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.
yes but its not about cases its about hospitalisations and deaths last 7 days cases down 8.4% but hospitalisations up 4.7% and deaths up 25.1%
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?
I haven’t worn a mask in months. Nobody does in Hackney.
The Cotswolds in mid August, OTOH, was full of curtain-twitching types who looked askance at my naked face.
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.
yes but its not about cases its about hospitalisations and deaths last 7 days cases down 8.4% but hospitalisations up 4.7% and deaths up 25.1%
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.
Yeah St Jacinda was, until fairly recently, proposing permanent state quarantine facilities be built at airports.
What's been interesting is watching the Australians finally shake off their complacency about the vaccine and strike major supply deals to get everyone vaccinated by the end of October and everything reopened by the end of November.
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
Are you trolling? They're not hovering, they're collapsing about as quickly as they have at any stage in the pandemic.
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.
yes but its not about cases its about hospitalisations and deaths last 7 days cases down 8.4% but hospitalisations up 4.7% and deaths up 25.1%
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.
I agree with that; they are still both relevant and funny. But also, despite being nearly 40 years old, I would struggle to find anything remotely offensive (by today's standards) in them, so there's not a chance of them being caught out by what some fear as woke cancel culture. Goes to show you can be funny without being offensive.
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.
yes but its not about cases its about hospitalisations and deaths last 7 days cases down 8.4% but hospitalisations up 4.7% and deaths up 25.1%
As I'm sure you are aware both are lagging indicators. Expect them both to turn negative in the coming few weeks. Why wouldn't they?
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?
Does she say that? The boy says white and one like my men, which is much funnier, but perhaps she says that first to set it up.
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.
People who say “prison island” are just berks.
I’m not a political fan on Ardern, and NZ had/has several advantages not available to other countries, but she did the right thing to close the borders and lock down with “extreme prejudice”.
And again, more recently.
As a result, NZers have very largely avoided all lockdowns and mask wearing, and nor has the economy cratered as badly as it has in other places.
NZ has 1/14 the population of the U.K. And has had 1/5000 of the deaths.
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.
yes but its not about cases its about hospitalisations and deaths last 7 days cases down 8.4% but hospitalisations up 4.7% and deaths up 25.1%
As I'm sure you are aware both are lagging indicators. Expect them both to turn negative in the coming few weeks. Why wouldn't they?
remember the big drop in cases late july. Hospitalisations and deaths continued upward despite the drop. Also as we move into autumn the seasons are moving against us for respiratory viruses. As i say lets see what happens the next few weeks
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.
yes but its not about cases its about hospitalisations and deaths last 7 days cases down 8.4% but hospitalisations up 4.7% and deaths up 25.1%
As I'm sure you are aware both are lagging indicators. Expect them both to turn negative in the coming few weeks. Why wouldn't they?
Equally I seem to remember that vaccination rates in some parts of Scotland are lower than almost everywhere else in the UK. I wonder if that explains why the recent spike in Scotland isn't being repeated in England.
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'm going to say something controversial here, but I think Michael Mcintyre is funny. I don't really understand the venom that is directed at him. Sorry!
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.
I agree with that; they are still both relevant and funny. But also, despite being nearly 40 years old, I would struggle to find anything remotely offensive (by today's standards) in them, so there's not a chance of them being caught out by what some fear as woke cancel culture. Goes to show you can be funny without being offensive.
Paul Eddington once got the writers to tone down some scathing jokes about local authorities and nuclear-free zones, which I suppose would have been the woke cancel culture of its day.
NY Federal Reserve now sees inflation at 5.2% in one year, 4% in three years; a series high with "large expected price rises" in food, rent, and medical costs.
But but but, Biden economic advisors said the west had solved inflation....
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.
yes but its not about cases its about hospitalisations and deaths last 7 days cases down 8.4% but hospitalisations up 4.7% and deaths up 25.1%
As I'm sure you are aware both are lagging indicators. Expect them both to turn negative in the coming few weeks. Why wouldn't they?
remember the big drop in cases late july. Hospitalisations and deaths continued upward despite the drop. Also as we move into autumn the seasons are moving against us for respiratory viruses. As i say lets see what happens the next few weeks
I may be being unfair but you come over almost as disappointed that we are getting on top of this dreadful illness
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.
This sort of thing is why, although I'm generally in favour of trans rights, I don't think MtoF trans people should be able to play competitive female sports at any level, yet alone the Olympics. Yes, there's an unfairness in not letting them: but there's also an unfairness in letting them, and it becomes a case of balancing up those unfairnesses. Leaving aside the risk of injury in some sports, no-one has a fundamental right to play sports.
