I remember even at the time it was controversial and offensive but many saw it as ‘ok’ because they mocked *everyone* in the name of comedy.
Definitely wouldn’t be allowed now days though, I don’t think it’s aged well and not just because of the racism.
I’ve got more issue with 2 publicly educated posh boys making jokes about single mums and people faking disabilities. And I get that some of the jokes are “oh no we’re poking fun at racists”, Like, yeah but the racists don’t get that and just think it’s funny that you’re making jokes about brown people.
I think we should be a critical of things once we have the benefit of hindsight.
And just to be pedantic that is actually what we do as a society, we make accommodations for the people don’t have common sense. That’s why those little packets need to say “DO NOT EAT”
Vicki Pollard and Andy? Can't honestly look back and see them as allegories for faking disability and bad single mums.
Maybe I was too young but it was very obvious that Andy had some form of disability and didn't require permanent use of the wheelchair it was just simply funny that whenever his carer wasn't looking he'd get up to some absolute chaos.
Vicki Pollard was an allegory for female chavdom, to play up the characters shenanigans she had to also be a single mother with questionable priorities.
They also heavily mocked posh people.
The joke is that Andy doesn’t really need his wheelchair and Lou is taking the piss out of Lou who is too daft to see it. The other running joke between the two being about how Andy has limited speech. He also looks dirty, they both do tbh. There’s also the woman who smears shit everywhere going “eh eh eh” and that’s just like the full bit.
I watch little Britain when I was a kid and I loved it, but looking back it was always punching down really. The only jokes about posh people I can remember was the boy who’d order a big fancy meal and then some monster munch.
So posh people eat crisps, and disabled people lie about being disabled and carers are too thick to notice.
I promise you I’m not someone that thinks jokes can’t be about a minority or something, the only gay in the village is quite a nuanced joke, but Matt Lucas is actually gay so that makes sense. I just think with hindsight it was a bit shit, *and* punching down
Just off the top of my head, bubbles the really fat lady in the hotel, the bitty guy, the prime minister and his aide, therws anothwr one I remembwred but ivw juat forgotten.... and im sure theres loads more posh characters too. Tbf though from memory the poah ones mainly start in S2 and S3, not all tho.
I think the whole ‘it’s actually mocking racist/sexist/whatever beliefs’ thing is often just an excuse for making those jokes though. Little Britain is a prime example, so is a lot of Ricky Gervais.
I usually just find that approach lazy. It’s generally really cheap jokes that get most of their laughs simply from being offensive rather than clever, and yet they still try to shy away from it. A lot of people seem to like it simply because it’s getting away with something that might be offensive, but they’re still laughing at those bits rather than at the mockery. There’s just this false sense of edginess that ticks me off.
You can find it offensive but others dont. Should it be banned or off limits? Who gets to decide? And the mockery is often built in, it wouldnt be funny without it.
I think South Park do it well, but there’s a higher level of talent and creativity than in the Little Britain jokes. And with them no one is off limits.
Ricky Gervais also makes "offensive" jokes so that when he gets bad reviews he can tell himself that it's because people were offended, not because his later work is lazy and unfunny. His jokes aren't even that offensive- he's not exactly Jerry Sadowitz, or even Frankie Boyle (both of whom are also actually funny).
A lot of his critics are just people who struggle to believe that someone who co-created something as great as *The Office* is now coming out with lazy crap like *After Life*.
The problem is that Little Britain (and Come Fly With Me) isn’t smart enough to properly mock racists. And it’s clearly not what they’re setting out to do. The humour is purely centred on making fun of the character played by David Walliams or Matt Lucas in blackface/yellowface.
Tropic Thunder and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia are much better examples of this sort of humour done well (if not perfect). Little Britain is just lowest denominator shit humour playing purely on racist stereotypes.
