[MOVED - SEE SIDEBAR] British Comedy

TL;DR: Please resubscribe to !britishcomedy / @britishcomedy

When I joined Kbin/Fedia back in June I was optimistic that it would surpass Lemmy in every way. I still prefer the interface, but because it's early days for it there isn't (quite yet) an API for running 3rd party apps and bots. So I signed up for Lemmy a month or so later and then discovered Connect, and I've been using that more and more and Kbin less and less.

It didn't really matter that some of my magazines (as Kbin calls them) were on Fedia as I could still monitor them from Lemmy and then log in if any moderation needed to be done (you can assign Lemmy users as mods but they can't do anything), right? Well, it appears not. I discovered a bug which means posts to a Kbin magazine don't federate properly unless somebody on the host instance interacts with them.

The bug has gained no traction at all even though I've proved it happens, and I'm getting increasingly frustrated with having to log in to Kbin just to upvote everything to get it to push articles and comments out to other subscribers. Especially as I have no way of knowing something is waiting until I log in...

So, the upshot of this is I'm moving this community/magazine to feddit.uk (arguably where it should have been originally but I wasn't familiar with Lemmy at the point I created it). I'm still optimistic for Kbin's future but the backend needs to improve!

Please re-subscribe using whichever of the following works for you:

• !britishcomedy
• !britishcomedy
• @britishcomedy
• https://feddit.uk/c/britishcomedy

Filming starts on series two of Tom Basden comedy

It launched the careers of Jesse Armstrong and Sam Bain, Mitchell and Webb, plus Olivia Colman – but it nearly got cancelled. Two decades since its first episode, its stars reflect on the show that made them.

Two of the UK’s top comedy stars, Richard Ayoade and Jonathan Ross, have received backlash on social media after reviewing The IT Crowd writer Graham Linehan’s memoir.

Irish scribe Linehan has gone from the writer of much-loved Channel 4 comedies The IT Crowd, Father Ted and Black Books to an outspoken anti-transgender activist in recent years, leading many in the UK and Ireland to boycott him.

He fell out of public favour after several incidents where he expressed anti-transgender or transphobic views, including comparing the use of puberty blockers to Nazi eugenics and experiments on children.

Linehan has repeatedly expressed his belief that he is a victim of cancel culture, and that his views have lost him work and caused his divorce.

...

Some early reviews of the book have been included as part of its online marketing. One notable name quoted alongside the memoir is Linehan’s former IT Crowd colleague, Ayoade, who played shy computer technician Maurice Moss in the Channel 4 comedy.

Ayoade’s quote reads: “Graham Linehan has long been one of my favourite writers – and this book shows that his brilliance in prose is equal to his brilliance as a screenwriter. It unfolds with the urgency of a Sam Fuller film: that of a man who has been through something that few have experienced but has managed to return, undaunted, to tell us the tale.”

A review from Ross hails Linehan as “one of the best TV comedy writers of all time”. The quote goes on to declare the book “a must-read for anyone who has ever wondered: a) how to create a hit sit-com and b) how it feels to lose everything. It’s funny, complicated and utterly compelling”.

...

Journalist and transgender activist India Willoughby wrote: “The Richard Ayoade endorsement of Graham Linehan is really disappointment – because at this point in the gender war, you’d have to use a lot of cognitive dissonance not to see Glinner for who he is.”

Comedian and actor Russell Brand has been accused of rape, sexual assaults and emotional abuse during a seven-year period at the height of his fame.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/2296041

The full commentary track is here. Looks like the Beeb slap down anyone trying to sync the whole footage, hence the YouTube Short. Here's another bit from them leaving the palace.

New horror epic out on Halloween

The two comics celebrate Ted's 10th birthday and the beautiful British countryside as their perfect series returns for a sixth time

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/1779045

A review from.the New Statesman:

Different Times is a chronological survey of the last century of British screen comedy, from the first films of Chaplin through to the Ealing comedies, the Sixties satire boom, the alternative wave of the 1980s, up to today. It focuses mainly on our best-loved television shows and comedians while essaying a breezy social history: comedy as a means to interrogate Britain rather than vice versa.

Unfortunately, the diagnosis that Stubbs offers is reliably hackneyed. Humour is a “consolation prize” of life in these dank, cramped islands. The British, by which he is anxious to make known he mainly means the English, are an unfortunate race: terminally frivolous, “miserably monolingual” and therefore xenophobic; where they do have depth it is usually only as stews of repression, bigotry and loathing. That such an immiserated isle produces such joyous comic talent is only lightly pondered. Instead, Stubbs advances further bloke-down-the-pub analysis of what ails us: declinism, deindustrialisation, post-imperial blues, etc.