But this does lead to some nasty complexities, as the Caster Semenya case has already shown.
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 think our culture knows more about drugs for physical endurance than men's hair-softening products.
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.
I agree with that; they are still both relevant and funny. But also, despite being nearly 40 years old, I would struggle to find anything remotely offensive (by today's standards) in them, so there's not a chance of them being caught out by what some fear as woke cancel culture. Goes to show you can be funny without being offensive.
Yes, one thing we have lost the ability to do completely in this country is the pre-watershed sitcom. These used to be almost on a par with pop music in their centrality to British culture.
NY Federal Reserve now sees inflation at 5.2% in one year, 4% in three years; a series high with "large expected price rises" in food, rent, and medical costs.
But but but, Biden economic advisors said the west had solved inflation....
Stagflation here we come. Worse here, because Brexit.
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.
I would not consider Jacinda Ahern as a model any British politician should follow in relation to Covid.
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.
The virus has to run out of people to infect eventually, unless it starts reinfecting people in significant numbers, and it might be now.
If it isn't quite yet then behaviour modification is the obvious alternative explanation - and it's hard to quantify.
I remember people optimistically stating that Delta - back when it was the Indian variant - was hitting a wall of vaccinated people and not spreading into the rural areas around Bolton and Bedford. Unfortunately that turned out not to be the case. But we have had a lot more vaccinations and infections since then, so it might be right this time.
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'm going to say something controversial here, but I think Michael Mcintyre is funny. I don't really understand the venom that is directed at him. Sorry!
He is the Coldplay of comedy. He is very good at what he does, but it is very safe, very vanilla and I think if every comedian was Mcintrye-esque, it would be a very boring space, in the same way if you went to a 3 day music festival and you got 100 Coldplay clones.
NY Federal Reserve now sees inflation at 5.2% in one year, 4% in three years; a series high with "large expected price rises" in food, rent, and medical costs.
But but but, Biden economic advisors said the west had solved inflation....
Stagflation here we come. Worse here, because Brexit.
High inflation in the USA is because Brexit. Interesting. 🤔
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.
Without wanting to go all contrarian, I wouldn't describe the last 18 months as Boris erring on the side of liberty.
Bloody hell, office is at > 70% capacity tomorrow and Thursday according to the survey we send on Monday morning. It's going to feel almost like pre-pandemic where we ran at ~80-90% of capacity. Think I might ask senior management if we can do a team lunch on Thursday, might be a bit late to get catering sorted though.
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..
And there are some good points, which you slightly skated around
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.
I would not consider Jacinda Ahern as a model any British politician should follow in relation to Covid.
Jacinda Ahern's is a terrible model to follow for a country as densely populated and interconnected as the UK.
Anyone who says that is either trolling or hasn't thought for a second the differences between NZ and the UK.
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.
I would not consider Jacinda Ahern as a model any British politician should follow in relation to Covid.
PB Tories don’t. Because they believe their own fart-pipes.
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?
I haven’t worn a mask in months. Nobody does in Hackney.
The Cotswolds in mid August, OTOH, was full of curtain-twitching types who looked askance at my naked face.
More askance than I usually get!
I have only worn a mask when it mandatory both de jure and de facto.
Yet I visited Oxfordshire over the summer where it was seemingly mandatory de facto albeit not de jure.
I agree that London is very much at the dovish end of the spectrum.
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'm going to say something controversial here, but I think Michael Mcintyre is funny. I don't really understand the venom that is directed at him. Sorry!
He is the Coldplay of comedy. He is very good at what he does, but it is very safe, very vanilla and I think if every comedian was Mcintrye-esque, it would be a very boring space, in the same way if you went to a 3 day music festival and you got 100 Coldplay clones.
I kind of agree with that, and he's certainly not my favourite comedian. But I think he is better than Coldplay!
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.
I agree with that; they are still both relevant and funny. But also, despite being nearly 40 years old, I would struggle to find anything remotely offensive (by today's standards) in them, so there's not a chance of them being caught out by what some fear as woke cancel culture. Goes to show you can be funny without being offensive.
Yes, one thing we have lost the ability to do completely in this country is the pre-watershed sitcom. These used to be almost on a par with pop music in their centrality to British culture.
I'd offer Not Going Out as a possible example. May not be everyone's cup of tea, but some really well written episodes, with whip smart jokes throughout.
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?
Does she say that? The boy says white and one like my men, which is much funnier, but perhaps she says that first to set it up.
Then there’s the whole running predatory pedo gay gag
‘Say, son, do you like watching gladiator movies?’