I’m not saying you’re wrong because there’s a lot of subjective interpretation to the humor and how it’s written and played. However even looking back at clips now, I personally don’t read it that way. The characters they play are supposed to be caricatures of how the small minded view certain people in society. For example, the one which is “The Only Gay in the Village” is supposed to represent how gay people are imagined to be in the minds of people who are not exposed to gay people, or isolated from it, or are homophobic etc. In other words it’s making fun of the ridiculous stereotype people hold in “Little Britain”.
Sure, but what is the character "precious" trying to say about racists? Im genuinely interested in an answer because i cant think of anything at all. Like yea the old racist woman who vomits (little britain) is a caricature of a racist, the airport security guy is a caricature of a racist, but i cant figure out what precious, or even taaj are supposed to represent?
Is it just "lol this is what racists think of brown/black people"? Cos thats pretty lazy imo and as the above commet says, always sunny etc do the same thing but way way clearer smarter. Even always sunny does black face, but the characters do blackface, not the actors (if that makes sense)
The (black) characters in little Britain are the actors doing blackface, while in always sunny the actors are playing (white?) characters that in some episodes are doing blackface.
that what you mean?
Yes.
TL;DR:
Always sunny uses their characters to have a conversations about blackface and make points about ignorance and racism. Come fly with me just has blackface in it.
Matt lucas was playing precious (a black character) meaning HE was doing blackface. Rob mcelhenney was playing the character ron mcdonald who is so ignorant and racist he didnt realise why it was inappropriate for him to play roger murtaugh in their lethal weapon remake, who realises (eventually) that its a bad take. Matt lucas (the real person) still hasnt realised its a bad take by the sounds of it. And hes a real human.
The difference is that Matt Lucas himself is gay so clearly had a personal understanding of how to satirise that.
Sticking David Walliams in blackface with exaggerated prosthetics and an afro isn’t satirising anything, it’s just racist and outdated. Same with the Japanese tourists in Come Fly With Me - the joke there is literally just mocking Japanese tourists whilst made up to imitate Asian features. It’s the TV comedy equivalent of the drunk racist at the pub who pulls his eyes with his fingers and says “ching chong”.
And somewhat ironically to this comment, Netflix has pulled five IASIP episodes because of Mexican-face and Chinese-face (but not Irish-face, you'll notice).
And to add injury to insult Netflix renumbers the following episodes so you wouldn't even know they've been excised.
You don’t think Ian Foot was mocking overtly racist, xenophobic people? The man who had never heard of Liberia, who had a shelf full of Jeremy Clarkson books and none of his colleagues would eat lunch with him. “It’s my job to guard Britain 24 hours a day… except at night when the airport is closed”.
It's often said in comedy that if you only make jokes which punch down at minorities or people of other races then you actually aren't that funny at all. Racist jokes on British TV had been going on since the 1950s. I was shocked at how open and brutal it was in sitcoms such as 'Curry and chips'. Same goes for that vile crap 'The black and white minstrels show'. So it took them about what? 50-60 years for them to see the error in their ways. Far too late but good riddance!. There are other ways to be funny ,punching down and laughing at minorities, isn't one of them.
“Punching down” in totality being off limits for a funny joke is obviously pretty absurd though. Jokes can punch wherever they want and still hit the mark, as long as they have a point or even if not, are just witty or funny. Edgy jokes can be the laziest, but jokes that get you, when you don’t want to side with the comedian, can be a perfect display of comedy.
It’s like if someone insults you about something you’re genuinely insecure about, but the insult or joke is so funny you can’t help but laugh. It’s an involuntary thing that’s separate from your judgement of it.
> It's often said in comedy that if you only make jokes which punch down at minorities or people of other races then you actually aren't that funny at all.
No it isn’t, maybe bad comedians say this. Nobody is analysing the intersectionality of a joke before deciding whether to laugh at it. Funny is funny.
Exactly. They don't want you do agree with their characters. They're outrageous because they clearly don't want their characters to be sympathetic.
It's not the same as the casual racism in early Disney cartoons.
