When comedians attack...other comedians! (Not really a list thread)

[Purple Tentacle]

alan strang: Did you do the portrait illustrations for the Jesus Parables on TMWRNJ, because the Eldon/Judas one gets a laugh from me every single time I see it.

[alan strang]

alan strang: Did you do the portrait illustrations for the Jesus Parables on TMWRNJ, because the Eldon/Judas one gets a laugh from me every single time I see it.

Yeah. I've still got the original drawing around here somewhere. It's yours if you want it.

[Ambient Sheep]

I'm so glad you said that.  When I was going through some old videos a looong time ago I grabbed this clip, and never posted it as the saturation is fucked.  I meant to regrab it when the subject came up in a fairly recent Spitting Image thread, but as per usual I never got round to it.  I've ripped out the audio though as I think it fits rather nicely with this thread.

Spitting Image - Good Evening Mr. Deayton

Nice clip!

By the way, you do know it comes up in Media Player as "Chris Morris - Paul Garner Taxi-Bothering", don't you?  No big deal, but you may want to change it if you plan on leaving it up permanently.

[rjd2]

i heard on BBC 5 a while ago that Peter Kay and johnny Vegas fell out over Phoenix Nights as Vegas started off writing it with him and then Kay just dropped him as he did not like Johnnys laid back attitude. They both played it down.

[Godzilla Bankrolls]

i heard on bbc 5 a while ago that Peter Kay and johnny Vegas fell out over Phoenix Nights as Vegas started off writing it with him and then Kay just dropped him.

Is there any truth in this? I doubt it, somehow.

[Munday's Chylde]

i heard on bbc 5 a while ago that Peter Kay and johnny Vegas fell out over Phoenix Nights as Vegas started off writing it with him and then Kay just dropped him.

Is there any truth in this? I doubt it, somehow.

If it is then the tables have turned with the actual co-writer abondoning Kay to write with Vegas

http://www.chortle.co.uk/news/nov04/phoenix.php

[rjd2]

Vegas has no input into any of the Pheonix Nights series he just along with Kay wrote some oof the characters and came up with ideas in the early stages of the writing of the show. The guy who calimed this wrote a history of Brittish comedy which was out months ago.

[Jemble Fred]

People have tried to convince me that the 'Harry Hill's TV Burp' pastiche on Bo Selecta 3 was a bit of harmless whimsy, but (aside from the fact that Francis has all the satirical bite of an episode of Bonanza) it certainly leaves a nasty taste in my gob – he really does seem to be insinuating that Hill's work is infantile and worthless. So either I'm too thin-skinned, or Francis has minus self-awareness.

[Cambrian Times]

10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Ok, this is how I see it.

I don't believe that Francis does any of his "takes" maliciously.  Many of the people that he takes off are people he admires, and who have willingly participated in his show, look at Jonathan Ross, Craig David, Davina McColl.

The way you have to look at Bo' Selecta! is in the terms of Ancient Greek Comedy. I've addressed this theory to Ambient Sheep, and Butnut and they agree with me.

Aside from the obvious fact that one of the fundamental practices of any form Greek Theatre is the use of masks,  I see Francis as a modern version of Aristophanes (If you can find it, I urge you to read Lysistrata, it's very funny). The humour involved in a lot of Aristophanes plays was extremely crude, toilet based, often sexually graphic, and here is the clinch, it ripped the piss out of contemporary situations and celebraties, and they loved it. There is one case in which he lampooned Sophacles on stage. Sophacles, who had witnessed the act on stage, had the good grace to get up and bow.

A couple of relevant quote perhaps?

He has been accused of seeking to degrade what he ought to have recognized as good;..... It has been said that Aristophanes was an unmannerly buffoon, and so, indeed, he was, among his other faults. Nor was he at all justified in stooping to this degradation, whether it were that he was instigated by coarse inclinations, or that he held it necessary to gain over the populace, that he might have it in his power to tell such bold truths to the people. At least he makes it his boast that he did not court the laughter of the multitude so much as his rivals did, by mere indecent buffoonery, and that in this respect he brought his art to perfection.