It wouldn’t get past the first edit today. In fact maybe 50% or more of the best jokes would be verboten
in july when we had cases around 30000 average daily deaths were around 30. Now with same cases average daily deaths around 150 a five fold increase. This means that by November with average cases around 30000 average deaths per day could spike to the 500 to 1000 level. Doesnt mean they will but its a possibility
NY Federal Reserve now sees inflation at 5.2% in one year, 4% in three years; a series high with "large expected price rises" in food, rent, and medical costs.
But but but, Biden economic advisors said the west had solved inflation....
Stagflation here we come. Worse here, because Brexit.
Happily our inflation rate will top out below that as we've already taken a fair bit of the pain because of Brexit and other factors. I think the City consensus is 3.5% later this year and then dropping back to 2.5% over the course of next year which is hardly a disaster.
Anyway, stagflation wouldn't occur in a high inflation environment as it causes people to spend rather than save. The US is stuck in a perfect storm of high inflation but still being having the world's safe haven currency so they can't depreciate their way out of running a gigantic current account deficit.
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.
I agree with that; they are still both relevant and funny. But also, despite being nearly 40 years old, I would struggle to find anything remotely offensive (by today's standards) in them, so there's not a chance of them being caught out by what some fear as woke cancel culture. Goes to show you can be funny without being offensive.
Yeah but shame to limit it like that.
All views about humour are subjective except mine. The funniest book ever written is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but it took a woman criticising it on the r4 book program to point out how horrible it is - the protagonists are effectively always bullying and intimidating people who can't fight back. HST's Hell's Angels is a real revelation, of what a pussy he is when up against real opposition.
Wouldn't want airplane without I speak fluent jive, or people queueing up to hit the hysterical woman.
in july when we had cases around 30000 average daily deaths were around 30. Now with same cases average daily deaths around 150 a five fold increase. This means that by November with average cases around 30000 average deaths per day could spike to the 500 to 1000 level. Doesnt mean they will but its a possibility
Many things are possibilities. But, in all likelihood, falling cases mean falling deaths in due course.
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.
I agree with that; they are still both relevant and funny. But also, despite being nearly 40 years old, I would struggle to find anything remotely offensive (by today's standards) in them, so there's not a chance of them being caught out by what some fear as woke cancel culture. Goes to show you can be funny without being offensive.
Yes, one thing we have lost the ability to do completely in this country is the pre-watershed sitcom. These used to be almost on a par with pop music in their centrality to British culture.
We’ve lost the ability to do sitcoms entirely. Risqué or middlebrow. But so have the Americans
Colbert was the last seriously funny US TV show. When he was satire. But now he’s just another late night chat show host. Agreeable, but no more
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'm going to say something controversial here, but I think Michael Mcintyre is funny. I don't really understand the venom that is directed at him. Sorry!
He is the Coldplay of comedy. He is very good at what he does, but it is very safe, very vanilla and I think if every comedian was Mcintrye-esque, it would be a very boring space, in the same way if you went to a 3 day music festival and you got 100 Coldplay clones.
I kind of agree with that, and he's certainly not my favourite comedian. But I think he is better than Coldplay!
Before Dave Gorman got married and had kids, his early work were absolutely side spitting and interesting, without being rude or offensive or particularly sweary. Mark Thomas was at the other end, was interesting, but rude, sweary and certainly offensive if you aren't left wing and for similar reasons isn't what he was.
I enjoyed both, even though I doubt I agree with Mark Thomas politically on much, I found him genuinely very funny and challenged my beliefs a fair bit.
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.
People who say “prison island” are just berks.
I’m not a political fan on Ardern, and NZ had/has several advantages not available to other countries, but she did the right thing to close the borders and lock down with “extreme prejudice”.
And again, more recently.
As a result, NZers have very largely avoided all lockdowns and mask wearing, and nor has the economy cratered as badly as it has in other places.
NZ has 1/14 the population of the U.K. And has had 1/5000 of the deaths.
Your argument is somewhat weakened by the fact that Auckland is currently in week 4/5/6 (?) of extreme mega lockdown. Although your logic is decent as far as it goes.
What is completely and utterly baffling and extremely frustrating is why no country has managed to successfully combine the Prison Island – Rapid Vax strategies. The UK was shite at the former and great at the latter. NZ was a great at the former but shite at the latter.
It's one of the weird phenomenons of this pandemic.
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'm going to say something controversial here, but I think Michael Mcintyre is funny. I don't really understand the venom that is directed at him. Sorry!
He is the Coldplay of comedy. He is very good at what he does, but it is very safe, very vanilla and I think if every comedian was Mcintrye-esque, it would be a very boring space, in the same way if you went to a 3 day music festival and you got 100 Coldplay clones.
