This is directly relevant to my wife's and my reading of the David Tennant & Olivia Coleman vehicle Broadchurch.<p>David Tennant's character is notably very bad at his job; that's why he got exiled to a backwater town. He bungled his last case so badly it made national news. In an American police procedural, we would either have some mitigating explanation for his failure, or at least some gritty vice or personal demon that was the real reason he got demoted.<p>In Broadchurch, Tennant's character just sucks at his job. Every episode of the show conforms to a formula where he gets suspicious of one of the other characters in the show and we spend the episode wasting time while it's finally determined that the suspect of the week is actually innocent. I have to say, it makes for entertaining television. It also resulted in my wife and I chorusing aloud, every episode, "he's SO BAD at his job!!"<p>(Minor Broadchurch spoilers) At the end when he finally catches the big bad, it's not because of anything he did. A coincidence and some carelessness on the part of the big bad lead to the mystery being solved. Also, every other character on the show had already been ruled out.<p>Since watching it we've kept a lookout for protagonists who embody the "everyman in way over his head who accomplished virtually nothing himself" archetype. It's fun to know Adams held forth on the very subject.
> Since watching it we've kept a lookout for protagonists who embody the "everyman in way over his head who accomplished virtually nothing himself" archetype.<p>You might enjoy Joyce Porter’s Dover series.
"David Tennant's character is notably very bad at his job; that's why he got exiled to a backwater town."<p>Worth noting that in Hot Fuzz (also featuring Olivia Coleman!) the main character is exiled to a rural location for being too good at his job.
That movie is a long series of spoofs nicely spliced together to form a story. To the point that it even works in the reverse, you've seen Hot Fuzz and then years later you watch some other movie and suddenly you realize <i>that's where they got it</i>.
She’s also in Peep Show, which to this day is my favourite British television series.<p>It’s such a good piece of dark comedy.
And the lesser known "Look Around You" which might also not land so well with an American audience.<p>Thants.
For season 1 it very much satirises the early morning open university tv educational media format from the 70s through the early 2000s [1]. I'm not sure it'd land quite the same way for other countries or even for gen-z onwards.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.bbc.com/historyofthebbc/anniversaries/january/open-university" rel="nofollow">https://www.bbc.com/historyofthebbc/anniversaries/january/op...</a>
What are birds?<p>We just don't know.
And that's a show about people who are bad at relationships.
For real humour starting Olivia, I STRONGLY recommend get appearances on Graham Norton - she's a great sport
Warms my heart to see fellow Edgar Wright fans here. Felt bad about his recent film results. I waited years for that. :/
I saw Baby Driver, which I really liked but I haven't seen any of the three movies since that.<p>The Cornetto trilogy are excellent. I'm a big fan of Three Colours (my favourite is White) and I think that actually in the same way that Kieślowski clearly doesn't care about the supposed theme, he just wants money to make movies, we can say the same for the Cornetto movies. We're bringing the commonalities to it in our interpretation, Wright didn't pour great effort into ensuring that these movies "work" as a trilogy, but they do if you squint, in the same way that Kieślowski didn't put great effort into relating his three films to the French flag but if you squint you can make it work fine.
At the end of the day, Hollywood is a business unfortunately and his last two films did poorly<p>Last Night In Soho was a absolute cinematic treat but had mixed reviews. I was fortunate to see it a week before release in 35mm in NYC and it was truly a special moment. But lets be real, even with films being graded on a curve due to the pandemic, the movie still did poorly.<p>Ok fresh start a few years later with The Running Man. This time he got big money, three time more than Baby Driver. (34mil vs 110mil) and the result? Baby Driver brought in ~227 mil and Running Man? Just ~69 mil.<p>Maybe he is better off producing smaller budget films and while I want nothing but success for him since he's my all time favorite director: Hollywood is a business. They will not look kindly on someone that keeps losing money.
The older I get, the more I suspect the Neighborhood Watch Alliance of being behind all society's problems.
Hold on, wasn't the flak he got for the case before the show started actually because he was covering for his wife (who was also working on the case)? She was having an affair and left the evidence in her car where it was stolen. He didn't say anything so their daughter wouldn't know, and took the fall for the case's failure, even though it wasn't his fault at all.<p>I didn't quite get the same read on the show you did. It seemed like the dynamic was that Olivia Coleman couldn't imagine anyone she knew being the killer, contrasted against Tennant being aggressively willing to suspect anyone, which is how they were able to rule the various suspects out.
It's admittedly been years since I saw it; I don't remember the entire mitigating bit about covering for his wife, but a lot went on in that series finale and I've had covid a few times since.<p>I like your read on their dynamic as foils to each other; I'll have to give it another watch with your read in mind.
> Every episode of the show conforms to a formula where he gets suspicious of one of the other characters in the show and we spend the episode wasting time while it's finally determined that the suspect of the week is actually innocent.<p>Something like this applies in the UK Midsomer Murders. Specifically, in the episodes where one of the suspects has a prior criminal record, they always get grief from Inspector Barnaby's current sidekick but are then proven innocent of the current crime. However, if an old police colleague from Barnaby's past offers to help, they are always guilty of something.
“In an American police procedural, we would either have…”<p>In the first minutes of the American show “Keen Eddie”, the titular character bungles a project so badly that he is exiled to London.<p>It unfortunately lasted only one season.
Today I learned that I would make a terrible detective!<p>When I watched Broadchurch with my family, I thought he was doing a fine job at getting to the bottom of the case. Goes to show much crime drama I watch.<p>I see now that Tennant's character's actions are a plot device to reveal the drama amongst the other characters, not the workings of a good detective.
This very good description makes it sound like a comedy, which it absolutely isn't, although I note that Olivia Colman got her break in dark comedy <i>Peep Show</i>.
It's so far from comedy that I couldn't make it through the series. When it comes up in conversation, I tend to describe it as "grief porn."
Ah, I should have made that clear, yes. We derived some unintended humor from the mismatch in cultural expectations, but Broadchurch is as serious as a heart attack.<p>(Didn't stop me and my wife from yelling MELLAR!! at each other across the house for weeks afterward.)*<p>*(He yells his partner Miller's name a lot in his Scottish accent.)
That reminds me a lot of slow horses as well.
Slow Horses is so equal-opportunity with how it hands out ineptitude. About the only character on the show who isn't inept is Lamb (Gary Oldman), but is such a wretched character, you could actually hardly find a moment to root for him. It's fantastic.
I'd argue that Coe is more than competent, just, you know, detached most of the time. Lamb always knows what needs be done, just never shares, and often lets things happen until what needs be done happens on its own or is inevitable.<p>Coe has extraordinarily high SA and makes decisions immediately. They might seem impulsive, but when he acts, it is always with forethought.<p>(Yeah, Coe is our favourite character.)
Louisa too. Before Coe came along she was for sure the best agent of the bunch; between the two of them it's a tough call imo.<p>Although I think Standish might have a leg up on all of them, including (sometimes) Lamb... but I'm biased since she's <i>my</i> favorite :)
> Coe has extraordinarily high SA<p>What does 'SA' mean? I'm not familiar with it.
I like to think of Lamb as an inverse Columbo - he's rude and horrible to people rather than Columbo's charm. They share the grubby look and intelligence.
> such a wretched character, you could actually hardly find a moment to root for him.<p>Hmm really?<p>In the first couple episodes, he definitely is, but I think they level him out a bit later on so that the viewer actually ends up liking him.<p>In the books, he is much more consistently unlikable.<p>(Don't bother with the books, IMO--show is better while still hewing quite close to them).
God that show is fantastic.
Slough House denizens screw up in blatant, over the top ways. While the Park screw up in ways that leave geopolitical consequences festering for years or decades while being good at covering their own asses.<p>The plot is generally some evil, corrupt actions the Park took in the past are coming home to roost and only the bumbling losers in Slough House can fix it (kind of, eventually, in a "at least London wasn't blown off the face of the earth" kind of way).
Yes, exactly my first thought as well. Fantastic show!
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The game Disco Elysium is kind of like this. Just know that the game is 99% reading and rolling dice.
…sort of, but the game does ultimately make clear that for all his faults, the protagonist is (and was, before the amnesia) exceedingly good at what he does.
That sounds awfully similar to our own reading of Department Q. I'll watch it too.
Department Q is a weird one because it goes with the trope of the acerbic hyper-competent guy, but then… actually, I don’t recall, is he actually incompetent? Or does he just not quite live up to his over-confidence.<p>Also it is sometimes hard with these detective shows because the screenwriters might want a character to be hyper-competent, but they are people too, limited in their ability to portray super-competent abilities. This can result in characters lucking their way into clues.
Sounds like a much-more-fleshed-out version of Inspector Gadget!
My take is quite different. EVERYONE in Broadchurch is at least nearly-criminally incompetent.<p>"Ooh, I'm an investigative detective in a homicide. I think I'll forget myself and beat up somebody in lockup!"<p>"What's that, evidence? I think I'll withhold it for minor personal reasons."<p>"Hey, there's a pedophile investigation going on. I think I'll lie about my 'alone time' with a teenage boy to EVERYONE, just to avoid arousing suspicion..."<p>Tennant's advantage is that, in season one, he's not emotionally tied up in this completely tangled small town. He's got some professional competencies over Miller, but not many.
Counterpoint: Charlie Brown<p>A big part of what makes Charlie Brown so endearing is his undying earnestness and optimism in the face of near constant bad luck and disappointment.<p>He is exactly the lovable loser archetype that this piece says Americans do not dig. Yet the Peanuts comics and cartoons and an American pop cultural institution.