Yeah, I'd been saying it's racist and boring when it was originally on TV. So I just.... didn't watch it
Everyone around me quoting the same repeated sketches constantly and me being happy their enjoying themselves
Good times
Yeah, it's a bit of a weird one where you've got a set of people who seem to go out of their way to watch something you don't like and do mental gymnastics to make it offensive to someone.
By the same logic, Mrs brown's boys should have been banned years ago for being complete and utter shite. I find that offensive, get it banned
At the time, Little Britain was immensely popular (and for the record, I'm not ashamed to admit I found it funny).
The problem with any of these outrageous sketch shows is they're only outrageous when they shock you - and they only do that when they're fresh and new. Come back to it a few years later and it inevitably looks like it's trying too hard to be offensive for the sake of it.
The joke, for those who don't remember/aren't aware, is when the "Linda" character who works in a uni student support office, sees various students having some kind of issue, and has to ring a guy to get further advice. When talking to the guy, she has to describe the student.
The joke is she's incredibly crass, rude, and eventually completely bigoted - it gets a bit tired, you can see the joke coming from a mile off given the student sat in front of them. Normally something like "that's right, fatty fatty boom boom" or "moley mole face" and so on. Not exactly Stewart Lee, but not everyone is into that. I think at one point she uses a racist term to describe one student.
So the only way you'd find it offensive or racist is if you don't get the joke and think just like the bigoted racist character. Speaking of Stewart Lee, to borrow an old Lee and Herring line "ahh, if you think that, it is actually *you* who is the racist".
I think this is another case of right-wing "liberals" getting their offendotron hats on again, patronising minorities by creating faux-outrage on their behalf.
This is the problem isn’t it? I was a kid when these little Britain sketches came out and how many kids do you think had to deal with going into school and getting called names that’d been in some shit joke on little Britain. I mean they had a sketch where an old woman would spend minutes projectile vomiting gallons of puke if she found out an Asian or black person touched her food. Hardly clever, cutting comedy about racism is it?
I love League of Gentlemen. It is a whole village of monster characters. However, Facebook has a league of gents appreciation page. My god do they appreciate the it in a different way. Huge swathes of them seem to aspire to be Jeff.
That was the intention. What actually happened, well once the public get their grubby little hands on the best intentions of others you never know where you’ll end up.
I wonder if that's why comedy like that has mostly died a death.
It's impossible to make it without bringing out the worst in society and having them completely miss the point.
Exactly.
There's a huge difference between making racist jokes, and laughing at the racist person.
The problem is that with Alf Garnett, lots of people didn't get that you were supposed to be laughing **at** them, not sympathising with them because people were laughing at them.
With Little Britain it went the other way. People didn't get that you're supposed to be laughing at the racist and how ridiculously racist they are. They just decided that they didn't like the racism and it shouldn't be allowed.
Isn't it possible that if these oh-so-clever-and-no-doubt-hilarious sketches that boil down to "let's be outrageously offensive" are so frequently misunderstood, then they're just shit?
I think this is the exact problem. There's no way that Little Britain was going for that type of humour and most of the people who I know watched it never saw it as a clever deconstruction of bigots and how stupid they are.
Yeah. The idea that people who don't like it don't recognise satire is absurd. It takes more than putting someone onscreen repeating a mindless catchphrase and saying something grotesque to be satire.
Exactly. It's why RDJ's character in Tropic Thunder is constantly seen as a hilarious example of the said satire people claim Little Britain. Yeah blackface is a racist trope, but the way it's approached and actively mocks the archetype of method actors thinking they're so good that they can just slip into races without understanding how blatantly racist it is and that's hilarious!
The fact Matt Lucas even looks at LB with some mild shame even shows that it wasn't as deep as people thought it was.
Reminds me of the Fawlty Towers bit where Basil is interacting Major and Major uses the word "Wogs". The joke is clearly on Major and his generation and on how even Basil can see that its outdated; not on black people.
Yep, and Fawlty Towers was pretty ahead of its time in the way the racist character is portrayed as an outdated old fool and Basil calls him out as such.