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.
I agree with that; they are still both relevant and funny. But also, despite being nearly 40 years old, I would struggle to find anything remotely offensive (by today's standards) in them, so there's not a chance of them being caught out by what some fear as woke cancel culture. Goes to show you can be funny without being offensive.
Yes, one thing we have lost the ability to do completely in this country is the pre-watershed sitcom. These used to be almost on a par with pop music in their centrality to British culture.
We’ve lost the ability to do sitcoms entirely. Risqué or middlebrow. But so have the Americans
Colbert was the last seriously funny US TV show. When he was satire. But now he’s just another late night chat show host. Agreeable, but no more
All those shows in the US aren't what they were. I think partly because they have just spent 5 years doing ORANGE MAN BAD night after night after night. Its like a band just playing one song over and over again for years.
Last Week tonight, when that started it was really good. Then it was dire during Trump. I have seen a couple since and there were better, but again not what they were.
Bloody hell, office is at > 70% capacity tomorrow and Thursday according to the survey we send on Monday morning. It's going to feel almost like pre-pandemic where we ran at ~80-90% of capacity. Think I might ask senior management if we can do a team lunch on Thursday, might be a bit late to get catering sorted though.
Book a Thirsty Thursday team night out instead – the atmosphere in town has been bloody great all month, crackling in fact, thanks to La Rentree and the excellent late summer weather.
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'm going to say something controversial here, but I think Michael Mcintyre is funny. I don't really understand the venom that is directed at him. Sorry!
He is the Coldplay of comedy. He is very good at what he does, but it is very safe, very vanilla and I think if every comedian was Mcintrye-esque, it would be a very boring space, in the same way if you went to a 3 day music festival and you got 100 Coldplay clones.
I kind of agree with that, and he's certainly not my favourite comedian. But I think he is better than Coldplay!
Before Dave Gorman got married and had kids, his early work were absolutely side spitting and interesting, without being rude or offensive or particularly sweary. Mark Thomas was at the other end, was interesting, but rude, sweary and certainly offensive if you aren't left wing and for similar reasons isn't what he was.
I enjoyed both, even though I doubt I agree with Mark Thomas politically on much.
The young Eddie Izzard is the funniest comic I have ever seen live. He had that ability to build and build ‘comic arousal’ until you hurt, and you were sick of laughing. And he was never classically offensive, and rarely swore
Shame he went all political, but he will always sing in the memory
in july when we had cases around 30000 average daily deaths were around 30. Now with same cases average daily deaths around 150 a five fold increase. This means that by November with average cases around 30000 average deaths per day could spike to the 500 to 1000 level. Doesnt mean they will but its a possibility
Many things are possibilities. But, in all likelihood, falling cases mean falling deaths in due course.
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.
I agree with that; they are still both relevant and funny. But also, despite being nearly 40 years old, I would struggle to find anything remotely offensive (by today's standards) in them, so there's not a chance of them being caught out by what some fear as woke cancel culture. Goes to show you can be funny without being offensive.
Yes, one thing we have lost the ability to do completely in this country is the pre-watershed sitcom. These used to be almost on a par with pop music in their centrality to British culture.
We’ve lost the ability to do sitcoms entirely. Risqué or middlebrow. But so have the Americans
Colbert was the last seriously funny US TV show. When he was satire. But now he’s just another late night chat show host. Agreeable, but no more
"The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" on Amazon is often hilarious and is entertaining drama.
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.
yes but its not about cases its about hospitalisations and deaths last 7 days cases down 8.4% but hospitalisations up 4.7% and deaths up 25.1%
As I'm sure you are aware both are lagging indicators. Expect them both to turn negative in the coming few weeks. Why wouldn't they?
Equally I seem to remember that vaccination rates in some parts of Scotland are lower than almost everywhere else in the UK. I wonder if that explains why the recent spike in Scotland isn't being repeated in England.
You sure? That puzzles me. Overall rate is (or till recently was) a bit higher than in England. And look at this map
However, "For English areas, the population used is the number of people of the National Immunisation Management Service (NIMS) database. For Scottish areas, the population used is the mid-2020 population estimate from National Records of Scotland. Comparisons between English and Scottish areas should be made with caution"
Even so, thjere isn't the heterogeneity one sees in England. So puzzled.
Bloody hell, office is at > 70% capacity tomorrow and Thursday according to the survey we send on Monday morning. It's going to feel almost like pre-pandemic where we ran at ~80-90% of capacity. Think I might ask senior management if we can do a team lunch on Thursday, might be a bit late to get catering sorted though.