OP here (though I don't claim any special insight, as I said).<p>It would be interesting to consider the differences between the Charlie Brown and Arthur Dent character archetypes.<p>One difference seems to me exactly the undying earnestness and optimism you mentioned: in a way, Charlie Brown and other American characters like him are simply not touched by failure (even if bad things happen to them), because of their optimism[1]. This makes them lovable: we appreciate them for this quality that we (most of the audience) do not have.<p>[1]: (or lack of self-awareness, in some other cases mentioned here like Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin)<p>Arthur Dent, on the other hand, is <i>not</i> gifted with undying optimism. He's constantly moaning about things, starting with his house and his planet being destroyed. This makes him relatable more than lovable: he's not a “lovable loser” (and for the right audience, does not seem a “loser” at all), he is just us, “my kind of guy” — we feel kinship rather than appreciation. We relate to the moaning (if Arthur Dent were to remain unfailingly optimistic, he'd be… different), whereas if Charlie Brown were to lose his optimism or if Homer were to say "D'oh!" to complain about <i>big</i> things in life rather than hurting his thumb or whatever, they would become less of the endearing American institutions they are IMO.
I would not say that Charlie Brown is untouched by failure. He does descend to the depths of despair. But some how rises from it to try (and fail) again. This trope is seen best with Lucy pulling away the football every time he goes to kick it. Even though he knows he's failed every time, he talks himself into this time being different.<p>This does not contradict your overriding point, just adding nuance to the claim he is "simply not touched by failure".
In American storytelling, being optimistic overcomes being a failure. In fact, you haven't failed if you still have hope.<p>Homer Simpson is an idiot, but he doesn't give up. That's endearing enough to hold the protagonist roll.
Yes, that's the part that Americans miss and the previous commenter missed. Charlie Brown is still optimistic.<p>To dig the English comedy you need to accept that you are or the protagonist is a failure. Your or their life will never significantly improve and they made peace with it. You covet and enjoy small moments of happiness. Happiness is not the winning big but returning home.
I wonder if Candide is the prototype of this.
99% of references I see to Charlie Brown in the U.S. are as a sucker who never learns.
Referencing does not necessarily equate to sentiment though. Similar to seeing Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes peeing on thing decals isn't representative to the admiration to the comic series. The "woop woop woop woop" adult voice is another core element to US culture making fun of authorative figures, but doesn't dismiss them as unneed aspects to life.
Those references are to the recurring gag with Lucy and the football.<p>There’s a lot more to the character than that so I hope 99% is an exaggeration and people are still reading Peanuts and watching the various animated versions. I’m pretty sure they are.
> Those references are to the recurring gag with Lucy and the football.<p>Probably, because that's the most popular example of Charlie Brown as a sucker who never learns, but it's a core part of his character and is shown by many, many other gags. There's also a recurring gag with Lucy and April Fool's Day. There's a whole family of them around baseball and Peppermint Patty. There's another recurring gag where he tries to fly a kite.<p>The comic can't depict Charlie Brown as able to learn - since he never succeeds,† if he could learn, he'd never do anything at all.<p>† There are a couple of temporary exceptions. When he runs away from home he meets a gang of littler children who respect him. When he has to wear a paper bag over his head at camp, he becomes a success for the duration.
Also a counterpoint, but from the other side (from British Speculative fiction): Terry Pratchett's Discworld series<p>These books, written by a British author, are full of characters with strong wants who are roused into situation-defying action.<p>These books are also best-sellers on _both_ sides of the pond, and often share shelves with Adams.
Not just Charlie Brown. The entire cast of the comic.<p>* Charlie Brown will never talk to the Red Haired Girl. His kites will always be eaten by a tree. He'll never win a baseball game. He'll never kick the football. He has abominably low self-esteem.<p>* Lucy's infatuation with Schroder is clearly one-sided; likewise Peppermint Patty / Charlie Brown; also Sally/Linus.<p>* Snoopy will never get the Red Baron, nor enjoy publishing success<p>* Linus will never stop believing in The Great Pumpkin and is disappointed every year.<p>Probably loads more. The comic is about losers, and losing.
Only a European, and one who grew up on US stuff, fondly so, charlie brown feels very low on the exposed and perceived American ethos / values. I saw a few strips and refs .. but that's about it.
It’s practically institutionalized at school. Major holidays are marked by watching Charlie Brown in class at a young age.
I don't recall EVER watching Charlie Brown shows at school (Fairfax Co, VA in the mid 80s).
So it's very much present as inner culture but not much an influence big mainstream productions (tv shows, movies) that we see as exports, is that right ?
I think it depends where you live. Peanuts seems to have fairly large presence in Taiwan and Japan--it's currently owned by Sony. It's one of the tentpoles on Apple TV.<p>According to Wikipedia, as a franchise it's brings in more revenue than Star Trek or the Avengers.
As iterateoften points out, the TV shows are mainly tied to US holidays, or at least how those holidays are celebrated in the US. This also makes Peanuts merchandise tied to those holidays very popular.<p>Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas are the major ones. I think New Year and Easter were added at some point but not as well known.<p>Having said that, it makes sense that those shows wouldn't translate as well to a non-US audience.
Honestly, in my experience the original stuff largely disappeared. I vaguely remember watching some of it back in the early 90's, but never in school. The holiday specials would be on TV if you went looking for them, but that's about it.<p>Snoopy was more ensuring than Charlie Brown, but even that was more "cute cartoon" than anything to do with any message.<p>Edit: I see some sibling comments that it's making a comeback, though I've no idea if any of it is all that faithful to the original.<p>Charlie Brown had a lot of Christian messaging reflecting Schultz's devout beliefs, and I doubt any of that will show up in whatever Apple and Target and current schools are putting together.
talking about snoopy, it was quite popular in france in the 80s, i even have a kid thermos (<a href="https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1478487195/thermos-snoopy-and-woodstock-roughneck" rel="nofollow">https://www.etsy.com/uk/listing/1478487195/thermos-snoopy-an...</a>). but yeah it felt acultural to me at least (to be honest i would have said it was english)
> Honestly, in my experience the original stuff largely disappeared. I vaguely remember watching some of it back in the early 90's, but never in school. The holiday specials would be on TV if you went looking for them, but that's about it.<p>Yeah, my dad (a Baby Boomer) loved these and would make sure to watch them every year. I and my Millennial siblings didn't really care, it just felt old-fashioned. I had no idea it was still popular at all.
Nope. Schoolhouse Rock, multiple Monty Python films, The Last Samurai, The Magic Schoolbus, Romeo and Juliet... but never any Charlie Brown. Oh yeah, and The Sandlot. 2 or 3 times I think.
Huh, we didn't get those either. Except Schoolhouse Rock. The only other TV I remember was we'd watch every Space Shuttle launch, up until the Challenger explosion, then we didn't watch them any more.<p>And of course, there was the Oregon Trail video game in middle school. But, as far as I can tell, that was a pretty short-lived thing.
Charlie Brown does feel more like a symbol of a bygone era rather than an embodiment of the 21st century American psyche
Yes, a time when children entertained themselves outside interacting with other children, and adults were so peripheral to their lives that they could be portrayed always off screen by a mumbling voice.
Yeah. I remember thinking it was old and boring as a kid in the 90's... Have children born after the millennium even ever seen a newspaper, let alone read the comics?
He has more modern versions in Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin. But most of the failures or misfortunes they experience are quite mild or temporary, all things considered.
From Stephen Fry: "You know that scene in Animal House where there’s a fellow playing folk music on the guitar, and John Belushi picks up the guitar and destroys it. And the cinema loves it. Well, the British comedian would want to play the folk singer. We want to play the failure."<p>Homer and Peter Griffin are idiots but they smash the guitar. Charlie Brown gets his guitar smashed.
I think this is a distinction between comedy and non-comedy genres.<p>There are many examples of protags in American comedies who never get their way -- Party Down, Seinfeld, Always Sunny. Part of this is the need for American sitcoms to maintain the status quo over dozens of episodes / several seasons.<p>You rarely see Hollywood action heroes who are beset with unrelenting disappointment -- they usually go through hell, but by the end of the third act, achieve some sort of triumph.<p>A notable counterexample is Sicario, but I wouldn't call it a "Hollywood action movie."
In the first Indiana Jones, the hero makes no positive contribution to the outcome in the end. He is just along for the ride.<p>To be fair, it requires a little bit of thinking to see. The general audience might see it as success because the outcome was "good" even if it had nothing to do with anything Jones did.
Indy led Belloq to the Ark. Belloq was looking in the wrong place because he only had the side of the headpiece of the Staff of Ra that was seared into Toht's palm, thus without Jones in the movie, the Nazis might never have acquired the Ark, failing to "take back one kadam to honor the Hebrew God, whose Ark this is".<p>Moreover, if Indy had not gone to Nepal, then Toht (having obtained the headpiece) and Belloq might have used a staff of the right length to find the Ark. Had they also captured Marion and taken her along to their secret island base, Jones would not have been there to tell her not to look, and thus her face would have melted off too.<p>Of course, Toht and his henchmen might also just have killed her in Nepal.<p>Alternatively, as Toht and company followed Jones to Marion, and might not have found her otherwise, they might never have had even half the headpiece of the staff of Ra, and the Ark thus would have remained undisturbed in its resting place, leaving the baddies to deal merely with the wrinkles and creases associated with aging appearing on their faces in the fullness of time.<p>So: Jones keeps Ravenwood alive, and puts the Belloq and his Nazi colleagues in a position to have their faces melted off. Jones also offed a couple of Nazis and other baddies along the way.
After the Nazis opened the Ark, Jones was able to tell the Americans where to pick it up from. Otherwise when the Nazis sent a crew to look for the missing men they’d have just found and taken the Ark again.
> it had nothing to do with anything Jones did<p>To be absolutely fair, I think in that era of American cinema there was a norm that you very clearly delineate apart what the protagonist accomplishes from what comes about by an act of God. Indiana Jones does nothing because the Nazis have to get their comeuppance for blasphemy.
>In the first Indiana Jones, the hero makes no positive contribution to the outcome in the end. He is just along for the ride.<p>I think that's just bad script writing.