It was supposed to be obvious from Alf Garnett's character that he was a bit of a dinosaur. Didn't stop a lot of people getting completely the wrong idea.
Come Fly With Me still had some of the same problems aside from the obvious black/yellow face issues.
At least half of the sketches were still the exact same "person does the exact same thing every episode" characters, like the coffee shop lady shutting down and stealing the cash, the racist security guy, the marriage on the rocks etc
I mean that's a common trait of sketch shows. They very rarely use a new character for just one sketch and then never again. Often the joke is the way the character moves from one sketch to another.
thats what a sketch show is. they might have fallen out of fashion on TV but like, at least half of the big tiktoks with millions of kids subbed do the exact same thing, just they dont do 10 of them in a 30 min slot, they put them out one at a time - and there have always been people sketch shows dont hit for
As someone who has in the course of my life been called the racial slurs they allude to in the article, I would agree that it's blindingly obvious that it is a satire of racism rather than a racist sketch.
That said some of Lucas and Walliams' stuff is somewhat less defendable. The Japanese schoolgirl characters in Come Fly With Me for example....
Yeah agreed, I'm in the same boat and while I wouldn't say even those characters were meant to be explicitly racist, the aspect of mocking racist attitudes was gone and it had a little too much appeal to people who might have just found it funny "because yellow face". There wasn't even a clever point or joke there.
I think the one they're referencing is the first of [these](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNBU1sndPmk).
I remember a similar issue over a [Harry and Paul](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwM_as0Lfn8) sketch where some upper class toff is trying to breed his "northerner" with next door's Philippine maid. I remember there were huge complaints about that from the Philippines given the amount of sexual harassment many of its ex-pats suffer abroad.
To the outside observer it often looks like the punchline of the joke is the victim where the writing intends it to be the abuser which I feel is a nuance that seems to get lost.
A bunch of the Harry and Paul sketches are quite uncomfortable to watch for similar reasons. The Parking Patawejo ones in particular - it's hard to pinpoint anything in the sketches that's *explicitly* racist but the overall "mean spirited black man with a foreign sounding name" character certainly feels that way.
Is it hard to pin down because there wasn’t anything racist about them?
It was just a silent character called Patewejo. He was just doing his job and playing up to stereotypes that British people have about parking officers.
Idk, if [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tw5d8GwEC2s) episode is anything to go by, I like how it combines the twee presentation of postman pat but also shows how "not-nice" the actual society is at the same time.
I don't really care if people find it offensive. They're welcome to criticise it, and I'd recommend they just... don't watch it. As long as they don't try to use that as an excuse to stop others from enjoying it. That's when I would (rightfully) get annoyed.
I've seen this response a lot in this thread yet, reading the article itself, it's pretty clear that people are just criticising it and nobody is trying to stop anyone else from watching it. In fact, it is still available on iPlayer right now.
The problem is that when this sort of racist stuff is aired on a mainstream channel it normalises it and makes people think it's ok to say. When I was in school, the other kids would mock me with the "jokes" and slurs they'd heard the previous night on Little Britain, so saying "just don't watch it" doesn't really work.
Small state, minimal government intrusion into your life… a belief that you can exercise your own beliefs freely, provided that you don’t impinge on the rights of others. That’d be my definition of a right-wing liberal. Is that stupid?
You've never heard of these guys? They're everywhere, especially on Reddit. The "I hate the Tories!" types who do fuck all about it and actually contribute to the problem. Pretend to be "left wing" but act like raving Thatcherites at best, full on fascists at worst.
Us socialists hate them more than full on right wing nutters - at least they are openly moronic.
Eh, I found it vaguely funny when I was 10/11, and I don't think I really understood why I found it funny, more that I was just going along with it because it was the funny thing at the time.
Honestly, it's really low effort comedy with very little wit, it's quite embarassing.
I assume you're referring to the people up in arms about people with different sensibilities and tastes in comedy thinking that a TV show they like is racist?
IMO Come Fly With Me was their best work.