Book a Thirsty Thursday team night out instead – the atmosphere in town has been bloody great all month, crackling in fact, thanks to La Rentree and the excellent late summer weather.
I expect individual teams will want to plan their own ones, I know my team has one planned the other senior has been organising £50 per head socialising budget for us. Lunch would be a nice little addition but not sure the company will go for it with such late notice.
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.
I agree with that; they are still both relevant and funny. But also, despite being nearly 40 years old, I would struggle to find anything remotely offensive (by today's standards) in them, so there's not a chance of them being caught out by what some fear as woke cancel culture. Goes to show you can be funny without being offensive.
Yes, one thing we have lost the ability to do completely in this country is the pre-watershed sitcom. These used to be almost on a par with pop music in their centrality to British culture.
We’ve lost the ability to do sitcoms entirely. Risqué or middlebrow. But so have the Americans
Colbert was the last seriously funny US TV show. When he was satire. But now he’s just another late night chat show host. Agreeable, but no more
"The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" on Amazon is often hilarious and is entertaining drama.
Wish I could agree. It’s fun and entertaining. But great or even notable comedy? Not for me
I do TRY to find good new comedy. I try quite hard
Williamson is a loyalist so I doubt it, removing Patel would also make her a focal point for rightwing opposition to the government on the backbenches.
The only move I expect is Raab to Justice with Truss becoming Foreign Secretary.
It is possible Gove gets a promotion too though as he is competent whatever other problems he has
Who to Trade?
Keep Truss doing it and bring it within the FCDO.
Has she worked out to use a phone yet?
They are such dummies. Dimmer than a 5 watt bulb.
Only slightly more (or less stupid) than people who fall for faked photos on the inter webs.
Regardless it protrays them as they are ( thick dummies ) and I wonder how you know it is fake
Oh, that's nothing. The Republicans in Texas have decided that California's on-line privacy laws aren't absurd enough, and are about to enact something that makes GDPR look positively sane.
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.
yes but its not about cases its about hospitalisations and deaths last 7 days cases down 8.4% but hospitalisations up 4.7% and deaths up 25.1%
As I'm sure you are aware both are lagging indicators. Expect them both to turn negative in the coming few weeks. Why wouldn't they?
remember the big drop in cases late july. Hospitalisations and deaths continued upward despite the drop. Also as we move into autumn the seasons are moving against us for respiratory viruses. As i say lets see what happens the next few weeks
I may be being unfair but you come over almost as disappointed that we are getting on top of this dreadful illness
I think that's unfair, let's see where we are after this winter. I feel uneasy about declaring victory when we are about to head into a period where respiratory illnesses usually thrive in.
The only thing I can confidently say is we are heading in the right direction thanks to amazing vaccines and other measures, and we are in a much better position than we were in back in 2020.
But we haven't won anything yet, Covid is not yet beaten. Let's see what winter brings.
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'm going to say something controversial here, but I think Michael Mcintyre is funny. I don't really understand the venom that is directed at him. Sorry!
He is the Coldplay of comedy. He is very good at what he does, but it is very safe, very vanilla and I think if every comedian was Mcintrye-esque, it would be a very boring space, in the same way if you went to a 3 day music festival and you got 100 Coldplay clones.
I kind of agree with that, and he's certainly not my favourite comedian. But I think he is better than Coldplay!
Before Dave Gorman got married and had kids, his early work were absolutely side spitting and interesting, without being rude or offensive or particularly sweary. Mark Thomas was at the other end, was interesting, but rude, sweary and certainly offensive if you aren't left wing and for similar reasons isn't what he was.
I enjoyed both, even though I doubt I agree with Mark Thomas politically on much, I found him genuinely very funny and challenged my beliefs a fair bit.
Gormans tour with the box of slides that he had bought, to riff of a song (cannot recall the details) was brilliant. He has a mind that will take the next step on a journey of weird, and then the next step and just keep going. Love it. Also the feckwittery of the guy called Dave Gorman, with a dad also called Dave Gorman, not thinking of his dad when asked - 'Do you know anyone else called Dave Gorman?'. Genius.
just been browsing another board and someone made a very good point that the dip in cases now and in late july both coincided with good weeks of weather. So it may well be the reduction of indoor mixing thats driving this
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.
in july when we had cases around 30000 average daily deaths were around 30. Now with same cases average daily deaths around 150 a five fold increase. This means that by November with average cases around 30000 average deaths per day could spike to the 500 to 1000 level. Doesnt mean they will but its a possibility
Pointless extrapolation. Deaths lag admissions, which lag cases. So the correct time to consider the deaths from the July spike is not July, it is at least 2 to 3 weeks later.
