I can’t help but notice how shit things that are supposed to be funny are, it’s all dumbed down and in-your-face so that stupid people can understand it.  I think people are scared to cross boundaries and be contentious, in case they offend their audience and lose them.  Frankie Boyle is one known for his risque material, he tries to offend but it’s lost its edge now, making the same joke over and over again stopped being funny after the fifth time.  One liners make me laugh but they aren’t funny, like some other low forms of wit, they may be clever but all-in-all they’re a really poor form of humour.  Much like one liners, slapstick is pretty poor too and you shouldn’t be proud of making people laugh with that most of the time, I’ll get onto that later.

Loads of comedians today are plain shite, for example Russell Howard, Russell Kane and Sarah Millican, and others who use Mock the Week to launch their career and see it dwindle from there.  All what Howard does is make spazzy noises, with actions to match and think that adding anything associated to a rude part of the body to — what would have been — a perfectly alright line would make it totally outrageous.  He also makes out his family members are hilarious; his brother or gran supposedly persistently coming out with smarmy jibes towards a prominent figure, when they so obviously don’t.  Kane is a ponce, still trapped in the closet, moaning about having women’s problems all the time whilst pirouetting across the stage with his shit hair.

Russell Howard has somehow made a career copying a Phoenix Nights scene.

Millican never shuts up about women problems — in her irritating, high pitched North-Eastern accent — thinking that misogynism is funny.  I’m not a feminist but her material is piss poor, it’s like guys who go ‘why are those women playing football?  They should be in the kitchen!’; it isn’t the sexism which makes those sort of “jokes” shit, that stuff got old pretty quickly in the ’70s.  I could write her a tour where she bickers on about eating cake and menstrual cramps, I could reel in the quids.  There’s that other one, with the puppet monkey, making a living off ripping off the Knowing Me Knowing You with Alan Partridge ‘Cheeky Monkey’ skit from 1994.

James Corden, now he’s a prick.  I bet he thinks he has lots of mates and shows off to them for laughs yet behind his back, they call him a twat.  He probably has ADHD, and would wither and die without attention he so desperately craves.  If he was the only person left on Earth, he would die because there’s no one to take notice of him.  Also he makes jokes about his weight, like wears swimming trunks or a leotard because he’s a cretinous dick.  Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer (or Reeves and Mortimer or Vic and Bob) are a pair I don’t find funny, what is funny about grown men hitting each other in the face with pans and blowing a drain pipe in someone’s face?  I liked them in the revival of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) though, even though I was like 9 back when that was on.

Hilarious.

There’s something about “comedians” that makes them better actors, probably because the humour is a lot more subtle.  Jack Whitehall is a shit, snobby stand-up but I didn’t mind him in Fresh Meat although I’m not fond of that — that Scottish bloke sounds like an Englishman putting on a Scottish accent and the black girl has an annoying tone of voice, making herself sound like she’s a bit dense.  Miranda, on the other hand, is all-round awful.  God knows how she or her eponymous show have been given the green light by the commissioning gods at the BBC, it makes me weep for humanity.

The people who actually think those lot are funny — with the possible exception of Vic and Bob for being old and a bit past my time — are the sort who chase the reflection of a watch face across the carpet, trying to catch it.  The difference between them mentioned prior and the Chuckle Brothers is that the Chuckle Brothers’ target audience are little kids, people who slapstick is really aimed for.  7 year olds aren’t expected to understand smarmy comments that mummy and daddy laugh at, their comedy needs to be obvious and that’s why Paul and Barry Chuckle have a charm about them.

Loads of “comedy” programmes need to add a laughter track so they force the laughter onto you, like Two Broke Girls, laughter track after shitty innuendo each time.  Scrubs didn’t bother with a laughter track and rightly so, although they try so hard to be funny but it very rarely is, at least it didn’t try to force me to laugh.  I laughed at that show three times, twice in the same episode at a little child’s expense (a doctor dropped spaghetti on his head and he got called ‘gay’ by him later) probably because laughing at that is wrong, and the other time wasn’t that funny.

‘Jackanackanory‘

I’m Alan Partridge is funny and has a laughter track and so is The Big Bang Theory, I’m sure they do it for emphasis.  I didn’t think much of either show at first but you need time to understand the humour, TBBT has admittedly lost its edge in later seasons for revolving around soppy love scenes far too often.  The laughs aren’t cheap, they’re fully deserved.  Alan Partridge is just a narrow-minded Steve Coogan with a curved lip, yet he has given it its own personality — Coogan would be classed as bipolar if he didn’t have Partridge at his disposal to let his true self go.  One thing that comedians can get away with is making pig ignorant statements because it appears they say them for jokes, whether they are being serious or not.  But when it’s someone else who says stuff like that, they’re a stupid idiot, unless they say it at an open mic session.  Strange one, that.

I snigger at sly, “under the radar” comments that go unappreciated by everyone else.  I snigger at football commentators pronouncing rude sounding names, or trying to avoid vulgar pronunciations, and using sporting lingo like ‘cross-cum-shot’.  I think what makes the latter funny is that sport is not intended to be funny, unless Mark Lawrenson is appointed as the summariser.  My sense of humour isn’t highbrow, my standards are higher than most peoples’, that is all.  I’m not one to blow my own trumpet but people say I’m funny, I think my style is observational if anything, dunno.  I suppose I do observe and comment.