Truly pathetic attempts at humour

[Captain Z]

Wasn't really sure what other thread to post this in, and it really isn't worth starting a fresh thread just for this video, but this got brought to my attention earlier.

Apparently, in December 1994, someone thought it would be a good idea to release a danced-up version of the theme from 'One Foot In The Grave'.  (The CD single contains no less than 5 additional dance remixes).



Anyway, a music video was made, featuring Eric Idle and Richard Wilson (true to form, Idle is filmed sitting by a swimming pool in Los Angeles). 
Idle mimes along and does some appalling half-arsed physical comedy, and it's the most pathetic, unfunny, tossed-off-in-about-an-hour thing I've seen in some time.

BEHOLD.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdtAXqec9-w

Incredible. Got to #50 in the charts. Reminds me of the preset dance beat on the keyboards in our school music classroom. Although that would have been in 1999, as we would often spend the time trying to create ATB's 9pm with the pitch mod wheel.

Speaking of naff novelty dance records, does anyone remember one that sampled the Nokia ringtone around 2000? It was definitely riding off the success of Trigger Happy TV and there was a big mobile phone on the cover of the CD single. I'm not thinking of Mario Piu - Communication, this one definitely sampled the ringtone rather than the interference noise.

[dissolute ocelot]

Speaking of naff novelty dance records, does anyone remember one that sampled the Nokia ringtone around 2000? It was definitely riding off the success of Trigger Happy TV and there was a big mobile phone on the cover of the CD single. I'm not thinking of Mario Piu - Communication, this one definitely sampled the ringtone rather than the interference noise.

No idea about that track, but there's about a million videos of people dancing to Nokia ringtones. I guess like Tik Tok (with which it may do a Venn diagram) it's something I'll never understand.

[buzby]

Speaking of naff novelty dance records, does anyone remember one that sampled the Nokia ringtone around 2000? It was definitely riding off the success of Trigger Happy TV and there was a big mobile phone on the cover of the CD single. I'm not thinking of Mario Piu - Communication, this one definitely sampled the ringtone rather than the interference noise.

Solid Gold Chartbusters - I Wanna 1-2-1 With You
It written by none other than Guy Pratt and a post-KLF Jimmy Cauty, with lyrics & vocals from comedy writer & director Lloyd Stanton and was produced by Cauty's old KLF collborator Mark 'Spike' Stent. The female vocals were by an unknown singer called Denise Palmer, with Tessa Niles on backing vocals and actress Debbie Chazen as the voice of the operator. It was releeased in December 1999 in an effort to get the Christmas/Millenium #1 but peaked at #62. As well as using the Nokia ringtone, it also lifts the 4-note keyboard riff from ATB's 9pm (Til I Come), which had got to #1 in Septermber that year.

The video features Cauty and Pratt in the giant cellphone costumes alongside Stanton as te prick with the phone, with Chazen as the operator.  There are also cameos from Roland Rivron, John Thompson and Stephen Marcus. Like Vindaloo (which Pratt also co-wrote), it has the stench of the Groucho Club all over it. In the media blurb for it's release, they were billed as 'The world's first Novelty Supergroup', and Cauty was quoted as saying "It's awful. Hear it once and that's it, it's all over. There is nothing vaguely hip, it's just pure now, throwaway novelty pop.".

[Jim Bob]

One thing: Aren't they more likely to be pens than batteries? A) They don't look like batteries, and B) batteries aren't art supplies.

I was going as per Jim Bob's post at the top of this page about the original comic which interpreted them as batteries (the 'joke' being that they are her actual art supplles lol) . But looking at the strip again, they do indeed look more like pens and indeed in this day and age people tend not to use batteries much in digital art, what with tablets and other modern art tools all being powered by being plugged in or pre charged, so I think you're right.

They look like ink cartridges to me

I've figured it out; they're styluses.