...

To laugh is not to take a moral position, or not solely so. A good joke toys with our assumptions and expectations, and liberates the unspoken. A really good one will tap into our prejudices not to propagate them but to jolt us into self-knowledge. As for how we approach the comedy of past, it should depend on what we need it for. A social historian who neglected how Dad’s Army or Morecambe and Wise captivated millions would be hindering their own enterprise. The ghastly relics that Stubbs describes, such as The Black and White Minstrel Show and Mind Your Language, also tell us much about their time. But in artistic or entertainment terms they are inert, as much because of how feeble they are as how offensive.

Indeed, at the close of Different Times Stubbs argues that, partly thanks to political correctness and modern identity politics, comedy has become both kinder and better over the past decade as it rejects the crude stereotypes of old. Stand-ups such as Bethany Black and James Acaster and sitcoms such as Detectorists and This Country are “a haven of considerateness, diversity, multiculturalism, richer in comedic detail and observation”. It’s an appealing idea, but as Different Times shows, the very best comedy transcends its time not merely by being correct, let alone nice. Many of Britain’s greatest comic creations – Fawlty, Rising Damp’s Rigsby, Alan Partridge – are monsters, but, through the skill of those who wrote and performed them, retain across the ages the breath of something human.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/1589723

The Funniest Joke of the Fringe award, now in its 14th year, is presented annually to a quip or one-liner deemed most hilarious by a panel of judges and a public vote. This year’s winner was comedian Lorna Rose Treen, who captured 44 per cent of the vote with this gem:

“I started dating a zookeeper, but it turned out he was a cheetah.”

Look, I can’t think of anything meaner than making fun of somebody for making a bad joke, but I’m going to grit my teeth and try my best.

...

I’m not the first person to point this out – Twitter/X has been especially unkind to this year’s winner – but the joke barely makes sense. Cheetahs and zookeepers aren’t synonymous, they’re just two things that are occasionally in close proximity to one another. A better version of the joke might be something like “Why did the tiger lose at poker? Because he was playing with a cheetah”.

...

To be fair to Treen, it’s not just her. Of the top 10 jokes that were shortlisted for the award, only one of them even really registers as a proper joke. William Stone’s “Nationwide must have looked pretty silly when they opened their first branch” is pretty clever, and has that sort of cool Mitch Hedberg quality that helps it rise above the others, which are essentially just a collection of lazy puns and twee observations. This one by Daniel Foxx is especially egregious: “My grandma describes herself as being in her ‘twilight years’ which I love because they’re great films”. That isn’t even a pun! That’s just word association!

BBC bosses pay tribute to the comedy writer who helped create the popular BBC One series.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/831223

This fresh take on the satirical comedy slot will feature new programmes from the likes of Rachel Parris, who will kick off the series with a range of comic characters including digital stars Rosie Holt and Michael Spicer; Dom Joly, who will take a mischievous approach to investigating the week’s biggest stories; Ria Lina, bringing a global perspective to the news with comedians from around the world sharing news from their countries; Catherine Bohart, who will take a deep dive into the roots of a news story; Rhys James, bringing his trademark quick wit to interrogate the news; and Andrew Hunter Murray hosts the latest creation from The Skewer’s Jon Holmes, which takes aim at the way the news is packaged and presented.

The specials will be broadcast in Radio 4’s popular Friday Night Comedy slot this summer, between series of Dead Ringers and The News Quiz. Friday Night Comedy is also hugely popular on BBC Sounds – last quarter, it was among the top ten on demand radio programmes and top twenty most-downloaded programmes globally. Each special will be available after broadcast, first on BBC Sounds and on RSS soon after.

DO NOT COMMENT. Testing in other direction.

My previous post does not appear to have left my server. If you can see this please comment. It should at least be visible on fedia.io

"Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot." Here's a list of 10 British shows that embody the quote.

Channel 4 has announced The Sean Lock Comedy Award, which will showcase talented new writers and performers who embody the alternative comedic spirit of Sean and Channel 4.

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/201159

One of late director Stanley Kubrick's films is to be adapted for the stage for the first time.

Apocalypse Clown gets cinema release - Starring David Earl and Natalie Palamides and written by Dead Cat Bounc

Attached: 1 image Well looky here!

This was a bit of a surprise find for me when it was first shown.

The Horne Section gets a second series - With Reggie Watts, Ronni Ancona, Kiell Smith-Bynoe, Stevie Martin and Anna Crilly joining the cast

Digitiser Live 2023 Weekend takes place July 28th and 29th at the Harrow Arts Centre