That's Numberwang!

Speaking of things I rarely talk about here, British comedy.

Say what you will, but there is a difference between Brits and Americans (including Canadians) when it comes to comedy - and it's not just the accents.

Trying to boil it down as simply as possible, the major difference is timing. Think of your favourite American sitcom. Now try and picture any scene from that sitcom with the laugh track removed. There sure are a lot of bizarre pauses, aren't there?

American comedians/comedy characters are aware they're being funny, and structure their dialogue accordingly.

In Britain, on the other hand, the actors realize they're being funny - but the characters don't. If you laugh too long at a particular joke, you're going to miss three or four more. It makes the whole thing more enjoyable, at least in my opinion.

Additionally, British humour generally involves a level of absurdity we don't really see in North America all that often. Take, for example, Mornington Crescent, the game where the game itself is the joke, as opposed to (as it would be over here) a vehicle for jokes. Along the same lines, Numberwang:



Another advantage to British comedy is that they don't run anything into the ground. Numberwang is a great premise, but could easily be overdone - and would be, were it on Saturday Night Live or anything else over here. Instead, there were exactly three 'episodes' of Numberwang, plus two spinoffs which had one episode each - Wordwang, and the German-language Das Ist Numberwang. With so little to fill, the writers were able to keep every instance funny.

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Something new I'm doing now. Previously, if I had something extremely minor to blog about, I'd either end up ignoring it entirely, save it for another post with a few other tidbits, or post it on its own anyhow.

From now on, these tiny posts will be attached to the bottom of regular posts, following a line of tildes.

Back when I was studying for a midterm, I found something slightly amusing in a textbook. Last night, while writing an open-book final, I think I topped that:

One of the less obvious lessons from the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States was to ask more probing questions about charities.

To be fair, he does go on to explain this point and it sort of makes sense. But still, I find it unlikely that anybody, upon watching the plane hit the second tower, started screaming "I KNEW WE SHOULD HAVE BEEN INVESTIGATING THE HEART AND STROKE FOUNDATION! I TOLD THEM!".

Along the same lines, couldn't it be said that one of the lessons learned from the recent pirate hijacking of an American ship is that International Talk Like A Pirate Day might eventually come under fire from the political correctness police?

Actually, it's not the same at all - at least with mine, you can see the flow of logic.

--Ryan