[darth andy]

My nephew is really into David Walliams books, every now and then I read a chapter or two out loud to him and they are quite funny, I can see why he likes them. Now he's reading a book by David Baddiel, about a lad in a wheelchair with a special car and it is shockingly bad. My nephew cracks up at the Walliams books but just seems confused by this one, it's really difficult to read out loud as the dialogue is just relentless back and forth one or two word answers and occasional farting. it's got so many references to what I imagine Baddiel thinks is youth culture shoehorned in, memes and phones and internet lingo that reads like he wrote it in a sort of deliberately out of touch way to give a little nod to parents reading it to their kids at how absurd the interests of kids are nowadays. Absolute drivel

[Captain Z]

Solid Gold Chartbusters - I Wanna 1-2-1 With You
It written by none other than Guy Pratt and a post-KLF Jimmy Cauty, with lyrics & vocals from comedy writer & director Lloyd Stanton and was produced by Cauty's old KLF collborator Mark 'Spike' Stent. The female vocals were by an unknown singer called Denise Palmer, with Tessa Niles on backing vocals and actress Debbie Chazen as the voice of the operator. It was releeased in December 1999 in an effort to get the Christmas/Millenium #1 but peaked at #62. As well as using the Nokia ringtone, it also lifts the 4-note keyboard riff from ATB's 9pm (Til I Come), which had got to #1 in Septermber that year.

The video features Cauty and Pratt in the giant cellphone costumes alongside Stanton as te prick with the phone, with Chazen as the operator.  There are also cameos from Roland Rivron, John Thompson and Stephen Marcus. Like Vindaloo (which Pratt also co-wrote), it has the stench of the Groucho Club all over it. In the media blurb for it's release, Cauty was quoted as saying "It's awful. Hear it once and that's it, it's all over. There is nothing vaguely hip, it's just pure now, throwaway novelty pop.".

Ha, that's amazing. As soon as I read the title I could hear the lyrics in my head. Bugged me for years, searched 'Nokia' on Discogs a few times but never came across it. They must have taken some inspiration from 'Cuban Boys - C vs I' too.

[buzby]

Ha, that's amazing. As soon as I read the title I could hear the lyrics in my head. Bugged me for years, searched 'Nokia' on Discogs a few times but never came across it. They must have taken some inspiration from 'Cuban Boys - C vs I' too.

I imagine so. C vs I had been doing the rounds since April that year when Peel had first played it, and then it got included on a sampler CD that went round the labels. It got picked up by EMI and was going to be released in January the follwing year until Jo Wiley started playing it too, so it was brought forward and was released on the same day (13/12/99) as the SGC single. They both peaked in the same week (25/12/99), though C Vs I got to the much more respectable #4.

NotBBC's Flamingkitties was part of one of Ricardo Autobahn's other projects, The Attery Squash.

[jobotic]

Bought the Cuban Boys album Eastwood. Never play it apart from this one, which I think is brilliant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWmI-JUhRYs

Their remix of Does Your Heart Go Boom? by Helen Love was nice too.

[thenoise]

All that comic really wants to say is:

- Cuh, art block! Eh, other artists?
- Eurgh corporate America!
- Artists are rebels or think they are
- Acquisition of stuff doesn't give you ideas

In a hamfisted weak piddle way. (But then webcomics are low hanging fruit, as regular visitors to the thread will be aware.)

I think beginning/ending it with 'I don't know what to draw' is supposed to elicit sympathy with her audience.  She may not have known what to draw, but at least she managed to draw something.

[idunnosomename]

My nephew is really into David Walliams books, every now and then I read a chapter or two out loud to him and they are quite funny, I can see why he likes them. Now he's reading a book by David Baddiel, about a lad in a wheelchair with a special car and it is shockingly bad. My nephew cracks up at the Walliams books but just seems confused by this one, it's really difficult to read out loud as the dialogue is just relentless back and forth one or two word answers and occasional farting. it's got so many references to what I imagine Baddiel thinks is youth culture shoehorned in, memes and phones and internet lingo that reads like he wrote it in a sort of deliberately out of touch way to give a little nod to parents reading it to their kids at how absurd the interests of kids are nowadays. Absolute drivel

i mean i was pretty sure this was the case but I am delighted to know for sure that Baddiel's kids books are bandwagon-jumping self-satisfied horseshit

[thenoise]

That Chubby 'tampon' gag is absolute cracker isn't it?  I guess the audience are just laughing at the word tampon.  Fuck knows though.  It's almost like a parody of that sort of thing.  His audience is far worse than Chubby and that's saying something.  Just sit there waiting for the next racist/sexist bit to roar in approval at.  Do you really think they want to hear another one of your shitty songs, Chubby?