Cleon the demagogue, Euripides the sentimentalist, and Socrates the type of the critical sophist, are the constant objects of his ridicule. In all these attacks there is much that is blind, not a little that is unfair. But to an earnest conservative like the poet, Cleon embodied the follies and conceit of democracy; Euripides, the taste for morbid rhetoric in poetry; and Socrates, the Rousseauism of antiquity, which subjected every established belief to a metaphysical criticism.

Anyway, have you never heard the maxim, "Imitation is the first form of flattery"?

[Cambrian Times]

Since I appear to have killed this thread I will try and ressurect it and put it back on track.

Didn't the "Carry On" crew really hate each other. I remember hearing or seeing that most the time Williams and Hawtrey were at each other's throats, and in particular that the former absolutely despised working with Fenella Fielding.

Or something.

[alan strang]

The way you have to look at Bo' Selecta! is in the terms of Ancient Greek Comedy. I've addressed this theory to Ambient Sheep, and Butnut and they agree with me.

We call that FOOLE'S GOLD (qv) - the act of defending a current piece of art by using too wide an historical context. Always interesting to read, but a little suspect when it comes to dissecting recent evolutions in comedy. For example, someone comparing Al Murray's Pub Landlord to a 'Shakespearean grotesque'. A nice enough observation but a far less pertinent or honest critical tactic than, say, comparing it to more recent character-based comedy, eg Harry Enfield, etc.

Anyway, have you never heard the maxim, "Imitation is the first form of flattery"?

In the case of Leigh Frances 'doing' Big Brother and David Brent, imitation is the first form of referencing things regarded as 'popular' without any kind of satirical stance in order to acquire a ready-made audience.

Of course it is entirely possible that Aristophes was 'essentially doing the same thing', and that history has chosen only to remember his backslapping, sweary, Comedy Awards-style all-mates-together satire while the genuinely angry stuff of the day has now been forgotten.

Incidentally Harry Hill was recently asked what he thought of the Bo Selecta parody of him. Apparently he just shrugged and said "It's for kids innit?"

[butnut]

The way you have to look at Bo' Selecta! is in the terms of Ancient Greek Comedy. I've addressed this theory to Ambient Sheep, and Butnut and they agree with me.

Well - sort of! I found it an interesting way of looking at BS, and one that I'd never thought of before and I'm glad you've posted it.

However, I still can't stand watching the programme or even seeing the adverts for his book!

[The Duck Man]

In Kenneth Williams' diaries (a good read) he constantly goes on and on and on and on about how much he hates doing Carry On and working with Sid James.

[Borboski]

Aristophanes
Sophacles

I think the difference between Aristophanes and Sophacles is that neither included in any of their shows a man dressed as a women going "ahhh my foooking 'andbags" and little bear with a hard on trying to get celebrities to touch it.

Sometimes it's made me chuckle, sometimes snigger, generally its made me think Leigh Francis is a nob, but never ever have I felt like I'm watching something remotely intelligent when watching Bo Selecta.  It's vaguely "rude" isn't it?

Is Leigh Francis your brother or something?  That said, I understand myself that feeling of people criticising something you really really like, its not so much the slur on your tastes, more that you want to shake them and say "no you're missing out! you just don't get it!"

I think Alan Strang is quite right their about fools gold; it's an interesting point your making, but you surely don't believe Francis is intentionally referencing the work of the Greek Comedies?  What next - Eastenders being "just like Chekov, you see it has people talking to each other and some gaps in the middle of sentences and everything"

[neveragain]

In Kenneth Williams' diaries (a good read) he constantly goes on and on and on and on about how much he hates doing Carry On and working with Sid James.

Yes, and then the next month he'd say 'oh, I do enjoy being a part of the Carry On films, they're very well-written, back with the old gang' then he'd go back to his original bile and then he'd praise them all again and then he'd kill himself to end the sufferring. That was old Ken, eh?

[Cambrian Times]

I'm sorry this is a long post, but what the hell, I feel it needs to be said, once and for all.