I'd say there are more. Courage the Cowardly Dog? Very much in the lovable loser camp. The Eds from Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy also fit, but I suppose you could say that's a Canadian show.
Indeed, also a great example of a failing bumbling lovable loser who is frequently considered a hero to many Americans is Homer Simpson. Homer Simpson is a hero to many people in America, especially among the working class. It's not a pure example, because Homer does inadvertently succeed often, but it's almost always because of some crazy luck, not because of some skill or even perseverance.<p>I largely agree with Douglas Adams assessment of the cultural differences. I think it's pretty clear that he is on to something in a general sense. But there are definitely exceptions in my opinion. It's just way too diverse and way too complex a formula to ratchet down in such a narrow way.
> Indeed, also a great example of a failing bumbling lovable loser who is frequently considered a hero to many Americans is Homer Simpson.<p>Homer maybe the lowest version of a protagonist "loser" tolerable to American viewers, but he still has far too much agency compared to a British loser. "Lisa needs braces" and "Do it for her" are very hero-coded, and would never happen in a universe where the Simpsons are a British family.<p>Another barometer is American remakes of British shows, where the loser character is given redeeming qualities or circumstances rather than just letting them be the losers they are, such as David Brent vs. Michael Scott in their respective "The Office" roles. I suspect soaked-in-the-wool loser characters don't poll well in American focus groups hired by studios.
Homer is a great example for this. However, at the end of the day, through all his incompetence and bumbling, he wins. He has a wonderful wife, kids and a home. He has friends and always has an upbeat “winner” attitude. You see him and see a happy, successful person inspite of his failings.<p>Same with Peter Griffin but he is confident and fiercely dominant. He doesn’t <i>feel</i> like a loser.<p>Even Michael from the office who is a “loser”, has a lot of redeeming qualities like genuine care for his employees, terrific salesman and a position of leadership.
Courage always overcomes the challenge by being brave even though he is scared.
Those shows are also on purpose far out and weird in their style and story telling.
As with everything else, sweeping generalizations about "culture" rarely hold up in the modern world.
I don’t know anything about Charlie Brown, but I’m not sure constant bad luck and disappointment capture the spirit of the British humour being discussed, as that can just as easily be used to describe slapstick humour. Perhaps it’s the existential futility/resignation that’s missing? Charlie Brown is a child, so they perhaps have optimistic naïveté instead (such that their failure be viewed with pity instead of kinship, which is really the distinction here).
Charlie Brown is dying in America. Gen Z doesn't know who he is.
Charlie Brown is actually pretty big right now- my gen z daughter has her entire classroom decked out in him and he's over Target, etc. He fits in with the cozy subculture part of gen z.
Bro literally everyone I know has watched at least the Great Pumpkin and Charlie Brown Christmas. People my age regularly make memes based on the football gag. It’s a cultural icon.<p>As a general rule actually, I’d say that Gen Z is more likely than may be expected to know about culture from before our time - the internet, after all, is a back catalogue of the best hits of humanity. That’s why spotify thinks we all have a listening age of 70.
> As a general rule actually, I’d say that Gen Z is more likely than may be expected to know about culture from before our time - the internet, after all, is a back catalogue of the best hits of humanity. That’s why spotify thinks we all have a listening age of 70.<p>I heard many people who grew up before 2000 remark younger people listened to more varied music than they did at the same ages. And I heard none remark the opposite. But some of the same people remarked knowledge of older television and movies had declined seemingly. And none remarked the opposite.
Apple just created a new Charlie Brown series and my 6-year-old daughter has already devoured it. I'm trying to get her to say "good grief!" more often.
Another counterpoint: Columbo
Columbo is anything but a failure, though, and the audience knows that. His genius is leveraging humility to convince killers that he's a bumbling idiot, while in reality he's onto them from the first encounter.<p>_Slow Horses_ came up in another thread. I'd argue that Columbo has more in common with Jackson Lamb than with Charlie Brown.
Most Americans wouldn't consider Charlie Brown the "hero" of his strip, they would consider him a loser who gets what he deserves, and that's the joke. He isn't cool the way Snoopy is cool.<p>I think the article is correct that Americans don't feel sympathy for the underdog who doesn't overcome and succeed in the end so much as contempt, due to their inborn sense of entitlement and belief that failure is caused by a lack of moral fortitude and excess of laziness rather than systemic injustice and inequality.
Americans are a pretty diverse group, but the most iconic image anyone has of Charlie Brown is perseverance. Lucy sets up a football promising potential success, and despite the fact that she's pulled it away from him at every opportunity, he still tries to kick it anyway.<p>I think that's a quintessentially American fable. Most people will never achieve great success, but they can experience the thrill of imagining opportunity, and even if they know it's illusory, that moment of faith and effort before failure is the heroic action.<p>People will do stupid things like bet their life savings on a game or a bad idea, but they feel heroic for having tried regardless, knowing that if enough people keep trying, someone is going to succeed, and they get to experience that success vicariously in some small amount because they tried just as hard as the one who succeeded, experienced the same struggle, and somebody made it, even if it was never going to be them.
The football bit has a subtle touch that I’ve not seen mentioned anywhere. Because it’s not just kick(trust/risk) or not kick(distrust/preservation). When he kicks, he gives it his all, resulting in massive failure if he’s tricked. Yet, he never gives it half effort. Half effort would mean even if she moved the ball, he would still be standing there with only a minor whiff. Then he could slap the ball out of her hand and make her the laughing stock. Point is, he has a lot more than two options that are presented. And I think this says a lot about his character. He’s portrayed as a kid who will likely be a better adult than child. He’s more mature than his peers. I think that is the subtle part of his personality and character that is a little deeper than the obvious.
Perseverance like CB's is just pathetic insanity.<p>That's how I see Charlie Brown, as do many of my friends. We frequently use the "CB missing the football" as an analogy for the Democratic Party - over the past several decades years, the party has been a long series of swing-and-misses (notably their ability to win the popular vote but lose an election, and even more their inability to beat Trump, twice).
That works as reference to a frustrating situation, but Charlie Brown doesn't just miss. We assume that if the football was left where it was promised, he would have kicked it.<p>Maybe you suspect a similar situation with the Democrats, that those holding power sabotage their efforts, or maybe the analogy doesn't work in that way, but I think that people like this Charlie Brown trope because his failure isn't the result of a lack of ability; it's an excess of hope and trust.<p>I've heard plenty of people say that Americans are idiots because they don't realize the system is rigged against them and they believe the American Dream that anyone can achieve success. I think plenty of them know that the world is a harsh place with untrustworthy and adversarial people and that they are at a personal disadvantage compared to the wealthy and powerful, but they choose to persevere regardless because they believe hope is better than nihilism.<p>That can work against them. They might vote for a political party even if it fails them. I'm not saying that kind of hope is sane or rational from a game theory perspective, but it's very American to keep it up anyway.
> but Charlie Brown doesn't just miss. We assume that if the football was left where it was promised, he would have kicked it.<p>You shouldn't; when Lucy doesn't pull the ball away, he does indeed miss, kicking her in the hand and putting her in a cast.<p>Charlie Brown never succeeds at anything.
They turned their back on their base voters to cater to tiny special interest groups. It's not surprising that the other side was able to draw them in with deceptive messaging. The funny thing is that the other side has perfected the art of constantly pulling away the football while blaming others to reinforce their support.
Charlie Brown is more like Peter Parker.<p>He always does the right thing. In spite of always being punished for it.
Systemic? It goes way beyond that.<p>Nature itself ensures that life is short, brutal, violent, and punctuated with horrors. Happiness is a transient state that loses its power if it is present more than part of the time, and joy can only exist in a backdrop of disappointment, or it just becomes another day in the life. We are wired for a life of failure, disappointment, trauma, tragedy, and loss.<p>That we have wrested a comfortable civilization from these dire circumstances is a great testament to the resolve and resourcefulness of men and women.<p>We have the great privilege and responsibility of living in this elevated plane, with a long (as biologicaly possible) life lived in relative comfort, and even insulated from the horrors of life by the drapery of civil machinery.<p>Even so, the only justice in this world is the justice we create ourselves.<p>The universe owes us nothing, and sometimes collects its debt for the entropy we take from it.
I think the fact that most Americans call it "Charlie Brown" when the name of it is actually "Peanuts" proves you wrong.
When you go out of your way to bash American culture for no reason (with some bonus racism thrown in a few comments down!) it really drags the discussion down. I really wish you wouldn't do that, it's just making the site worse for everyone.
>When you go out of your way to bash American culture for no reason (with some bonus racism thrown in a few comments down!) it really drags the discussion down.<p>This discussion is <i>about</i> American culture, and I have reasons for my criticisms. That you can't conceive of any such criticism as having any possible rationale beyond randomness and racism is what makes good faith discussion difficult here. Forgive me if I've given up even attempting nuance after having my efforts be met with snark and midwit dismissals time and again.<p>But in the future I will keep in mind that only pro-American views are allowed in threads like these. I keep forgetting this is supposed to be a safe space for the very people responsible for the myriad problems we're not supposed to mention. Sorry for harshing the vibe.
> <i>they would consider him a loser</i><p>What about Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes?
Calvin is such an interesting character. He never "learns", similar to Charlie Brown, but his outlook is that of a scientist who just wants to "see what'll happen". Anything to occupy his hyperactive mind, whether it be spaceman spiff or a trip to the Triassic, or closer to reality, pranking Susie Derkins or trying to get the better of Moe (or Hobbes for that matter). He's not optimistic, but cynical. But his cynicism is irrelevant because he's driven by his avoidance of boredom.
> Most Americans wouldn't consider Charlie Brown the "hero" of his strip, they would consider him a loser who gets what he deserves, and that's the joke.<p>I don't think you speak for most Americans. That's the cruelest interpretation I've ever heard of Charlie Brown.