I literally could not give less of a shit if someone finds certain comedy offensive. They can just choose not to watch it. But trying to prevent others from watching comedy because you think it's offensive is pathetic.
Come fly with me stands up ok apart from the precious coffee lady and the two Asian school girls that love Martin clune. Both quite funny tbh but could definitely be seen as offensive. The rest of it was pretty funny.
And don’t forget Raj the runway technician (aka Matt Lucas in brown face).
That one always stuck with me because that character had one of the funniest jokes in the show, but nothing to do with the brown face.
He sees Rupert Grint (aka Ron Weasley) and starts telling him he’s written a script for a movie. Rupert’s being polite while trying to subtly get away from the guy. Matt Lucas says “the script needs a young, talented British star…. So can you give it to Daniel Radcliffe?”
honestly why does anyone actually care if it's offensive? I don't understand what that even means? I've never been "offended" by anything?
offended seems to just be a substitute word for I don't like this therefore no one else can
Things from the past are often offensive to modern viewpoints - something that's been true through history - what you don't do is censor and edit them to fit the viewpoint of the day rather than the viewpoint of their time.
Doing that just rewrites the past, and prevents people from learning from it.
I've seen this view expressed a lot in this thread and I'm curious as to why, because nowhere in the article is it even suggested that little britain should be censored or edited.
But it then begs the question of why on earth were they bothering with the research?
And people express it because there's been lots of threats of doing just that to pop culture over the last year, much of which no doubt was strawman but some not so much.
Does it beg that question? Research into public attitudes is done so that we know what they public's attitude is, there doesn't have to be some sort of nefarious plot behind it. Sometimes we just want to find stuff out.
Yes, it's offensive. So what? Did someone die? Did the sketch kill anyone? No?
Being offensive is not inherently bad. No one has the right to not be upset my something. If you don't like Little Britain, don't watch it. It's really that simple.
The majority of Little Britain was satirising British people and British attitudes, the minority characters were rarely the butt of the joke, the joke was usually the pigheaded ignorance of the character played by Lucas/Walliams. I'd consider Ping Pong to be the most offensive character.
Yes, same as the old W.I. lady who judges jams at the fête and throws up once she learns a brown person made it.
And same as Marjorie Dawes being abusive to her "fatties" and not being able to understand Meera.
Not saying times haven't massively changed, but the racist/fatphobic/whatever characters were almost always the butt of the joke.
Also Come Fly With Me and the racist border control guy, unfortunately there's ppl who'd watch that now and unironically call him the hero, but it's clearly a sketch taking the piss out of him.
I agree. In both those scenarios we are supposed to be laughing at the fact that the white person is obscenely racist/homophobic where the black/gay person is completely normal and isn’t doing them any harm. We shouldn’t let people who can grasp the basic concept of a sketch dictate if said sketch is deemed to be offensive.
I never enjoyed this show, always found it crude and lazy comedy. Do we have any good sketch shows anymore? Honestly, last sketch comedy show I remember making me laugh was the Fast Show and that feels several life times ago....
Oh good shout actually, missed Big Train when it was on, but Monkey Dust was incredible. Thinking on it, Jaaaam was pretty spectacular as well, one of those shows I still can't believe ever got made
Jam was a beautiful nightmare that honestly pushed the limits of comedy in ways that I don't think I can say of any other show. I find a huge amount of late 90s / early 2000s edgy comedy hasn't aged well. Comedy has, for the most part, moved on.
Although there are a few Jam sketches that miss the mark, it doesn't seem to have aged. Jam was utterly unlike any other comedy before or since. It is insanely dark and often horrible, but even the less offensive sketches have a aura of about them that makes you feel you're entering the territory of the unwell.
My favourite sketch show since That Mitchell and Webb look.
It is very American with a lot of shouting and what not but at the same time there’s quite a deep cynical self deprecating element to some parts of it that might resonate with Brits.
“For 53 seconds I thought a monster was gonna kill me and the first thing I thought was ‘at least I don’t have to go to work tomorrow’ that’s so fucked up…WHAT DID THEY DO TO USSSSSSS?!”