To Quote Borboski

I think the difference between Aristophanes and Sophacles is that neither included in any of their shows a man dressed as a women going "ahhh my foooking 'andbags" and little bear with a hard on trying to get celebrities to touch it.

Have you ever studied Greek Comedy? Particularly Lysistrata? If so, you would have realised that as Greek Theatre was an exclusively male art form, and that the most of main characters in Lysistrata being female, you have a the case of men dressed up as women and though they are not saying "ahhh, my fooking handbags" they are essentially saying "ahhh, aren't all men fooooking bastards."

As for the Bear, ok a close comparison can be found later in the text, when the men of Athens, due to the fact that Lysistrata has accosted the women of Athens into refusing their men folk conjugal rites, and laying in siege at the Acropolis so that the men will cease their constant warfare with Sparta, are walking around with graphically expressed erections.

(CINESIAS enters, in obvious and extreme sexual excitement.)
CINESIAS
Alas! alas! how I am tortured by spasm and rigid convulsion! Oh! I
am racked on the wheel!...
.... LEADER OF CHORUS OF OLD MEN
Poor, miserable wretch, baulked in your amorousness! what tortures
are yours! Ah! you fill me with pity. Could any man's back and loins
stand such a strain. He stands stiff and rigid, and there's never a
wench to help him!.....

(A Spartan HERALD enters; he shows signs of being in the same
condition as CINESIAS.) HERALD
Say, where shall I find the Senate and the Prytanes? I am bearer
of despatches.
(An Athenian MAGISTRATE enters.)
MAGISTRATE
Are you a man or a Priapus?
HERALD (with an effort at officiousness)
Don't be stupid! I am a herald, of course, I swear I am, and I
come from Sparta about making peace.
MAGISTRATE (pointing)
But look, you are hiding a lance under your clothes, surely.
HERALD (embarrassed)
No, nothing of the sort.
MAGISTRATE
Then why do you turn away like that, and hold your cloak out
from your body? Have you got swellings in the groin from your journey?
HERALD
By the twin brethren! the man's an old maniac.
MAGISTRATE
But you've got an erection! You lewd fellow!
HERALD
I tell you no! but enough of this foolery.
MAGISTRATE (pointing)
Well, what is it you have there then?
HERALD
A Lacedaemonian 'skytale.'
MAGISTRATE
Oh, indeed, a 'skytale,' is it?

You can finds the complete text here, if you don't believe me

http://eserver.org/drama/aristophanes/lysistrata.txt

Is Leigh Francis your brother or something?

No, to my knowledge I'm totally unrelated to him. Although there are one or two people on the site who do know him and have actually worked with him <waves at Sick As A Pike>
Also it's not my taste that I feel is being slurred, but my intelligence. I just don't like people to saying that because I watch such and such and such a programme that I am intellectually subnormal.

...you surely don't believe Francis is intentionally referencing the work of the Greek Comedies?

I never said I did. What I did say, is that I, personally believed that there are comparisons. It's the terms that I choose to view the programme and how I understand it. As for a comparison between Eastenders and Chekov, it may have been in the early days of serialised drama that there was a comparable sense of realism between the two art forms. Now as sensationalism has taken precedence over realism in the battle for ratings, that evaluation is no longer true.

Just to provoke you more, I'm going to through in a couple more analogies for you.

Particularly in the third series, Francis has developed three outstanding characters in the Bo Selecta scenario. There Merrion, Barry Gibson (The Bear) and Keith Lemon (in a role as Avid's agent/guardian). It may sound ridiculous, but these characters to my mind, could be used to define Freud's triptych model of the unconscious mind.

Barry Gibson - Id

As The Bear, Gibson's character represents the Id, more so than Merrion, as his crude, violent language and his extreme sexual "presence" relates to primitive aggression and the desire instant gratification - look at what happened to Paul McKenna.    

Avid Merrion -Ego
As the central character Avid is by definition the ego, however at some points the lines are crossed between him and Gibson, although not as extreme. He has some, however little sense of reserve. On meeting a celebrity he does not have the immediate desire to "jump on them like a Jack Russell in Season". He will first talk to them, chat with them, give them a drawing or some bit of tat. Then he will jump on them. But during the third series, he has been more restrained and reigned in by -

Keith Lemon - Superego
As Merrion's agent/advisor, he tries to place Avid on a more moral pathway, to be more politically correct to, not to be so graphic in language or deed at the risk of and I quote "fucking people right off". More often then not through his own admission he's not that successful.