Williamson is a loyalist so I doubt it, removing Patel would also make her a focal point for rightwing opposition to the government on the backbenches.
The only move I expect is Raab to Justice with Truss becoming Foreign Secretary.
It is possible Gove gets a promotion too though as he is competent whatever other problems he has
Who to Trade?
Keep Truss doing it and bring it within the FCDO.
Has she worked out to use a phone yet?
They are such dummies. Dimmer than a 5 watt bulb.
Only slightly more (or less stupid) than people who fall for faked photos on the inter webs.
Regardless it protrays them as they are ( thick dummies ) and I wonder how you know it is fake
For God's sake, "how do you know it's not fake", because she's a functional adult, that's why.
Oh, and because of the actual non-photoshopped picture, too.
Does anyone remember Charlie Drake? He was the Michael McIntyre of the 1950s and early sixties. Without the wokeness of course. So he could have been the worst of all - had he known about it.
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.
I thought rugby (entirely rightly, in my view) had said no to trans women playing against natal women?
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.
yes but its not about cases its about hospitalisations and deaths last 7 days cases down 8.4% but hospitalisations up 4.7% and deaths up 25.1%
As I'm sure you are aware both are lagging indicators. Expect them both to turn negative in the coming few weeks. Why wouldn't they?
remember the big drop in cases late july. Hospitalisations and deaths continued upward despite the drop. Also as we move into autumn the seasons are moving against us for respiratory viruses. As i say lets see what happens the next few weeks
I may be being unfair but you come over almost as disappointed that we are getting on top of this dreadful illness
I think that's unfair, let's see where we are after this winter. I feel uneasy about declaring victory when we are about to head into a period where respiratory illnesses usually thrive in.
The only thing I can confidently say is we are heading in the right direction thanks to amazing vaccines and other measures, and we are in a much better position than we were in back in 2020.
But we haven't won anything yet, Covid is not yet beaten. Let's see what winter brings.
Maybe it is unfair, but the nuance of the postings does give some indication to it
There are a couple of things to wind out before being certain of this case rate reduction:
Effect of first tests of many pupils (prior to returning) are now moving in the previous week's data The low number for the Bank Holiday is moving out of the Previous week, leaving th higher numbers of the following days.
This will affecting both reporting date and sample date figures to potentially elevate the Previous week figures.
All said, though, that is the difference between slight fall and slight rise - we are certainly not yet seeing a Scotland style explosion.
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.
I agree with that; they are still both relevant and funny. But also, despite being nearly 40 years old, I would struggle to find anything remotely offensive (by today's standards) in them, so there's not a chance of them being caught out by what some fear as woke cancel culture. Goes to show you can be funny without being offensive.
Yes, one thing we have lost the ability to do completely in this country is the pre-watershed sitcom. These used to be almost on a par with pop music in their centrality to British culture.
We’ve lost the ability to do sitcoms entirely. Risqué or middlebrow. But so have the Americans
Colbert was the last seriously funny US TV show. When he was satire. But now he’s just another late night chat show host. Agreeable, but no more
"The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" on Amazon is often hilarious and is entertaining drama.
Wish I could agree. It’s fun and entertaining. But great or even notable comedy? Not for me
I do TRY to find good new comedy. I try quite hard
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'm going to say something controversial here, but I think Michael Mcintyre is funny. I don't really understand the venom that is directed at him. Sorry!
He is the Coldplay of comedy. He is very good at what he does, but it is very safe, very vanilla and I think if every comedian was Mcintrye-esque, it would be a very boring space, in the same way if you went to a 3 day music festival and you got 100 Coldplay clones.
I kind of agree with that, and he's certainly not my favourite comedian. But I think he is better than Coldplay!
Before Dave Gorman got married and had kids, his early work were absolutely side spitting and interesting, without being rude or offensive or particularly sweary. Mark Thomas was at the other end, was interesting, but rude, sweary and certainly offensive if you aren't left wing and for similar reasons isn't what he was.
I enjoyed both, even though I doubt I agree with Mark Thomas politically on much, I found him genuinely very funny and challenged my beliefs a fair bit.
Gormans tour with the box of slides that he had bought, to riff of a song (cannot recall the details) was brilliant. He has a mind that will take the next step on a journey of weird, and then the next step and just keep going. Love it. Also the feckwittery of the guy called Dave Gorman, with a dad also called Dave Gorman, not thinking of his dad when asked - 'Do you know anyone else called Dave Gorman?'. Genius.
Googlewhack was my favourite of those shows...that he did, what 20 years ago?
The best Mark Thomas one was strangely not one ranting about the Tories, New Labour, the Tories...it was Bravo Figaro!, much more serious one about his dad, his love of opera, battle with a horrible degenerative disease, weighed against a past of beating his mum and terrible behaviour.