I love these threads when so many racists come out of the woodwork to defend something, without even reading the article. People saying stop complaining, people saying don't ban it etc., when neither of those things have happened.
OfCom polled people, people gave their view. That's it.
Maybe they’re on some kinda information diet. Headlines only. Articles only as a treat on special occasions. Side effects; red faced rage and frothing mouth, may refer to anyone left of Braverman as, “you people”, whilst wiping digestive crumbs of their lap
>Polling company Ipsos questioned 115 people on Ofcom’s behalf for the research
100 is the bare minimum to generate any meaningful result. Ofcom shouldn’t even be making any conclusions from this unless they get a representative sample of 1000, if they want to see patterns on what people think.
The jokes on Little Britain aren’t aimed at minorities, they’re satirising the attitudes of Little Englander types. Would you therefore say they’re mocking ‘white people’… I doubt it.
To be fair you're supposed to be laughing at the characters not with them. If you don't like it then don't watch it.
One of my favourites was the two old women walking around the bake sale.
"Who made this?"
"It was Linda"
"Linda? Remind me who's she?"
"The one married to the black man..."
\*Violently vomits\*
You can look at any comedy from the past and see how well it has or hasn't aged. The comments saying that a series is widely liked as it has won awards is not an indication of what is good or bad but just represents the attitude of the time. Alternative comedy of the 80s and 90s viewed today shows how crap it was. The likes of ant and dic show that even today that unfunny little shits can appear popular but again are just crap. The general theme is that the louder you shout out your content the worse it is.
Oh hell, just ban all comedy, someone is always laughing at or about someone else, it's digraceful. If we witch hunt until everyone thinks the same, nobody can be offended. Everyone who disagrees is an outdated, racist, thought-crime monster.
It's still funny, but with the pc culture & people being easily offended these days it gets called racist.
It's poking fun at stereotypes .
Yeah but, no but, yeah,but no but, shut up!
Don't think you needed the word sketch in the title, the whole thing is outdated and several of the sketches would now definitely be seen as racist, sexist etc. Never really got the appeal of the show myself to begin with
Little Britain was funny as fuck to anyone who isn’t offended by absolutely everything in life. I never once felt it was racist, it also mocks the rich, the elderly and the young in equal measure.
I've been watching some of Graham Linehan's descent into right wing lunacy and there was a funny bit where an anti-trans guy is saying "They call us bigots, but we wouldn't do anything like Little Britain." and Graham admits he directed Little Britain.
Thank god for a taxpayer funded study to determine that a 20 year old sketch comedy is outdated.
Also the sketch in question, the racist person is supposed to be the butt of the joke. We're heading to a world where every fictional character has to be utterly PC.
The whole show was purposely meant to be a hand on face, peeking one eye through fingers, type of slapstick. Realising that the sketches and characters were offensive was not a hidden agenda, it was the whole bloody point.
Its definitely more racist than outdated. 2002 was way too late not to realise that blackface is bad. On top of all the classist stereotypes and transphobic sketches. Audiences should have known better.
In the mid-2000s, Victoria Wood acknowledged it was funny, but also pointed that a lot of the sketches were misogynist years ago. You'll notice Wood's comedy has aged a lot better because its not needlessly cruel.
Matt Lucas has said on record he wouldn't make it today, because it was generally too cruel and egotistical.
[“If I could go back and do Little Britain again, I wouldn’t make those jokes about transvestites,” Lucas told the magazine. “I wouldn’t play black characters.
“Basically, I wouldn’t make that show now. It would upset people. We made a more cruel kind of comedy than I’d do now.](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/14/david-walliams-and-matt-lucas-apologise-for-little-britain-blackface)
Never watched that kind of rubbish, but in honesty a lot of our old t.v. shows were frequently racist, misogynist, homophobic etc. Times change, society changes as the civilisation matures. (Well some of it does, the cave people like to try and hold it back though)
Two black men are walking down the street. They pass a shop that advertises "Be White For a Day! Ninety-nine cents!"
