing Saddles too perhaps. And early Woody Allen: Love and Death
After that it gets difficult...
I don't think "Stonehenge" from Spinal Tap will ever cease to be funny.
Ruthless People is another film which remains very funny.
I just rewatched the Stonehenge Spinal Tap clip on Youtube. With some anxiety.
Still funny?
YES it is still very funny. However, I doubt it would be allowed now, because it has dwarves dancing around the tiny Stonehenge, in a comical way. Not Woke. So they'd have to get rid of the dancing dwarves, and they are mainly what makes it so hilarious. Even a dwarf is bigger than this pitiful mock-up of a megalith
Comedy is slowly being strangled to death
I wonder if Jimmy Carr or Ricky Gervais would get booked these days if they weren't already too big and profitable not to?
I could certainly see some in the business saying we might not take a risk on them, lets just book the safe option that has been on the telly doing totally forgettable material about their passion for cardigans.
Hence the entire and stellar career of Michael Mcintyre
I remember in the not exactly distant past when Lee Evans was seen as the mainstream very safe option....a lot of his gags now would definitely have some very upset for stereotyping in particular women.
Comments
Never mind, there will be a new disaster to point to tomorrow, I have no doubt. I am sure we will all have second thoughts then.
SPD-S&D: 26%
CDU/CSU-EPP: 20.5%
GRÜNE-G/EFA: 15% (-0.5)
FDP-RE: 12.5%
AfD-ID: 11.5% (+0.5)
LINKE-LEFT: 6.5%
+/- vs. 3-6 Sep
Fieldwork: 10-13 September 2021
Sample size: 2,062
https://www.twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/1437426410650546184
We've debated this before. The few funny movies (say) which don't date are magnificently rare, but they exist.
I think we all agreed that Airplane and Life of Brian remain funny, decades later. And Spinal Tap? Blazing Saddles too perhaps. And early Woody Allen: Love and Death
After that it gets difficult...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwvHsu-POBE
I personally I think one big reason, a load of comedy clubs went busto 10 or so years ago e.g. Jongleurs over expanded and went tits up. Now all the guys and girls on that circuit had to be good or they blew up quickly. I used to go fairly regularly to the ones in London, and the crowds could be really brutal and as you were on the rotation you had to play the same venue every few weeks and you couldn't just do your 30 min set over and over again.
Loads of people who then became pretty big in the 00s and early 10s came out of that world. To survive it and move up, that had to be sharp.
Now it is much more centred around these big shows in arenas and theatres, which you prep one show to last you 1-2 years and your tour it into the ground. And as the world changes quickly, it lends itself to quite stale material that won't date inbetween the time you wrote it and perform it. And also you don't want the outrage mob, jumping a bandwagon and finding your income for the next year has been torpedoed.
Now, one guy who is still really good, Ross Noble, but because his material is semi-improv, so it is exactly the opposite of that, it can be flexible and change night to night.
Ruthless People is another film which remains very funny.
Four Lions is one of the funniest films ever made. And best satires. And best commentaries on life, the universe, and everything. And hasn't dated a millisecond.
There are others, of course. None on your list, interestingly.
But Boris was late into lockdown three times.
His negligence does seem to have led to tens of thousands of avoidable deaths.
March 2020 may be forgivable (although many on here, including me, were calling for a lockdown up to two weeks earlier than we eventually did), but the mistakes in late 2020 were not.
https://twitter.com/ds_m4riano/status/1436307592666624010
I often avoid movies and TV shows I found hugely amusing as, say, a 20 year old, for fear they will gravely disappoint me now
I recently checked out a comic American novel which I loved as a late teenager, and I found it dire: laboured and mediocre. Like the Daily Mash extended to 300 pages. Sad
A number round the table were approving. Until we got to the HAC officer. Who said he liked the idea of dynamic loyalty and given that it happened that he was on duty in London and a large number of armed men under his command, did I have any suggestions for his allegiance?
But I tried watching The Young Ones recently, and Bottom, Up Pompei, Red Dwarf… it was just too much like hard work.
I have seen a few that have a good hour that got them where they are, and then they have nothing else e.g. Henning Wehn. He had a great 30 mins of funny material about being a German in England...and that is literally what he still lives off. He has such little material his first half of a new show, is the old show cut down....
Merry Wives of Windsor remains a laff riot.
Also the amateur dramatics bits of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Some parts (the Irish jokes, about the guests thinking Basil/Manuel might be gay and the racial epithets used by the Major) would never pass today.
On the other hand the Germans sort of does at some level because there's still a bit of that which goes on.
Lines like "I like it black. Like my men", uttered by a nine year old girl?
He is probably arresting TSE for wearing a loud suit in a built up area, as we type....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
Now it is they look for people for the panel shows, which the comedian hope to then use to launch their big arena / theatre tours.
Its a bit like bands that have slogged it for a number of years, got really good live, then hit the big time. They have the 90 mins of material, they can really do it live and normally worth you money. Compared to the ones that have the one big hit off the first album and become overnight famous.
I don't massively care for Ed Sheeran music, but he slogged the hell out of it, playing anywhere and everywhere (Mrs U saw him with bugger all people). Frank Turner is another. Both can definitely really do it live, there is no doubt about that.
The former BBC anchor Simon McCoy is also believed to be considering his position
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/split-loyalties-at-gb-news-with-andrew-neil-departure-looming-7rgbpggn5?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1631544823
Crashing through a polystyrene wall of bricks in a JCB might float some boats. At infant school age my youngest son found Dick and Dom shouting "bogies" at the top of their voices was hilarious. That is the sophistication level of Johnson's comedy.