Stephen Fry made the same remarks in a Q&A session some years ago: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k2AbqTBxao" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k2AbqTBxao</a><p>As a Brit I can't agree more with both, I find American humour so hard to relate to but I guess it's just a culture thing
His point of high church vs. Protestantism is a good one. We in the US practice a kind of competitive Protestantism designed--at least partly, if not mostly--to make the adherents feel good about themselves. There is a distinct difference between submission and proselytizing.<p>There is also something to the state of empire as well. The British empire had been in steady decline for a very long time before Adams or Fry started making people laugh, whereas the American empire has been ascending quickly since WWII. This sort of gestalt is hard to ignore and will certainly influence things. For example, would a 'Blackadder' sell as well in 1890? This is around the same time 'King Solomon's Mines' was selling briskly, and Haggard's story is instantly recognizable by any modern Hollywood writer.<p>On some level Americans are British people time-displaced by a couple of generations.
I find more modern American humour much easier to relate to, probably because it has veered more in this direction. A show like Always Sunny seems incredibly British-compatible because it's about terrible people getting their comeuppance, yet still being sympathetic despite their failings.
To go full British, you need characters like David Brent, who aren't sympathetic. They have no redeeming heartfelt goodbye. No-one is sad when they're gone, life moves on.<p>I would also say that the Always Sunny gang really aren't sympathetic either, but it's a para-social trick of having spent so much time "together" with them over so many episodes.<p>I suspect a new viewer coming to watch the latest series of IASIP would not see them as sympathetic. That's quite different to The Office (US), where a new viewer skipping to later seasons would not have the same opinions as a new viewer watching season 1, where Scott was much closer to a Brent type character, before he was redeemed and made more pitiable than awful over the seasons.
A more recent show to compare would be the UK vs the USA version of Ghosts. I like both shows but it is interesting how in the USA version all the main Ghosts are basically good people while the UK Ghosts have more serious flaws. And in the UK version, money is a constant problem while in the USA version it isn't nearly as big of a problem.
I'm not sure it's generally true that funny English characters aren't sympathetic.
You're right, there are plenty of sympathetic ones too, but it's the unsympathetic ones that really don't do so well to a US audience. There's a reason that The Office (US) hard pivoted Michael Scott after season 1.
Mr. Bean (Rowan Atkinson) is both hilarious and sympathetic so there's that.
> I would also say that the Always Sunny gang really aren't sympathetic either, but it's a para-social trick of having spent so much time "together" with them over so many episodes.<p>I'd say they're charismatic and funny, but irredeemably bad people. It was refreshing that the show didn't shy away from that; in lots of comedies, the characters are basically psychopathic if taken literally, yet we're still supposed to like them and to see them as having hearts of gold if they make the occasional nice gesture. Always Sunny just leaned hard into portraying them as terrible people who were only 'likable' in the shallow sense needed to make the show fun to watch rather than an ordeal.<p>But I think the creators eventually lost sight of that -- I remember the big serious episode they did with Mac's dance, and I just find it baffling because in order to buy into the emotion we were evidently supposed to feel, we needed to take the characters seriously. And as soon as we take the characters seriously we are (or should be) overwhelmingly aware that we're watching people who have proven over the previous umpteen years to be irredeemable sociopaths, which kind of takes the edge off the heartwarming pride story.
I only watched the first few seasons of IASIP, but I don’t remember them being sympathetic characters at all. The whole concept, and what made it funny, I thought, is that they really are all terrible people who just drag each other down.
Yeah, the conceit of Seinfeld was that the characters were crappy, but you liked them because they were funny. But they didn't actually lean into that as hard as, say, the finale would suggest. All of the characters have something sympathetic that you can like about them, even if you can buy the thesis that they are unsympathetic broadly.<p>The genius of IASIP is to just lean all the way into this trope. The characters are never sympathetic and never redeem themselves. It's almost an experiment in whether you can make people feel sympathetic toward awful (but entertaining) characters just through long familiarity with them. (Yes.)
It would be disturbing to find out people sympathize with the IASIP characters.
They were more human and relatable in the very early seasons. It was just a bunch of people dicking around trying to run a bar (for the most part).<p>As time went on, they become more and more awful.<p>I'd say it has a pretty decent parallel with Breaking Bad. In season 1 almost anyone can relate to and cheers for Walter. By the last season, you hate him and are happy he dies.
They were committing various felonies in the first season, if I recall. It couldn’t have been more clear that these characters are bad people who will do almost anything to get what they want. The humor lies in the arbitrary and inconsistent boundaries they set for themselves and each other.<p>Contrast with the initial good intentions of Walt in Breaking Bad. The IASIP characters never had good intentions.
I don’t believe most Americans would hate Walter, even at the very end. Americans hate Skylar.
No way. Everyone hates Walter at the end. If he had plausibly maintained the "I was doing it for my family" pose, then maybe, yeah. But the whole point of the last season was putting that idea to bed, demonstrating that it was always destructive selfishness.
Yes rationally he should be hated, it just doesn’t appear he is from a lot of discussions and forums online.
> Everyone hates Walter at the end.<p>Hate? Nah. He's tragic.<p>Does he do evil, despicable things? Absolutely. Are most of those things done because of jealousy, rage, or a failure to bother to understand the context in which he's operating? Definitely. But, like, unless you've <i>never</i> been jealous, blindingly angry, foolish, or far too hasty, you can see where (assuming turning yourself in to the cops isn't an option [0]) you <i>might</i> end up making similar choices. [1]<p>Is he prideful, wrathful, did he do many evil things? Yes, yes, and yes. It's not unreasonable to call his (in)actions -on balance- monstrous. But he's also relatable/understandable in a -er- "Greek tragedy" sort of way. He's a blunderer and a wrecker who probably deserved <i>far</i> worse than he got, but I find it dreadfully difficult to <i>hate</i> him when I consider the entire story.<p>[0] Which it pretty much immediately absolutely was not. Even at the start, all the money he made would have been forfeit and (because the USian "Drug War" is batshit crazy) prosecutors probably would have found a way to take the house and cars, leaving his family <i>way</i> worse off than if he'd done nothing at all.<p>[1] Having said that, there are so many points of decision that the odds that you'd walk his path exactly are approximately zero.
Yeah this does seem right. Maybe as our own empire has been collapsing, our culture has been edging toward the brits'.
Another great example of this is British SF, especially 20th century Doctor Who and Blake's 7, vs American SF such as Star Wars/Trek. The British version can be much bleaker. And of course Red Dwarf, which doesn't translate <i>at all</i> into American. (There was a single pilot episode)<p>Edit: someone downthread mentioned Limmy's Show and Absolutely, to which I would add Burnistoun. Scottish humor is even more grimly fatalist than English.
> The British version can be much bleaker.<p>I think this one is a miss. TOS is inspired by _british_ naval history. Loss, fear, and failure are central to the show. In this era of TV, leading characters still had large flaws. Kirk is frozen by choice, Spock believes himself superior, Bones is a bigoted luddite. We as viewers get to see the pain this causes and their efforts to improve. It's wholly different than modern US television including all other ST media. Meanwhile, 70s Dr. Who is packed with automatic weapons fire and explosions and the formula has always been the Doctor knows best. (I am a huge fan of all the mentioned shows.)<p>For a good, modern example we can look at Ghosts (suddenly renamed "Ghosts UK" on my streaming services) and Ghosts US. The adaptation is agonizing. They stripped the important aspects of the story but kept a boy scout, toy soldier, and an interracial marriage. I found that telling.
> Scottish humor is even more grimly fatalist than English.<p>Typified by Rab C Nesbitt. "An alcoholic Glaswegian who seeks unemployment as a lifestyle choice".<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rab_C._Nesbitt" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rab_C._Nesbitt</a>
Tbf, Star Trek TOS was also a sci fi show with an FX budget of two shoelaces and a pack of gum, and had to be carrier by great actors and writing, which it absolutely was. It's still my favourite Star Trek to this day.<p>I think the problem with how the US makes shows is that once something get successful, it gets a budget, which means the writing needs to appeal to a broader audience, which makes the whole thing blander.<p>I might be ignorant of US television pop culture, but I think, at least before the 90s, the UK produced much more memorable scifi shows (and even in the 90s, a lot of those US shows were secretly Canadian)
Does the Office have heroes? It turned out to translate very well into American.<p>That Red Dwarf pilot was actually fine except for the bizarre choice of making Lister a hunk. Rimmer was fine, Holly was great.<p>I think there is a divide, but it isn't the Atlantic ocean.
As I just commented above, I do think The Office fundamentally maintained this foundation of comedic failure, but I also think it wouldn't have worked as well for American audiences (and indeed, wasn't working as well in the first season because of this) if not for the much larger emphasis on the likable-character love story with Jim and Pam. Maybe the upshot is that you can have a British edge in American comedy, as long as you sand it down a bit with some other element.<p>I see a similar kind of dynamic in Parks and Recreation, which is maybe a more culturally native take on the same kind of show, where Leslie is also ultimately a comedic failure, but with the edge sanded down by a certain amount of (mostly fruitless) competence and especially a seemingly inexhaustible well of enthusiasm and optimism that can't help but infect most of the people around her.
man it has nothing to do with American watchers.<p>the UK Office had fourteen (14) episodes. The US one had 201 episodes.<p>if you don't lean on things like inter-office romance there is nothing to put on screen.<p>the jim-pam thing was a direct riff on the tim-lucy interactions in the UK version, they just didn't, you know, <i>have 100+ more episodes</i> to build on it.<p>hell, you can even see when that ran out of steam in later seasons of the US version and they just start jamming celebrity guest stars in there
Fair!<p>But I also think it's correct that the US version is much softer-edged and that it would not have been so wildly popular were that not so.<p>I mean, there are harder edged comedies in the US, but they certainly aren't as popular. Would they be more so in England? I dunno, maybe. I suppose the US version of The Office was probably more popular across the pond than the homespun version as well?