[Poirots BigGarlickyCorpse]

That Chubby 'tampon' gag is absolute cracker isn't it?  I guess the audience are just laughing at the word tampon.  Fuck knows though.  It's almost like a parody of that sort of thing.  His audience is far worse than Chubby and that's saying something.  Just sit there waiting for the next racist/sexist bit to roar in approval at.  Do you really think they want to hear another one of your shitty songs, Chubby?

Bottom did it way better because you're laughing at Eddie "tak[ing] the ancient wisdom of Buddhism and pervert[ing] it into a dastardly scheme whereby you take over the brain of a supermodel so you can have a quick ogle of her norks". And also because they're both facing certain death hanging from a broken car on an illegal death-trap ferris wheel wired up with explosives.

[notjosh]

The fact that this tweet, which could easily have been four words + picture, is still written with the same structure as every BBC satire joke of the past 40 years says a lot about the inability of this show to do anything remotely surprising or subversive.



"Up at the beginning of the sentence... and down at the end of the sentence."

[notjosh]

I've figured it out; they're styluses.

Looks more like she's stealing several copies of Pete Best's The Best of the Beatles.

[petril]

Solid Gold Chartbusters - I Wanna 1-2-1 With You

1-2-1 eh? who would you most like to have a one 2 one with?

[Jumblegraws]

I don't need to tell you all that Chubby Brown is bad, but I'm particularly irked by his popular joke about how reincarnation can't be real because if it was, he'd have come back as Catherine Zeta-Jones's tampon, which got uproarious laughter. This doesn't work for many reasons:

He's not dead yet, and was born long before CZJ, so right off the bat it makes no sense
Reincarnation (supposedly) brings you back as a living thing, not an inanimate object
Saying something isn't real just because you don't get what you want from it. "I've never won the lottery so therefore the lottery can't be real"
You don't get to choose what you come back as, and you wouldn't be granted something based on your sexual fantasies
Why would you want to come back as something that is plugged entirely into a hole and used to absorb menstrual blood, and then thrown away, even if you did really fancy the person?

And it's just not funny.

I've been trying to look up the joke again online and he's saying that's what Iraqis believe in, which basically completes a bingo list of ignorance, but yeh it is the directness of the image and the bluster by which it is told that makes it a good joke in the context of chubby.

Just to add to the dissection, it's part of a routine about why the Iraq War was so futile, but it's not really clear why the (inaccurate) description of the forrin belief system supports this motion. So the joke's a bundle of non sequiturs wrapped inside a bigger non sequitur.

Also in that routine is a joke about how lots of Iraqis are called 'Ahmed', which will cause lots of squaddies to be accidentally killed by their comrades when they signal their position by shouting "I'm 'id 'ere!"

[thenoise]

"Up at the beginning of the sentence... and down at the end of the sentence."

Something out of yesterday's headlines involving two things.  A few descriptive words about the first thing ... but I'm actually referring to the second thing!

[Dewt]

And that's just the women!

[thenoise]

Have I Got News For You returns for it's 4548397539th series, laments CookdandBombd's TheNoise.  Safe, outdated, cliched, derivative, centrist, predictable, smug, increasingly unpopular and boring - but that doesn't stop him posting 10 times a day!!!

[Icehaven]

The fuck is on that cat's head? Is it supposed to be hair? A jaunty beret? A cowpat? Sonic should be glad he doesn't have to look at that all day anymore.

[ajsmith2]

The fuck is on that cat's head? Is it supposed to be hair? A jaunty beret? A cowpat? Sonic should be glad he doesn't have to look at that all day anymore.

It's supposed to be purple hair I think, but again, I don't think it's fair to criticise the character designs in this comic when it was only created to critique another comic. (as seen in part below and in full on the preceding page).

[M-CORP]

Have I Got News For You returns for it's 4548397539th series, laments CookdandBombd's TheNoise.  Safe, outdated, cliched, derivative, centrist, predictable, smug, increasingly unpopular and boring - but that doesn't stop him posting 10 times a day!!!