Data rights look like they’re going to be flushed down the loo.
There has not been enough of this
Cases in England last Monday: 27,202
A drop of 6,125 or 22.5%
Can we stop panicking about kids returning to school now?
And I reckon the herd effect within schools - I.e. that 12-16 will spread a lot to other 12-16s is both the cause of the greater prior infection rate, but also means that any vaccine given to a not previously infected child is proportionally more useful in reducing spread. I figure these factors broadly balance out, so can be simplified out as a factor.
eg A video news report showing 1000s of Iranians fervently praying, their noses to the ground, just after the Revolution
Cue Pamela Stephenson, as newsreader:
"In Iran, the search goes on for the Ayatollah's contact lens"
No way that would be allowed now. We've lost so much freedom
Somehow he lost his way with four lions and his more recent film.
Perhaps I just don’t find the comedy value in terrorism. Maybe it’s me.
Among more recent comedies, Sex Education was pretty good and restarts on Netflix next week. Perhaps its lack of exact reference to any real educational system (essentially it's an American school pretending to be British) takes it out of the offensive zone into the merely funny?
UK: 41,192 -> 30,825 (-25.0%)
England: 27,202 -> 21,077 (-22.5%)
Scot: 7,065 -> 4,241 (-40.0%)
NI: 1,764 -> 1,199 (-32.0%)
Wales: 5,161 -> 4,308 (-16.5%)
6.30pm on R4 on a Wednesday is anti-funny.
And actually Blackadder is very funny.
In the end they may well end up with a third category for transgendered males - whether you want to call them Trans Women or TIMs.
I think that has been suggested on PB previously.
I can see a scenario happening when each successive female opponent pulls out of a tournament saying "I'm not fighting someone with a man's body", and the athlete such as Alana MacLauthlin ends up winning the tournament with no fights at all.
And whether he was or wasn't will not be known for years.
Still funny?
YES it is still very funny. However, I doubt it would be allowed now, because it has dwarves dancing around the tiny Stonehenge, in a comical way. Not Woke. So they'd have to get rid of the dancing dwarves, and they are mainly what makes it so hilarious. Even a dwarf is bigger than this pitiful mock-up of a megalith
Comedy is slowly being strangled to death
Humour is about the confounding of expectations. If the way you confound expectations also confounds expectations, you're onto a winner. This is a rare insight into Boris's humour:
https://reaction.life/jeremy-vine-my-boris-story/
I'd also say that Boris presenting HIGNFY was one of the funniest moments of the century.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w53JbQ4pMjE
If you instinctively loathe him, you're going to struggle to find him funny. But I don't.
David Nobbs' character Henry Pratt mused thus on the most successful comedians: it's those who present a false picture of themselves, but one which is close enough to be believable. This Boris does. Though how he does it so constantly, I don't know.
Doesn't mean to say I want him as Prime Minister, though he's firmly on the long, long list of people who would have made a far better prime minister than Jeremy Corbyn.
One of the things that is doing for BoJo is our collective increasing familiarity with his shtick, and he's not quite clever or diligent enough to keep the act fresh. A bit like some of the old music hall acts when TV started. Or Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em; a work of genius, but Michael Crawford doing the same thing for more than three series would have been just sad.
Compare BoJo's appearances on Have I Got News For You with William Hague's.
I once asked a UK government minister who supports trans women competing in women’s sport if she would be OK if Floyd Mayweather announced he was transitioning and got in the ring to fight women born with female bodies.
She refused to say it would be unfair because she was too terrified of upsetting the very vocal and aggressive trans activist lobby.
That’s how crazy this debate has got.
I could certainly see some in the business saying we might not take a risk on them, lets just book the safe option that has been on the telly doing totally forgettable material about their passion for cardigans.
UK? Well I didn't mind Extras.
Medium term prediction of the inpatient number is 3.5k at the end of October for England.
Dunno if that's true but Ozcam's Razor and all that?
One other theory - a friend is of the opinion that his kids socialise more out of their bubble in the holidays, and less in school time. Admittedly the Scotland picture seems to have been different but I think I recall the Scottish restrictions also eased around the time the schools went back.
But ultimately - who knows...
'What's the difference between five big black guys and a joke? Baxley's mom can't take a joke.'
The Predator.
I needed oxygen in the cinema when I heard that joke.
But it was/is not a matter of tripping off the tongue but of preservation of life.
Boris utterly failed that test (compare with Jacinda Ardern) not once but several times.
No we don’t need “years” to make that judgment.
Only apologists say that.
brexitschools going back. Admissions falling too now.If that's the case you would expect to see the figures oscillate up and down for a while.
Anecdotally I don't hear much evidence of behaviour modification, but it's hard to be sure. Particularly as changes in behaviour among the unvaccinated population will have a disproportionate effect.
She's got huge concerns about the scrums with one side having all birth females whilst the other side has one or more trans women in their scrum.
That's serious injuries/paralysis waiting to happen.
Personally I think it now misses the target far too often. But still when its good, its very good.
Proving only the subjectivity of humour.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/my-boris-johnson-story
Not sure he meets the 'big political hack' description though? He does do the swingometer, such as it is, nowadays.
And if you are seriously holding up Jacinda "prison island" Ardern as a role model in how to handle the pandemic then that sadly loses you a lot of credibility.
Boris errs on the side of liberty (or "it'll be fine" to be less charitable) which is a side that plenty of the country errs on also. To simply cut off a nation's normal activities would give most people, and especially most Brits pause for thought.
Some of the lads on here would give him a run for his money, mind..