I'm sorry if the above looks like complete bollocks, but I'm an trained actress working as a barmaid, not a psychologist or a psychoanalyst, it's three in the morning and it also helps if you have the series 3 DVD on hand for source material.  

Ok, one more final analogy.

From series one, I've often felt that Francis was making something like a kid's television programme, but with adult content punched deliberately straight through the centre of it. Francis has had previous experience in this field - he used to star in a Channel 4 magazine programme called "Buzz" in the late nineties. The only comparison I can remit from memory, is that if you removed the graphic language and sexual content, you would be left with something akin to cult ITV programme "WACaday", hosted of course by Timmy Mallett. (Other comparison include that both Francis and Mallett are talented pictorial artists; I read somewhere that Francis studied at Leed's College of Art and Design, and both have recorded top five singles) Anyway, because of his presentation style, Mallett was labelled as nothing more than a colourful buffoon, with trademark outsize glasses and a habit of hitting people over the head with a cushion. However occasionally you did see a chip in the veneer and saw something more than the jovial buffoonery we are  were accustomed to. I allude to a travel diary Mallett did in the late 80's, in which he visited pre-unifiction Berlin. I remember him walking in a park, when suddenly he stops and looks over a wall, I don't think it was THE WALL, but the metaphor was there.  The expression of meditative seriousness on his face, suddenly revealed to me, that there was something else there, beneath the surface.

What I am trying to get at with the above is that sometimes, however briefly, I can see Leigh Francis looking over the wall.

[TJ]

Time to bring this one back, I think. With two examples of jokes that may or may not have been pointed attacks:

1) Alexei Sayle's 'Monsieur Aubergiene' - a subtle comment on the fact that the 'groundbreaking' Mr Bean was a direct lift (albeit an inspired and clever one) of Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot?

2) the Bottom episode "Digger" - could the adoption of the persona of a refined toff and his retainer 'Jives' have been a reference to Fry and Laurie's recent appearances as "Jeeves And Wooster"?

[Jemble Fred]

1) Only heard about this suggestion recently. You'd have to look very hard to get the Mr Bean references (I'm not saying they're not there, but you'd need a good knowledge of Mr Bean to pick it up), but that's because it's first and foremost a piss-take of mime generally, which Alexei's always railed against. If he'd wanted to lay into Bean, he'd wouldn't have dressed up like a french mime in a top hat.

2) It's a Wodehouse reference, yeah, but I can't imagine it being aimed at Fry & Laurie in the slightest – people have been making Jeevese references for nearly a century. Perhaps the F&L series brought the characters back into vogue, but I don't think Rik & Ade meant it as a specific reference to Hugh & Stephen.

In both cases, if they were meant to be aimed at the suggested targets, they failed miserably.

My four-mojos'-worth.

[Jon_Norton]

Here's an old exmaple of one comic attacking another, from way back:

Private Eye's "Great Bores Of Today" had a pop at Ben Elton in 1986, wen he was getting a profile due to Satutrday Live. It just parodied him as a repetritive, loudmouth bore who never got laughs.

If the South Bank Show on PE is to be taken as representative, then the "Great Bores" pieces were composed on the spot by Peter Cook, and transcribed by Hislop, who simply called time when there was enough material.

I mentioned this to BentHalo the other day, and he pointed out that there was an edition of Saturday Live which featured Cook as a guest, and Ben Elton only appeared at the very end.

The Smith&Jones book "Janet Lives with..." also has a piece attacking Janet Street-Porter's C4 legacy, which mentions Elton, though it's unclear if he's been ridiculed himself.

[TJ]

1) Only heard about this suggestion recently. You'd have to look very hard to get the Mr Bean references (I'm not saying they're not there, but you'd need a good knowledge of Mr Bean to pick it up), but that's because it's first and foremost a piss-take of mime generally, which Alexei's always railed against. If he'd wanted to lay into Bean, he'd wouldn't have dressed up like a french mime in a top hat.