I have only seen very little of both, but I did get the distinct feeling that the US office was just plain better executed in many ways. I do remember that reading online forums, fans of UK Office scoffed at the US version at first, but that turned around.
True, after the first season. But I kind of question whether there is really a difference between "better executed" and the cultural difference we're discussing here. It's rare to have a show change tone from one season to the next, so it gives us a pretty unique way to look at what changed. I'm not sure what the "execution" issues were in the first season, except that it seemed (to me, as an American) more cold and self deprecating, where later it was warmer and more lovable. It had the same actors and sets and everything, but just different writing and changes to the personalities and storylines of the characters. But I think this might just be restating the differences between American and British humor that kicked this thread off?
> That Red Dwarf pilot was actually fine except for the bizarre choice of making Lister a hunk<p>I doubt the character of Ace Rimmer [what a guy!] would have translated <i>at all</i>.
Jim is the hero of the US version of the Office<p>He doesn't succeed so much at work but he does in his personal life
Robert California and Dwight were the clear heroes of the American version of the office.
Star Wars is not scifi. Star Trek has nothing to do with SW.
Yes, definitely a culture thing. I had a very difficult time finding most British humor funny when I was younger, but my personality combination of loving humor and comedy and also being incredibly interested in people, drove me to want to understand why British humor was funny when most of the time it just seemed so absurd.<p>It was a multi-decade path so it's very difficult to identify progression points, but slowly through exposure I began to "get it" and now I adore British comedy and humor. I still adore American comedy and humor as well, but the more exposure to the culture I got, the more I understood it.<p>Obviously that's just anecdotal, but I personally find it strong evidence that the humor divide is indeed cultural. The more similar cultures are to begin with, the easier the leap is.<p>To me the most exciting part of this is that it means there are thousands of other cultures on this planet that have humor that I have not unlocked yet. Someday I hope to!<p>Edit: for a very fascinating example of differences, I love comparing the UK version of the office to the US version of the office. To many Americans, David Brent mostly just came off mean and an asshole, even a poisonous one, whereas Michael Scott comes off as eccentric and clueless and unable to read the room, but overall a mostly good guy. That perception makes David Brent kind of hateable whereas Michael Scott kind of lovable.<p>Another fascinating point of comparison is the UK version of ghosts, versus the US version of ghosts. I'll leave comparisons and contrasts on those to others as I haven't watched all of the UK version of ghosts yet. I'd be fascinated to hear what others think of that, and the office for that matter.
I watched both versions of Ghosts, and found them to be quite similar honestly. The US version can be a little more slapstick and a little more goofy, but that's about it.
It's the opposite for me - the 'you can't change anything, the world sucks, the best you can do is endure and be snarky about it' attitude appealed a lot more to me when I was younger.
David Brent is poisonous, and indeed hatable. The point of the British version of the show is not that he's more tolerable or likeable to the British. If anything it's more pointed how awful he is this side of the water, given the preponderance of bosses exactly like this. What makes the show work in the UK (and Ireland), is a greater cultural willingness to see the worst aspects of reality reflected in entertainment. Versus the focus on escapism in even the most grim US television - i.e.: Tony Soprano is a monster, but he also has charisma and glamour. Walter White is dying and becoming more and more amoral, but he also goes from being a dork to a badass. Both characters are utter glamorisations of what their real life counterparts would be like. Along with the surrealism there's a genuine existentialism to the darkest of UK comedy - from early Alan Partridge to Nighty Night. An actual interest in examining the nature of cruelty and suffering.
> I find American humour so hard to relate to but I guess it's just a culture thing<p>These kind of comments always puzzle me. Hollywood makes stuff for the entire world, not just for a domestic audience.<p>Shows like Friends, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, pretty much any big sitcom you can name is in syndication in most countries around the world, because of how relatable it is.<p>It's often not sophisticated, and can be quite shallow (See Two and a half men or Big Bang theory), but it being hard to relate to is unlikely to be an issue.
Don't underestimate the power of big media corporations to push a world view. When I was a kid in NZ, British culture was impressed on us via the media. These days, there's more American influence. I don't think that's to do with the inherent quality of those cultures.
Very interesting! Except I noted that he referred to David Brent from The Office, and we have a <i>direct</i> corollary to that character, of course, in Michael Scott from The Office. They really didn't change the formula for American audiences, he's absolutely still a comedic failure. Starting in the second season, he becomes a bit more of a lovable comedic failure, but the basic point of the character stands. And he is beloved by American audiences!
I also really enjoyed After Life (with Ricky Gervais). I wouldn't call him a hero, but then again maybe I would. So honest, so pissed off, so intelligent.<p>Sick Note with Rupert Grint, same thing. Brilliant.<p>I'm currently reading the Bobbiverse series. Sure the guy is sort of a hero. But he is also an antihero forced to do heroic things, while he just wants to geek out and enjoy his coffee while making star trek references.<p>I'm not British btw.
As an older American, I’ve always found British humor of the Monty Python type hilarious.<p>Unfortunately, I haven’t found a lot of newer material of this type. I may have to look harder.
What do you mean by "this type"?<p>The sketch show format has been pretty much entirely killed off by TikTok & Instagram.<p>It's very hard to do a sketch that hasn't already been done on TikTok with a tiny fraction of the budget.<p>Absurdist humour still exists everywhere, it's less popular than either Python in the 70's / 80's, or the flash era in the 2000s, but it's still everywhere, but I'd also wager it is not to your taste.<p>At the risk of offending just about everyone, I would suggest that something like "Skibidi Toilet" is just this generation's badger-badger-mushroom, which in turn was that generations' "Bring me a shrubbery!".<p>Sketch shows in particular don't work well for TV in this era. Mitchell and Webb tried hard to return with one this year and it just fell flat, the jokes feel telegraphed from a mile-away, taking a minute to get to a punchline in a era when the same jokes are told in a 10 second short.<p>The downside of the tiktok/insta model, is that the more successful people on Insta end up just re-telling their one good joke over and over. ( Or indeed, re-recording someone else's one good joke. ).<p>Not that sketch shows didn't also repeat jokes sometimes, but they could at least play around with a punchline in unexpected ways, or have callbacks and nods to earlier sketches in a series. That kind of non-continuity doesn't work when you don't know which tiktoks will go viral, or which order your audience will see them in, as the algorithm dictates all.
I think there's something to this. But I'd also say the reason it feels so dead is because consumed media has shattered into a million pieces. With the death of broadcast TV and somewhat the death of movies, it's actually getting increasingly harder to find shows with common consumption.<p>The reason "Bring me a shrubbery" is funny and why people endlessly quoted Holy Grail is because almost everyone in the US watched Monte python at one point or another. Part of what made people do those quotes is the fact that regardless audience, you know you'll get a laugh because they too know the context for the phrase.<p>I don't think there's a single piece of media like that. Not at least in the last 10 years. I mean, funnily, I think you've nailed Skibidi as a rare exception, at least for the younger generations.
If you are saying sketch shows like "Thank God You're Here" "Fast & Loose" and "Who's Line is it Anyway" are being killed off by short/low budget replacements on TikTok, we must be living in different worlds.<p>I haven't seen anything like them on TikTok and I'm on there enough to have noticed. Maybe you're talking about the dumb alien short videos of them telling a joke to each other and snickering, that doesn't compare.
"TikTok doesn't live up to the best of TV" is true, but that's not the argument I'm making.<p>OP asked for "newer", and yet you've not named anything created in the last 10 years. ( And named a 30+ year old improv show, which is definitely not the format I'm talking about. )<p>You're not alone, one second-cousin comment even went with the phrase "more modern", then named a range of shows that are at least over 20 years old. Green Wing was the 90's, that's closer to the time of Python's Life of Brian than today.<p>Clearly things aren't fine if there isn't fresh blood coming through.<p>Sketch shows never were the best of TV, they are a format where you throw a lot out there and then the very best bits of each episode might be particularly funny, with a bunch of filler in-between.<p>That can't compete with a medium where people just swipe the second they're not finding a particular piece funny or to their taste.
I agree the shows I named have aged, but I think my point stands. There really isn't anything _like_ those shows on TikTok that I am aware of, and maybe you've made a bigger point that there isn't anything like these shows at all anymore. (To be fair I don't watch much traditional TV anymore -- maybe that was your point all along and I just missed it)
>"Thank God You're Here" "Fast & Loose"<p>I've never heard of these shows, where are they out of?<p>>we must be living in different worlds.<p>While I'm not on social media like that, I do think so.
> I would suggest that something like "Skibidi Toilet" is just this generation's badger-badger-mushroom<p>Beyond the first minute or two, I'd not class Skibidi Toilet as any kind of humor. It's a serialized silent (late-era-style silent with synced foley but no dialog) sci-fi action war epic told without intertitles.
As in surreal British sketch comedy? You'd like<p>- The Goon Show (it's this 1950s radio serial that inspired the Pythons... it's surprising how many tropes the Pythons borrowed from it)<p>- The Goodies<p>- The Kenny Everett Television Show<p>- Absolutely!<p>- The Mighty Boosh / Unnatural Acts / Noel Fielding's Luxury Comedy<p>- Vic Reeves' Big Night Out / The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer / Bang Bang, It's Reeves and Mortimer<p>- Big Train<p>- The League of Gentlemen<p>- On the Hour / The Day Today / Brass Eye<p>- Jam / Blue Jam<p>- The Armando Iannucci Shows<p>- Limmy's Show<p>Also, to throw in a US programme, I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson was pretty good
- A Bit of Fry and Laurie<p>with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry
Can we fit in 'Not the nine O'clock news'?<p>And what about 'Spitting Image'?
> The Goon Show<p>I had the opportunity to meet and talk to Harry Secombe just a couple years before he died. He was quite surprised to run into an American who knew who he was. Most American's only know Peter Sellers.
