Is Derek and Clive indefensible?

[Brundle-Fly]

Me and my mates were obsessed with the puerile anarchy and bent comic musiicality of this skit but I can entirely understand why anyone under the age of forty three will think this is rotten self indulgent, boorish shite. Or any decent person, really?  Fair enough.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nIVx4PnSMg

I had a girlfriend who was ten years younger than me who could not comprehend why myself and fellow ilk loved the likes of Oliver Reed and the way he behaved like a drunken cunt on chat shows. The luxury to be that abandoned? Yep!  Indefensible? Probably. 

Makes me very happy.  Ah well...

[DrGreggles]

No idea why Top Rank is so fucking funny, but it is.
https://youtu.be/hQHVRIsBFwU

[Brundle-Fly]

Crying with laughter listening to this bollocks at a quarter to two in the morning. It's so utterly pathetic, but rather liberating.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_lj1ikP5U8

[Lisa Jesusandmarychain]

I remember the sheer unbridled silliness was what drew me in initially as a fourteen year old kid in 1980, rather than the 'shock' factor. Things like Alfie Noakes and Winky Wanky Woo.

Me too. I was in bits when I first heard that line about what was up Joan Crawford's cunt- " all these hamburger stands- no hamburgers, just hamburger stands ". It's that bit in bold that I just find hilarious.

There are huge swathes of Derek and Clive that are simply NOT FUNNY, though. Dudley Moore is noticeably struggling a lot of the time  too.

[Lisa Jesusandmarychain]

Crying with laughter listening to this bollocks at a quarter to two in the morning. It's so utterly pathetic, but rather liberating.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_lj1ikP5U8

" I was trying to watch Emmerdale Farm. "

[Black Ship]

I still think "Racing" and "the critics" are the funniest fucking sketches ever.

[Beagle 2]

I loved it all when I was 18. Now I'm 37 it doesn't do anything for me at all to be honest, because I'm a boring old fart. Some of it I don't have the stomach for, some is incredibly awkward to listen to and a good proportion is so tossed off it's boring. There's undoubtedly some absolute gold in there though, and if I hear it coming out of my son's darkened room when he's a teenager, I'll feel proud.

[PaulTMA]

Just want to add to the voices saying Quantick is an arsehole.

It would be a shame if someone like David Quantick had a Google alert for his own name and was led to this thread dominated by people who think he's a very big fucking cunt indeed.

[biniput]

What has this Quantick person done? Is there an old thread here that might give details?

[Revelator]

I think Cook and Moore were the first to say that Derek and Clive were "scum." We're not meant to sympathize with or champion these characters--we're meant to laugh at them and rank them barely above apes. The albums are a dive into the world's filthiest sewer, and part of the laughs are in the excess filthiness. That said, the overall level quality in the D&C saga is wildly variable (but hasn't that always been the case?) and I'd only play the material for people I know well (but hasn't that also always been the case?) .

[Brundle-Fly]

What has this Quantick person done? Is there an old thread here that might give details?

I don't know why there is such ire for David Quantick on here. Odd, seeing he's written for some of CaB's favourite shows.  He must have had an opinion or something?

[Autopsy Turvey]

Nowadays, though, I'd struggle to argue convincingly against a claim that the content is morally dubious.

Why on earth would anyone ever want or need to do this? Why would comedy ever need to prove itself as morally upstanding in order to be defensible? What even needs to be defended, the right of Cook & Moore to say these things, or of Virgin Records to release them, or is it every one of us having to defend our own moral core for laughing at them? Either way, it's a deeply sinister question.

An outsider might see it as a pair of drunken, entitled, leering, sexist 1970s men yukking it up with no small amount of malice,

Depends how much of a humourless finger-wagging cunt the outsider is. A different outsider might be blown away by the sheer transgressive force of hearing such unfettered filth, darkness and fury delivered with such delirious joy and richly comic imagination.

That it's two of the most talented comics Britain has ever produced doesn't really excuse it.

The fact that it's funny 'excuses' it everything. Did anyone hear the Newman & Baddiel attempt at this sort of thing? I can only remember 'mong' voices and interminable coked-up sniggering. That was indefensible comedically, although obviously anyone is free to record and release whatever jokes they like, and we're all free to tell them their jokes are shit.

The argument that it's just pure 'funny' is also complicated...But then, isn't that basically the same model we give Gervais stick for?

We're not laughing at the 'model', we're laughing because kicking your wife's cunt in for half an hour is a spectacularly disproportionate punishment for taking too long to obtain a polaroid of a possibly record-breaking yardage of snot.

Isn't it all a bit lads lads lads, encouraging bad behaviour?

"I got up to Golders Green and I must have slaughtered about eighteen thousand before I realised what I was doing... I thought, 'fucking television has driven me to this'."

"Morally dubious... encouraging bad behaviour..." Amusing to see the sniffy authoritarian arguments of the old conservative religious right dovetailing with those of the modern politically correct left. There's a whole new generation of Mary Whitehouses on social media, shame that nowadays the media establishment bends over backwards to placate these cunts, while the old media establishment regarded it as a badge of pride to be complained about by their pearl-clutching antecedents.

Is, say, Gervais 'punching down' in his comedy any less than Cook and Moore?

Dunno, to me 'punching down' is a concept for those who think certain types of people are beneath them.