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.
I agree with that; they are still both relevant and funny. But also, despite being nearly 40 years old, I would struggle to find anything remotely offensive (by today's standards) in them, so there's not a chance of them being caught out by what some fear as woke cancel culture. Goes to show you can be funny without being offensive.
Yes, one thing we have lost the ability to do completely in this country is the pre-watershed sitcom. These used to be almost on a par with pop music in their centrality to British culture.
I'd offer Not Going Out as a possible example. May not be everyone's cup of tea, but some really well written episodes, with whip smart jokes throughout.
Not going out is pleasant enough. And I think Lee Mack, Tim Vine and Katy Wix all fall into the category of 'funny whatever they do'. In common with most modern sitcoms, though, a disproportionate amount of the comedy is based on 'awkward'. Awkward was always a feature of sitcoms, but I'm sure it didn't used to be quite so central.
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.
I thought rugby (entirely rightly, in my view) had said no to trans women playing against natal women?
World Rugby has said no, but the RFU haven't quite matched that.
There are a couple of things to wind out before being certain of this case rate reduction:
Effect of first tests of many pupils (prior to returning) are now moving in the previous week's data The low number for the Bank Holiday is moving out of the Previous week, leaving th higher numbers of the following days.
This will affecting both reporting date and sample date figures to potentially elevate the Previous week figures.
All said, though, that is the difference between slight fall and slight rise - we are certainly not yet seeing a Scotland style explosion.
Given recent numbers are down on same day 2 weeks ago, not sure that mechanism would suggest any chance of a slight rise. Take the school testing surge out and the only trend is that the late August fall in cases never stopped.
So we’ve lost great music and great comedy. The golden age is long gone
But we have gastropubs
TV drama is also better.
Hmm. This is Us, Succession...Those are pretty amazing. Big Little Lies v good also.
I mean I like Line of Duty, or anything that Stephen Graham is in, obvs, but the US does great drama and I'm not sure we have anything more to offer than the odd bonnet.
Hello @CorrectHorseBattery, thanks for that. Yup, seems like it although the council by election results seem a bit all over the place.
I think though it shows how much BJ dominates the landscape though that we are talking about a reduced Con lead / essential parity for a mid-term Government as a major shift. This is still all about how the Govt does, SKS has got nowhere
Hello @CorrectHorseBattery, thanks for that. Yup, seems like it although the council by election results seem a bit all over the place.
I think though it shows how much BJ dominates the landscape though that we are talking about a reduced Con lead / essential parity for a mid-term Government as a major shift. This is still all about how the Govt does, SKS has got nowhere
@MrEd, welcome back Sir. I hope you are well, we have not crossed paths of late.
NY Federal Reserve now sees inflation at 5.2% in one year, 4% in three years; a series high with "large expected price rises" in food, rent, and medical costs.
But but but, Biden economic advisors said the west had solved inflation....
The good stuff is remembered, the crap forgotten. It creates a bias and the misconception that things were better in the past. Plenty of good comedy and music about today. Just plenty of rubbish too and less filtering.
Comments
last 7 days cases down 8.4%
but hospitalisations up 4.7%
and deaths up 25.1%
Nobody does in Hackney.
The Cotswolds in mid August, OTOH, was full of curtain-twitching types who looked askance at my naked face.
More askance than I usually get!
Hospitalisations for the last 2 days data are both lower than all of the preceding month.
Hate to break it to you, but things are going well.
What's been interesting is watching the Australians finally shake off their complacency about the vaccine and strike major supply deals to get everyone vaccinated by the end of October and everything reopened by the end of November.
I’m not a political fan on Ardern, and NZ had/has several advantages not available to other countries, but she did the right thing to close the borders and lock down with “extreme prejudice”.
And again, more recently.
As a result, NZers have very largely avoided all lockdowns and mask wearing, and nor has the economy cratered as badly as it has in other places.
NZ has 1/14 the population of the U.K.
And has had 1/5000 of the deaths.
But but but, Biden economic advisors said the west had solved inflation....
But this does lead to some nasty complexities, as the Caster Semenya case has already shown.
These used to be almost on a par with pop music in their centrality to British culture.
https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1437436633511604236?s=20
Worse here, because Brexit.
If it isn't quite yet then behaviour modification is the obvious alternative explanation - and it's hard to quantify.
I remember people optimistically stating that Delta - back when it was the Indian variant - was hitting a wall of vaccinated people and not spreading into the rural areas around Bolton and Bedford. Unfortunately that turned out not to be the case. But we have had a lot more vaccinations and infections since then, so it might be right this time.