I feel like Jam/Blue Jam was about the zenith of British surreal and nihilistic comedy.
I was looking for I Think You Should Leave, which I think is great. But it might be the exception that proves the rule, at least for newish shows in the US.<p>Key and Peele and Chappelle's Show were also this kind of show, but are pretty old now.
Also:<p>- Monkey Dust<p>- The Fast Show
Thank you!
As a fellow older American who loves Monty Python, the more modern British shows I've enjoyed the most were Green Wing, League of Gentlemen, Peep Show, and Doc Martin. Of those, League of Gentlemen and Green Wing have the most Python-like absurdity, while Doc Martin has the most subtle humor. Peep Show is hilarious, but the most crass humor of those listed, although League of Gentlemen doesn't shy away from crassness either.
If you're a gamer, pick up Thank Goodness You're Here!
The phenomenon Adams is talking about here is largely a post-WW1 phenomenon in UK culture, related to the post-WW1 malaise. His best examples are post-WW1 (Paul Pennyfeather, Tony Last, and the book by Stephen Pile). The others arguably don't really fit (e.g., the core delight in Gulliver is the reader thinking they are smarter than Gulliver; the reader doesn't identify with him). It's not exactly a new observation... one of the motivations both Tolkien and CS Lewis had for strong characters like Aragorn was to present examples falling outside this cultural drift.
As much as I love American upbeat-ness (I'm American) I think that our hatred of failure and our strained optimism puts a tremendous psychological pressure on us. Sometimes, we fail, and that's okay. Sometimes, we lose, and that's just life. I think that's an essential part of growing up, and our collective denial of that makes me feel like we, as a people, are not quite mature.
At least for American technologists (if not technologists more broadly, or Americans more broadly) failure is not at all seen as a bad thing: it's seen as a data point that XYZ didn't work, so now we'll pivot to ABC and give that a go.<p>Edison's quote about not having failed, but rather, discovering 1,000 ways not to do something captures this well.
I think (we) Americans hate failure only when people give up.<p>We have a very long tradition of failure leading to success, everything from Edison trying hundreds of lightbulbs to Don Draper in Mad Men reinventing himself after failure.<p>Our bankruptcy laws are different from other countries in how lenient they are towards the debtor. And, of course, the entire culture of Silicon Valley is about failure after failure followed by success.<p>And it's not even conventional, economic success that we want. We're happy when someone finds happiness even if not financial success. The rich-person-gives-up-everything-for-love is a familiar American trope.<p>We don't like failure, but we forgive it, as long as we keep trying.
Although I have very little experience with British humor, I find it interesting to compare British fiction I read as a child/teenager that became popular hits in the US (Harry Potter, Alex Rider). From this article's perspective, those protagonists are the epitome of American heroes (autonomy, mastery, purpose). No wonder they garnered such acclaim in the US. Curious if these stories are the exception rather than the rule in British YA fiction? Is the comparison unfair, since these stories were not written with the comedic genre in mind?
> Curious if these stories are the exception rather than the rule in British YA fiction?<p>I feel like for Harry Potter it's more that it leans into the "fantasy" genre hero arc trope?
Some good examples there, also Doctor Who
What i find in dr who is that, at least at the beginning of every episode he doesn't even attempt to control what's happening even when his life is threatened. He's perfectly happy to let events unfold before stepping in.<p>And he hates using guns. He walks into danger with zero ability to defend himself besides some weird tool with painful limitations. In a way he's the most un American hero possible.
Of which Adams was one of the writers.
At least in the case of Harry Potter specifically, there's actually a few things that contributed to its success outside of it having a traditionally successful Real American Hero™.<p>First off, we need to remember that it was cribbing from a lot of <i>other</i> "kid goes to magic boarding school" books out there. The difference in sales success is down to the fact that JKR got a better US publisher. Scholastic has an unfair advantage in the young adult and graded reader markets called the "Scholastic Book Fair". Basically, it's a travelling bookstore event set up in US schools where they sell kids books. If you wanted to start a YA phenomenon in the US, especially back in the 2000s, that was the perfect way to do it.<p>For similar reasons, Bone outsold a good chunk of other western comics purely because of the fact that Scholastic was the only company willing to touch it.<p>Another factor is that its obvious Britishisms come across as fantastical to American audiences. I mean, who in America even knows what a boarding school is? This is the same reason why Naruto did so well in America, even though most of the things that seem unique about its world are just fantastic versions of bog-standard ninja tropes.<p>[0] This is the same reason why Naruto arguably did better in America than in its native Japan.
"Keep Calm and Carry On" is very much the British way, even though us Antipodeans refer to them as whinging Poms.<p>Keep a stiff upper lip chaps.
"In the US you cannot make jokes about failure"<p>There is also the phenomenon that serial failure Donald Duck is still a very popular character in several European countries, while we don't care about Mickey Mouse at all. Isn't it the other way around in the US?<p>Mickey always does good and always wins, that's deeply boring. Donald is flawed and relatable.
Interestingly growing up as an American, I watched Duck Tales which while tangentially related to Donald Duck it’s about his ultra rich uncle going on awesome adventures and just being so smart and awesome. Donald shows up every once in awhile but I don’t really remember much about him.
Duck Tales is basically an attempt at doing Carl Barks era adventure style minus Donald, but Scrooge being made more heroic/sympathetic (he's pretty much a lovable jerk at best in the old stories). I think Disney really wanted to tell the Donald stories Europe loved to Americans.<p>The persistence of Carl Barks and Don Rosa style stories here is surprising even to me. My son, born 2005, seems to know every single Barks story by heart - and I can't say I pushed it <i>that</i> hard.
I don't think many people care about Mickey as a character. They like the image but that's about it.
This made me think about another contrast, Hayao Miyazaki. His characters ("heroes" or "villains"), usually are more morally complex and nuanced than the ones you would find in the works I typically see depicted in Hollywood. They are not just good or evil. You may not agree with their actions, but you understand the logic of it.
Ironically, Ghibli's adaptation of A Wizard of Earthsea (written by Le Guin, an American author) flopped in part because Miyazaki made it much more about heroes versus villains than the original story.
What brings me back to hacker news are these posts that ask questions yanked unexpectedly directly from my own soul, in words more articulate than I could manage. And then somehow manages to answer those questions. Thank you.
This does not surprise me - and America is a big place, and I'm sure there are areas where Arthur would be seen in a similar light but I've worked in the US and the UK and this type of things reminds me of the phrase 'separated by a common language'. Slightly off topic perhaps but another area where I see a strong divide in sensibilities are the NewYorker cartoons - my wife (born in north America) thinks the are hilarious. I usually don't understand what's funny about them.
> In England our heroes tend to be characters who either have, or come to realise that they have, no control over their lives whatsoever – Pilgrim, Gulliver, Hamlet, Paul Pennyfeather (from Decline and Fall), Tony Last (from A Handful of Dust). We celebrate our defeats and our withdrawals – the Battle of Hastings, Dunkirk<p>I'm having rouble reconciling the first sentence with the second. At Dunkirk, the English displayed massive control over their own fate. Yes, I suppose it was a military defeat, but it's so famous and moving because the agency of everyday Englishmen saved the war effort. Perhaps that's the American in me speaking.
What a great response by Adams! I think the acceptance, and even the celebration of failure is present among the “maker” community in the USA to some extent, which has really drawn me to it.<p>I wonder if there’s the same outlook on failure among other creatives, would be interesting to compare the hobby communities opinions between the USA and UK.
That's a very interesting observation. You see it a lot in "tradesy" videos on YouTube, machinists* and welders and woodworkers and the like. The humor and self deprecation - far more apparent than in most other genres of American media - is really quite close to feeling British. As a transplanted Brit, it's pretty comforting stuff to watch.<p>*This Old Tony's channel is a particularly good illustration of this point, among many.
And the weird thing is, these are the people who actually make thing.<p>I think the success (not necessarily financialy, but in the public eye) of the American tech elite can be partly attributed how much more relatable these peole were than the previous ones.<p>For someone who was used to seeing these corporate types with their perfectly tailored suits who spoke in press releases, I think it was a refreshing change to see Mark Zuckerberg give interviews in his college hoodie in his typically awkward fashion.<p>I think this created a perception in the eyes of the public that these guys are different, and tech has coasted on this goodwill for quite a while.
Inheritance Machining is like that - a lot of self deprecation.
Yep. I haven't found any metalworking channel that isn't. Woodworking channels can be a bit more... confident, "I know best so follow my hack if you want to keep your fingers," but many of the established, higher production channels like Lincoln St, Blacktail etc. are all just as deprecatory as the metal stuff.
Intersting. I used to be a professional woodworker, and can't stand the wood working channels. I love This Old Tony though.<p>I feel like doing a channel that brings in the reality of being a chippy. Tools that look like they were used outside in all weathers, having to make do with the tools you have with you. The crap timber that we have to deal with...I won't ever get around to it though.
Well there is the awesome Cutting Edge Engineering channel - but they have the advantage of coming from Australia.
One problem I have with this is that the word Hero has multiple meanings and I'm not sure we are talking of the same thing. Like which of these characters follow the classic Hero's Journey, which are just the leading characters in books, which are heroes to another character, which are labelled as a hero as pretext, which are anti-heros treated as heroes, etc. These are all very different things.
One of my favorite details about Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" is the name he chose for his main character: Hiro Protagonist. It's not just a lovely bit of wordplay, it immediately makes you think about whether the protagonist is a "hero" or not.<p>This overloaded meaning of the word "hero" is especially pertinent when discussing the differences between the interpretation of "hero" in US culture and other cultures. Outside overt dictatorships, the US is the only country I know of where people are taught that anyone who serves or served in the military is automatically a "hero", regardless of whether they've actually done anything that would normally be considered heroic.