It's alright, I was about to say the same thing. When you first watch it in the spring of 2015, when you're only 13 and therefore unfamiliar with satire, it is the funniest and most innovative programme on television. Three years later, when that kind of satire is everywhere and every week is the same formula and the same jokes and digs (oh look, Ian Hislop knows nothing about SnapChat or the Kardashians, the poor sod, hahahahaha- oh look, Merton's feigning a heart attack!), you just can't be arsed with it. Especially when there's stuff on YouTube that's funnier but less safe and centrist than this show.

Not that I am speaking from personal experience of course.

In 2017 a Labour politician (Alan Johnson I think) went on the show and made a joke about Amber Rudd and traffic lights. (You can probably guess.) Paul Merton stared open-mouthed, saying he'd said that on the program eight months prior. And that became the new running gag, with the show going back in time to see who'd ripped off who. Maybe it was a ripoff. Or maybe it was just a really obvious joke.

[M-CORP]

Hate to be a double poster but have just thought: the last two series of Spitting Image, while not without their moments (most of the stuff with the Tony Blair puppet), probably fit the bill of this thread. Most likely the new series that's coming will too.

Seriously, the first episode of series 18 (the last series) features a live-action parody of Power Rangers focusing on energy suppliers. A show known for featuring puppets doing a sketch with NO PUPPETS. That's when you know a show has lost its way. But more importantly, it isn't funny (save the 'power struggle' bit perhaps).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PU3c23Rqls

[keir]

The fact that this tweet, which could easily have been four words + picture, is still written with the same structure as every BBC satire joke of the past 40 years says a lot about the inability of this show to do anything remotely surprising or subversive.



"Up at the beginning of the sentence... and down at the end of the sentence."

40 years is about right - I always hated that shit on HIGNFY - "On holiday in the alps, Luciani Pavarotti got out of bed on the wrong side again" [stock footage of an avalanche] - partly because I already thought it was shit when it was on NTNOCN.

[Sebastian Cobb]

As shit as Roy Chubby Brown is, I have to concede his tampon joke is better than the comics in this thread. Not only is it funnier at a miniscule level, it's less effort to process and is over quicker.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I don't think this is as bad as a lot of stuff in this thread, but has anyone noticed the trend of people, miming and over-acting to idiot men like trump or musk using tiktok?

I mean, it was funny the first time, but now it's becoming a thing and there's not really much mileage at it.

Here's an example that is done quite well, it's taking off and there are copycats:
https://mobile.twitter.com/sarahcpr/status/1263515132698734597

[C_Larence]

I don't think this is as bad as a lot of stuff in this thread, but has anyone noticed the trend of people, miming and over-acting to idiot men like trump or musk using tiktok?

I mean, it was funny the first time, but now it's becoming a thing and there's not really much mileage at it.

Here's an example that is done quite well, it's taking off and there are copycats:
https://mobile.twitter.com/sarahcpr/status/1263515132698734597

I prefer this one, which I believe was posted on the forum before. At least this one has more of a joke to it than just straight lip syncing.
https://vm.tiktok.com/wAcefs/


Here's Seinfeld, arbiter of what's funny and why, dissecting the frog in the NYT and I think thoroughly missing the point.

[machotrouts]

The fact that this tweet, which could easily have been four words + picture, is still written with the same structure as every BBC satire joke of the past 40 years says a lot about the inability of this show to do anything remotely surprising or subversive.



"Up at the beginning of the sentence... and down at the end of the sentence."

The insanely rigid cadence of @haveigotnews tweets is infuriating. "Don't spend two thirds of your tweet infodumping context for your drearily obvious punchline" is Twitter Satire 101.

My least favourite aspect of HIGNFY Voice is how half of their tweets take the form "As [Thing X], [Thing Y]", which clearly implies Thing X and Thing Y happen concurrently, and yet Thing Y usually only makes sense as a reaction to Thing X.



WHY are they so doggedly committed to this illiterate house style? I mean besides "there's no incentive to change because people fucking follow and like this worthless shit anyway".

[Famous Mortimer]

Does anyone actually like it, though? Or is it just force of habit?

[chveik]

Seinfeld is so fucking dumb