Anyone who says that is either trolling or hasn't thought for a second the differences between NZ and the UK.
Because they believe their own fart-pipes.
Yet I visited Oxfordshire over the summer where it was seemingly mandatory de facto albeit not de jure.
I agree that London is very much at the dovish end of the spectrum.
‘Say, son, do you like watching gladiator movies?’
It wouldn’t get past the first edit today. In fact maybe 50% or more of the best jokes would be verboten
Anyway, stagflation wouldn't occur in a high inflation environment as it causes people to spend rather than save. The US is stuck in a perfect storm of high inflation but still being having the world's safe haven currency so they can't depreciate their way out of running a gigantic current account deficit.
All views about humour are subjective except mine. The funniest book ever written is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but it took a woman criticising it on the r4 book program to point out how horrible it is - the protagonists are effectively always bullying and intimidating people who can't fight back. HST's Hell's Angels is a real revelation, of what a pussy he is when up against real opposition.
Wouldn't want airplane without I speak fluent jive, or people queueing up to hit the hysterical woman.
Colbert was the last seriously funny US TV show. When he was satire. But now he’s just another late night chat show host. Agreeable, but no more
I enjoyed both, even though I doubt I agree with Mark Thomas politically on much, I found him genuinely very funny and challenged my beliefs a fair bit.
What is completely and utterly baffling and extremely frustrating is why no country has managed to successfully combine the Prison Island – Rapid Vax strategies. The UK was shite at the former and great at the latter. NZ was a great at the former but shite at the latter.
It's one of the weird phenomenons of this pandemic.
Last Week tonight, when that started it was really good. Then it was dire during Trump. I have seen a couple since and there were better, but again not what they were.
Shame he went all political, but he will always sing in the memory
Trouble is, in terms of comedy, I fear we are right
https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/interactive-map/vaccinations
However, "For English areas, the population used is the number of people of the National Immunisation Management Service (NIMS) database. For Scottish areas, the population used is the mid-2020 population estimate from National Records of Scotland. Comparisons between English and Scottish areas should be made with caution"
Even so, thjere isn't the heterogeneity one sees in England. So puzzled.
I do TRY to find good new comedy. I try quite hard
The only thing I can confidently say is we are heading in the right direction thanks to amazing vaccines and other measures, and we are in a much better position than we were in back in 2020.
But we haven't won anything yet, Covid is not yet beaten. Let's see what winter brings.
Also the feckwittery of the guy called Dave Gorman, with a dad also called Dave Gorman, not thinking of his dad when asked - 'Do you know anyone else called Dave Gorman?'. Genius.
Oh, and because of the actual non-photoshopped picture, too.
https://twitter.com/trussliz/status/1163746041117794306
So we’ve lost great music and great comedy. The golden age is long gone
But we have gastropubs
Effect of first tests of many pupils (prior to returning) are now moving in the previous week's data
The low number for the Bank Holiday is moving out of the Previous week, leaving th higher numbers of the following days.
This will affecting both reporting date and sample date figures to potentially elevate the Previous week figures.
All said, though, that is the difference between slight fall and slight rise - we are certainly not yet seeing a Scotland style explosion.
The best Mark Thomas one was strangely not one ranting about the Tories, New Labour, the Tories...it was Bravo Figaro!, much more serious one about his dad, his love of opera, battle with a horrible degenerative disease, weighed against a past of beating his mum and terrible behaviour.
In common with most modern sitcoms, though, a disproportionate amount of the comedy is based on 'awkward'. Awkward was always a feature of sitcoms, but I'm sure it didn't used to be quite so central.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2021/mar/30/trans-women-in-english-rugby-could-face-height-and-weight-safety-checks
Hopefully the Golden Epoch of TV drama will now resume
Conservative lead down from 9% to 4%
https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1437446073895817222?s=19
Obvious trend now
Keir Starmer for PM, could it be so?
I mean I like Line of Duty, or anything that Stephen Graham is in, obvs, but the US does great drama and I'm not sure we have anything more to offer than the odd bonnet.
I think though it shows how much BJ dominates the landscape though that we are talking about a reduced Con lead / essential parity for a mid-term Government as a major shift. This is still all about how the Govt does, SKS has got nowhere
Sunak continues his decline, he will be in the negatives soon
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-58507764
Conservative 39% (-2)
Labour 35% (+3)
Liberal Democrat 9% (-2)
Green 6% (–)
Reform UK 5% (+1)
Scottish National Party 4% (–)
Other 3% (–)
Changes +/- 6 Sept
First time Cons below 40% since Oct. 2020.
https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1437446073895817222?s=20