I think it could just be that America is a much bigger market with much higher production values in TV and Film, so British people get their fill of competent, triumphant heroes from American media.<p>America has plenty of beloved sad sacks too. Charlie Brown, Donald Duck, Goofy, George Costanza, Eeyore (originally British but very popular in America and popularized by Disney) to name a few.<p>British media has carved out a bit of a niche for itself, but British people are also consuming other English language media.<p>And you also have plenty of British media where the hero is competent, triumphant, masterful, and autonomous with (frequent if not ubiquitous) standard happy endings. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Who.
> so British people get their fill of competent, triumphant heroes from American media<p>Conversely, American culture has historically <i>included</i> all the best of the British.<p>In addition to those mentioned above, Hitchhikers Guide, Monty Python, Watership Down, The Young Ones, etc.
Isn't Eeyore part of the Poohniverse?
100% seen it in business too. My UK colleagues often use self-deprecation while providing their business updates. But my US colleagues present their accomplishments directly with confidence.
In business I find Americans oversell their achievements and I constantly have to decode "the absolute best", "knocked it out the park", "most amazing X" and figure out what has been redefined this month for that to be true. They use incredible contortions in language too to mislead and cover up and make themselves look good<p>Colleagues also managed to have the most amazing coffee or literally — literally — the best taco ever, every week. It's quite something!<p>We also get self deprecating in front of Americans because they're purposefully intimidating. Big characters, loud voices, huge military they're not afraid to use etc. UK is often bullied by the US Gov. It's deference too
It's not just deprecation, it's systemic understatement. It drives non-British people insane because everyone is talking in code.<p>And some of the meaning is hidden in intonation.<p>If someone says "Interesting..." that can mean "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard" or "Might be worth a look, but not a priority right now." Or maybe "That's very suspicious."<p>"That's quite good" usually means "Very good, I like it!"
There is the famous case in the Korean War at the Battle of Imjin River where the British commander of the Gloucestershire regiment reported to an American General, 'Things are a bit sticky, sir'. The American General thought that meant a good thing, like they were holding the line, when in fact they were fighting a heroic last stand outnumbered 25:1!<p><a href="https://www.warhistoryonline.com/korean-war/battle-of-imjin-river.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.warhistoryonline.com/korean-war/battle-of-imjin-...</a>
Conversely what does an American mean when they say "wow that's absolutely amazing" for everything ...
Also starting anything with "With the greatest respect..."
I certainly use the word "exciting" in ways that that might be non-standard, like for instance describing when everything has gone catastrophically wrong.
> If someone says "Interesting..." that can mean ...<p>Same in German.
> "That's quite good"<p>Ummmm...... I'll say it is <i>"not bad"</i>.<p>For me to say something is <i>"quite good"</i> it would have to make me cream myself.
'Interesting' => 'you're stark raving mad but you're in the room with me so I'm going to be polite to you until I'm out of striking range'.
One big difference between the two cultures, is the British caste system.<p>It's important for us to Know Our Place. Me mum[0] was British, and I used to see this attitude, all the time.<p>Climbing is OK, but you need to do it <i>properly</i>. Americans are told "Don't take that shit! Force them to accept you!", while British are told "Tsk. Tsk. You can't do it that way! You need to join their club, before you try going to their level."<p>Heroes are often those that accept their lot.<p>[0] <a href="https://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/SheilaMarshall.htm" rel="nofollow">https://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/SheilaMarshall.htm</a>
Caste system, as in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XmB59Ax4cE" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XmB59Ax4cE</a> ?<p>Along the lines of <a href="https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/notes-on-nationalism/#:~:text=If%20one%20harbours,true%2c%20are%20inadmissible%2e" rel="nofollow">https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...</a> , I'd maintain the US national fiction is "the US is a classless society".<p>lagniappe: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPPpjU1UeAo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPPpjU1UeAo</a> vs <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TQmo5TvZQY" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TQmo5TvZQY</a> vs <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__HPfmvaWRw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__HPfmvaWRw</a>
Not sure what the latter videos are about, but that Orwell Foundation link is packed with some serious ham. Thanks for sharing.
<i>> US national fiction is "the US is a classless society"</i><p>I wouldn't say that.<p>It's just that we believe that there's no birthright caste. Mobility is possible between all classes. Sometimes, though, it's really difficult; just not impossible.<p>Big difference, in mindset.
And of course you get just as much snobbery from your own class about wanting to climb.<p>It is possible for a working class person to become Middle class. But you have to be born to the Upper Classes. You can get some way by sending your Children to public school (The perverse name for the most exclusive private schools!). The kids might make it, but you will always be 'new money'.
I feel like the divide is very evident of each countries version of the show "The Office". Probably a common trope at this point, but not even the dialogue, already the aesthetic tells you a lot about the perspective of the characters. While the UK office is grey, washed out and gloomy, the US office is warm, surprisingly full of life and outside shots are mostly sunny.
US Office is set in Scranton, PA but filmed in LA. So the outside shots inevitably became quite sunny.
IIRC, Ricky Gervais advised the showrunners of the US adaptation to make Michael Scott more optimistic than his UK counterpart. Quite savvy on his part.
Interesting. The other book this makes me think of is Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. I think Gaiman lives in America now, but he’d only recently moved as of when Neverwhere was published, and it’s a <i>very</i> British novel.<p>I love the world and plot of Neverwhere, but the protagonist, Richard Mayhew, always pissed me off because he’s such a loser. I never understood why Gaiman chose <i>him</i> to be in charge of the story.<p>Now I’m wondering if that’s my American sensibility.
I forget where, but someone was talking about a similar difference in American vs British comedy looking at The Office (the American one) and Parks and Rec. In both, the format tends to be pre-conflict -> conflict -> resolution, with the episodes almost always ending on an upbeat tone. In contrast, in a British show, it tends to be pre-conflict -> conflict -> kick them while they are down. Things can get worse, the characters can be unredeemed, and the fun is they are inept, unlucky, arseholes that don't get out of the situation with a happy ever after.<p>Americans like that humor as well (see Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Archer, etc.) but it definitely is less prevalent.
Americans don't celebrate failure?<p>Well, there's the Alamo. There's Custer's Last Stand. There's Douglas MacArthur getting a Medal of Honor for being chased out of Luzon.<p>And I urge American HNers to walk or drive around, and see how long it takes to see a Stars and Bars.
The post is primarily about humour though - do Americans really make jokes about those things? Maybe it's not failure they are celebrating, but war?
Americans don't celebrate the Alamo as a failure, they celebrate it as a catalyst for the Texas revolution afterwards. If that hadn't occurred Americans wouldn't even mention the Alamo in their history books.<p>Americans don't celebrate Custer's last stand. Indigenous people obviously do, and should, but white people don't consider him a hero.<p>Americans don't celebrate MacArthur getting chased out of the Philippines, they celebrate his declaration "I will return" and the Allied victory.<p>Americans only support the underdog when the underdog wins in the end.
Look up Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Perhaps the biggest celebration of the losing side in history. Or the first Rocky movie.<p>> Americans only support the underdog when the underdog wins in the end.<p>By that definition the by far most cited example on the British side, Dunkirk, doesn’t count because Britain won in the end.<p>No one celebrates someone who was defeated if the defeat wasn’t memorable. Usually that was because it was an inspiration to rally a cause that was later successful.<p>Plenty of white people celebrate Custer. Search for “Custer statue” or drive around out west and see how many paintings of Custer’s last stand you can spot hanging in bars.
On the contrary ... we LOVE the perennial underdog who stays in the fight. Like the British, once you start winning consistently you quickly earn our contempt.<p>American football is packed with great examples.
Mirroring this divide, Denmark has a TV-show called "Klovn", which is basically a copy of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" (down to the , except that while the main character in Curb is the cause of a lot of cringe moments, he always ends up getting his redemption and being the hero (at least to the viewer). In "Klovn", the main character ("Frank") causes a lot of cringe moments in the same way, but he is a tragicomic character and is almost always in the wrong.
I wonder if Wodehouse ties together both types of heroes in Bertie and Jeeves! Though it's been decades since I read a Wodehouse book, I'm just uncontrollably laughing now just thinking about it! My grandfather had pretty much the whole collection.
The article and the comments herein remind me a conversation a few years ago with an ex RAF pilot who had done a few exchanges with the USAF. Among other things, pilot/personnel evaluations in the two organizations were worlds apart. In the RAF, at least during his time, they were what I would expect, more or less factual: Bloggins is good at X, needs to improve Y, excels at P, shouldn't do Q at all.<p>Meanwhile, in the USAF, anything that could even be perceived as negative was a career killer, so ratings started at mildly superlative and went up from there: Bloggins is an X top gun, is very good at Y, walks on water doing P, and is good with Q.<p>YMMV, of course, those are my recollections of beery convos with a former Tornado jockey.
As far as I know, all branches of the US military write up a "fitness report" for each officer once a year. "Above Average" is a certain career killer.<p>But somebody who was a dean at (I think) Virginia Tech wrote that the British "His work is quite sound, actually" could be higher praise than the American "His work sets the standard we all aspire to."
Exactly! Another, semi-related difference between the cultures: When Alexander chooseEitherOrBothOf(provided instructions, gave orders) during the Sicilian campaign, American generals took them as orders and did them, sometimes to their detriment, while British generals took them as intent/direction, and asked questions.<p>Eventually, the allies realized they had very different command cultures and learned to work together. It may be that Normandy, et al, would have been far different if they hadn't have figured this out in Sicily.
The "Losers" framing is a bit American, but tragedy has a long history, illustrating the difficulty of being subject to conflicting forces (typically moral, since societies push their interests as such) as a way for understanding to at least explain the pain, taking away the panic and sometimes the isolation. Suffering with some kind of style shows that one is still free, and thus independent of the forces (think Mark Twain humor). Willa Cather's work is more about realizing the big picture itself makes our personal suffering relatively small.