Hmmm... I'm not sure I agree with that. Abstract swipes have always been as a much a feature of his humour as direct and blatant ones - see the 'Muslim Golden Girls' for example - and I don't entirely accept that there would need to be blatant Mr Bean references to make the point. And maybe the adoption of a French name and vaguely Gallic costume was specifically to hammer home the point of the source of influence.

In both cases, if they were meant to be aimed at the suggested targets, they failed miserably.

Again, not sure about that - I can't have been the only one that interpreted the Monsieur Aubergiene sketches that way at the time, surely?

[Jon_Norton]

Rik Mayall was a great friend of Stephen Fry's, until the incident with the abandoned run of "Cell Mates" in 1994, though they patched it up later on.

[Godzilla Bankrolls]

I saw S Lee last night and he had pops at Graham Norton and Angus Deayton, so after the gig I asked him why, as neither have done what he attacks them for in the past few years. He said that he doesn't watch TV, and anyway, he changes it to the FNP sometimes these days. He didn't do any Elton stuff.

[Z/Sb]

It was obvious from the start that Monsieur Aubergine was a piss-take of Mr. Bean from the name alone and his silent comedy routine. But also, more than anything else, it was an absolute spot-on piss-take of what constitutes humour/comedy in Europe.

[waste of chops]

I saw S Lee last night and he had pops at Graham Norton and Angus Deayton, so after the gig I asked him why, as neither have done what he attacks them for in the past few years. He said that he doesn't watch TV, and anyway, he changes it to the FNP sometimes these days. He didn't do any Elton stuff.

I saw S Lee tonight and he used both Angus Deayton and FNP as examples in the bit I assume you're talking about (no mention of Graham Norton though). He also did the anti-Elton stuff and made a comment about how he once tried to improvise a bit of his routine "like Eddie Izzard pretends to do... You just say 'er' a lot".

'ello all, by the way.

~~stu

[Hoogstraten'sSmilingUlcer]

Morris attacked the Edinbugh festival, calling it 'a disgusting, debased circus.' That quote has always sat rather oddly with me. It seems like the kind of extreme, almost knee-jerk anger that he would usually be attacking, but it's an entertaining quote all the same. Morris should be less professional and attack other comedians and comedy writers, I'm sure he has the wits. He could start with Charlie 'Cunt' Brooker.

[TJ]

"like Eddie Izzard pretends to do... You just say 'er' a lot".

"Edrie Izzard is currently doing his long streams of boredom, where you go round and round in circles just to say "oh yes, hmm, that's me"..."

[The Mumbler]

Morris attacked the Edinbugh festival, calling it 'a disgusting, debased circus.' That quote has always sat rather oddly with me. .

He made that quote in July 1994, shortly before that year's festival.  Deliberately timed, I feel it was more a dig at media executives than comics.

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

Bump

In Alexei Sayle's song 'Shut Up' (Series 3, Show 5) he attacks John Sessions, Stephen Fry, Josie Lawrence, and...somebody else, I forget. The following week, he does a variation on the 'two straight men' gag about Hale and Pace.

That's a glimpse into a lost world - a comedian openly attacking his contemporaries without thinking 'Better not be nasty, I might have to work with them one day'. Lawrence is an especially strange person to single out, the equivalent of slagging off someone like Natalie Haynes (which would never happen now).

[The Duck Man]

What does he attack Stephen Fry for? I vaguely view them as being in the same "set", if you will.

I'm trying to think whether they ever worked together. Nothing comes to mind, although not being born when they might have done means my knowledge of that era is a little scant.

[Emergency Lalla Ward Ten]

The line is, I think, 'Stephen Fry talking movingly about his celibacy...SHUT UP!'. So not really an attack on Fry the comedian necessarily.

They were both in The Young Ones 'Bambi', but I can't think of any show where they've been in the same scene.

Oh, I've remember the other line in Shut Up: 'Those comedians on Comic Relief, they really care...SHUT UP!'.