Although the Anglican Church is a hybrid of Reformation era Protestantism and of Catholicism, I think that the US tradition of Protestantism is generally (not always) more positive and less fatalistic.<p>I believe that the cultures of both nations are heavily derived from their religious traditions; even if you never practice religion in either nation you imbibe its effects from early childhood in the cultural values and norms that it influenced.<p>For example, one of the key aspects of Protestantism is evangelism, which would not make sense if people thought they could not be successful.<p>So I think a lot of American culture in particular is based on this tradition that encourages optimism and repeated trying even in the face of failure. Hence the way we select heroes.
"repeated trying even in the face of failure"<p>That's pretty much the motto of one of Scotland's greatest heroes - Robert the Bruce:<p>"If at First You Don't Succeed, Try Again"<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_the_Bruce" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_the_Bruce</a>
In some flavors, Protestantism is quite focused on self-scrutiny and skepticism about human nature, making people suspicious and even actively hostile towards supposed heroes.<p>Other flavors of Protestantism seem to have completely lost that, though. Evangelical Protestantism somehow inculcates a need for leaders to love and worship and an ability to completely suspend rational judgment about them. Their relationship to charismatic pastors and other leaders is a mystical, ecstatic experience that they have an unlimited appetite for. No matter how many times their leaders are shown to be flawed, and in many cases quite detestable and corrupt human beings, they eagerly look for the next leader to worship.<p>Two stereotypes that illustrate the extremes of this massive cultural difference in Protestantism are the rich WASPs of the northeast and the poor Southern Baptists of the deep South.<p>WASPs know that heroes are myths, and are unsurprised when the real people turn out to be real pieces of work. Southern Baptists kind of know this on some level -- I think they're actually a bit attracted when a man has a whiff of charlatanism about him, because it shows he knows what they want -- but when they choose their hero, they give themselves over to complete and sincere belief in him.
The British do have a difficult or perhaps just different relationship with heroes vs the US IMO. Some study has been made of this in the past. Even in comic books, where writers have traditionally been afforded more freedom (morally, philosophically, martially/violence, sexually even). Even in pure fantasy/sci-fi (take WH40K as an example). There are many fine US creators/studios, and excellent output, but I don't think the satirical and political elements could have come from there.
Different foundations of the worldview, thus different values, thus different reprenestations of these values shown through heroes.<p>We don't realize what are foundations of our worldview as they aren't appearing in a contrast-enough setup.
Do English tech interviews emphasize heroic gusto or post-mortems?
Don’t forget “Eddie the Eagle”. Quintessentially British.
As divided as the US is right now, there's a bunch of things like this that every American seems to agree on without even realizing that it's not the same in most of the world.<p>For example, "work ethic". Correct me if I'm wrong, but you could write "worked very hard every day" on someone's tombstone, and almost every American seeing it, regardless of politics, will think "That was a good person". Someone to look up to.<p>Not "did good work", not "their work helped many people", definitely not "lived well". Even "was very productive" sounds too suspicious - being productive is great and all, but a productive person might be doing 10h worth of work in 5h and then call it a day, and that's just unacceptable, so that's not going on your tombstone either.<p>Just... work hard. The protestant ideal. Going on vacation and being too sick to work is literally the same thing, because it stops you from working hard.
There's a pretty big generational divide on this point, I think. I don't think many people under the age of 45 or so still see the "never took a sick day" thing as a laudatory statement.<p>(Also probably a regional divide too. I worry that I'm wrong about this when it comes to some places on the coasts, but I think it's accurate for most places in the country.)
Anecdotally (under 45; American), I agree that "never took a sick day" is indeed <i>not</i> a laudatory statement, but I also strongly believe that working hard is a prime virtue.
That's good news. Hope the kids fight for some basic worker's rights.
This might be a Polish thing but hero has to die. Does not matter if accomplishes a goal, just that hero put it all on the line against incredible odds.
Isn’t the whole point of Hamlet that he does have control over his life? At any moment he could have just stabbed Claudius and taken over. The dramatic tension comes from him being unable to get out of his own head and get down to businessto.
Reading this, I am immediately reminded of Al Bundy in Married with children, isn't he An American hero quite similar to Arthur Dent? Other than that I always thought of the Show King of Queens as similarly depressing, ... would be curious how that fits into the narrative of American heros
> Charlie Brown, Donald Duck, Goofy, George Costanza, Eeyore to name a few.<p>What about real people (not animation characters for children)?<p>Could "Mr. Bean" only be created by the Brits, or if not, where is his
U.S.-American counterpart?
> “Iran can't hit back over Soleimani's killing.¹ Who will we take out? Spider-man or SpongeBob SquarePants? They have no real heroes.”<p>But, fwiw, I don't think I agree with you. Mr bean is just as fictional as charlie brown, the medium or original intended audience doesn't seem very significant to me at all. Also george costanza is in there and I think 90s-2000s american sitcoms actually have a lot of the kind of character you have in mind.<p>¹: I don't agree with the quote either. As this article and comment section makes very clear, heroes and the definition of heroism are culturally embedded and not fully legible to outsiders, like probably every culture's heroes.
Brits are self-deprecating to a fault.<p>You can be successful, but you have to attribute it to luck. It's not the done thing to try too hard.<p>Tall poppy syndrome is also alive and well.
This reminds me of the differences between the US version of The Office and the UK one. I’m actually fond of both but the boss character (as played by Ricky Gervais) in the UK version is absolutely reprehensible. And he’s the main focus of the show. The US version started that way but it just didn’t work at all. By the second season Steve Carrell’s character was a lovable doofus and the show was much better for it.<p>(I also think some line of thinking like this applies to politicians. British people almost always hate their politicians, even the ones they vote for. By comparison, in my experience, Americans really want to root for their candidate. Be that Obama or Trump, there’s a passion there you rarely see in the UK)
Explains why Sir Keir Starmer is so relatable.
I feel like these lines are getting increasingly blurred. Eg "The Recruit" is basically "what if Mr Bean (could say entire sentences and was young and handsome and) would get a junior legal gig at the CIA". It's very American, action packed, everybody is steaming hot and there's conspiracies behind every corner, yet it is also all about the humour in failure and the extreme escalation that results from the protagonist's screwups.
Is Arthur Dent the hero? I imbibed him more as a passive vessel to experience the absurdity of Douglas Adams universe. But it’s been a while since I read it.
Some of the best US standup comedians I know don't fit this narrative.
I think it's fantastic that Douglas Adams was on Slashdot.
And once again with one sentence Adams is able to all but completely articulate an incredibly nuanced cultural topic:<p>> Terrible things happen to him, he complains about it a bit quite articulately, so we can really feel it along with him - then calms down and has a cup of tea. My kind of guy!<p>Some people can communicate on a truly different level.
> We celebrate our defeats and our withdrawals<p>Polish people say the exact same thing about themselves while thinking this is endemic to Poland.
There's more than one form of English humor. Last year I played through Thank Goodness You're Here!, which I think borrows from a lot of late-20th Century tv including Monty Python. It might be "nihlistic" in the sense that it's absurd but not depressing.
I think this supposed English "heroes" is more post-WWI and post-WWII trauma and coping than the actual historic English culture.<p>Basically it is cope for losing history's greatest empire in a generation.<p>You don't see this in the pre-WWI authors. Look at Rudyard Kipling (see Mowgli who although Indian is very English). Look at Fleming and James Bond. *<p>See also Dickens and some of his heroes such as Nicholas Nickleby.<p>What is being passed as English culture is just fairly recent retconning due to WWI and WWII and the crisis in English thought it produced.<p>* Removed previously incorrect statement including Edgar Rice Burroughs who is an American although Tarzan is English
It's hard distill entire countries like this (especially based on one guy's comments, told second hand). I understand Adams' quote in the context of Hollywood, but there's more to American culture than Hollywood. These are diverse nations & diversity is good.
Is Arthur Dent the hero? I imbibed him more as a passive vessel to experience the absurdity of Douglas Adams universe. But it’s been a while since I read it, but from memory all the situations are so absurd that I never felt myself yelling at the hero to make a more logical, or “herioc” decision because there wasn’t really a lot of sense in that sort of thing
I think so. He's more storm-tossed survivor than Moses parting the waves, but he makes the best of the endless shit he's dumped into and preserves his sense of self throughout. I think he responds heroically, far more than he fixes anything external. For example he finds himself marooned on a strange planet and sets up a Perfectly Normal Beast sandwich shop, living very comfortably for a while.<p>For what is he fighting against? Nothing really, he's just adrift in the universe. There's no antagonist beyond existence itself and his own circumstances. He faces off against both quite effectively.
One of the characters that has some Arthur Dent in him from the US side is - I think - Forrest Gump.
Ja, storm tossed survivor /accidental stoic who do we have .. Bilbo, yossarian, Rincewind.. Bit of a tossup innit?<p>From memory so long is a bit of a departure from the rest of the series and felt like adams was giving dent a vacation/term of being the deliberate stoic
Been years too but yes, he gets to live back on earth and shacks up with his girlfriend if I remember correctly. I remember even as a kid thinking it was tonally a bit weird but I need to re-read the entire series with adult eyes.<p>I was going to reply to jacquesm's comment above about Forrest - they both embody some stoic qualities - but you touched on that anyway.<p>> Bilbo, yossarian, Rincewind<p>Yossarian! Outstanding. Bit of a cynic more than a stoic perhaps? You're right about Bilbo. Frodo I think not so much. And Samwise of course is pure American.
I call this take pseudo-intellectual indulgence form, so called, academic intelectuais.<p>Lord of the Rings is very much English Literature, and the biggest epic form the 20th century and has none of that. Ditto for Harry Poter (I’m not saying Harry Potter is on the same level of literary grandeur as LOTR, but it’s still an important epic series for newer generations).<p>You can always find examples for one side or the other of the argument. But, of course, only “social” scientists would be tick enough to claim some clear divide here as it suits their argument.
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