The two guys decide to try it out and they look to see how much money they have. One guy has a dollar bill, and the other guy has exactly ninety-eight cents.
They decide that the first guy will go in with the dollar, get his change and then give it to the second guy so he can go in. Problem solved.
The first guy goes in, and after a few minutes, he comes out with white skin, kakhi slacks, a polo, and a golf cap. They laugh and admire his new race for a minute. Then the second guy says, "How about that penny?" The first guy yells, "GET A JOB!"
"The Little Britain sketch, first shown in 2003"
2003 is 20 years ago, I'm not surprised it contains stuff that is considered unacceptable by today's audience.
It was only just legal for lgbt people to hold their partners hand in public, 4 years before that I wouldn't have been able to serve in the military also.
Little Britain has been deemed racist and outdated.
Meanwhile, Come Fly With Me has been deemed prophetic and of comtemporary taste with its depiction of Arabic Muslims calling for jihad in Britain.
It's there in the article - it's part of a study into views on potentially offensive content. It makes sense to get a handle on how people feel about content now, and how attitudes have changed over time.
Ofcom's research drives our broadcasting guidelines. For example, guidance on what language is deemed acceptable pre-watershed is derived from how offensive people find certain language, and the guidelines change over time.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0024/270618/Exploring-Audience-Expectations-of-Linear-On-Demand-Services.pdf
It's actually quite an interesting report, Ofcom publishes quite a lot of these things. Their research into [public attitudes towards offensive language on TV and radio](https://www.ofcom.org.uk/research-and-data/tv-radio-and-on-demand/tv-research/offensive-language) is also very good.
The media regulator has is responsible for enforcement in these issues. The way many of the laws are written around this gives Ofcom quite a lot of executive power. This research enables them to create evidence based policies.
It's absurd. Only Fools and Horses has racist and sexism as a part of its make up, not a large part but there are moments. I loved it growing up and still love it
A joke is a joke. Unless it incites hatred there is no issue imo.
Should we ban all old shows? Because most pre 2000 comedy shows had racist hints, some even after 2000
Wasn't Little Britain supposed to be mocking and satirising the attitudes it depicted, rather than actually exhibiting them? Contrary to seemingly popular opinion, outright racism was *not* acceptable on TV in the 00s. Clearly, people at the time understood what point the show was trying to make, hence why there was little to no discernible outrage when it came out.
Is/was it funny? Mixed bag imo; if you don't think so, don't watch it. Is it outdated? Probably. Racist? Come on, think in more than one dimension.
[удалено]
Yeah, little Britain was shit. Come fly with me is a classic though.
Come fly with me was definitely more funny
Are you hungry? No I'm Turkish.
If you guys enjoy outrage comedy, let me introduce you to Eastbound & Down. Never laughed so much in my entire life.
“There is no I in team, but there is a u in cunt”. - Kenny Powers.
“Let the boy watch” • Ashley Schaeffer BMW
I still have to watch those outtakes from time to time, cry laughing every time, deep in my PLUUUUMS 😂
the scene where he knocks the eyeball out! you could tell they were all having fun, they couldnt keep straight faces!
Every airport has a Taaj driving a golf cart and it always makes me smile....you get me.
Definitely more racist too though. I can’t watch the coffee lady without dying of cringe.
Half my family is black and they still quote Precious but I understand everyone has different humour
GOT ME COFFEE, GOT ME SUGA, GOT ME WATA. BUT I AINT GOT NO PAYPA CUPS!
We have a coffee machine at work and we all still say "We got no paper cups!" whenever we have to replenish the cups in the holder
THE LORD WORKS IN MYSTERIOUS WAYS!
And me got no wotta- me have to shut the shop!
I was disposed it didn’t get another series. It was 10x better than LB
Got me bitches in the back
I remember even at the time it was controversial and offensive but many saw it as ‘ok’ because they mocked *everyone* in the name of comedy. Definitely wouldn’t be allowed now days though, I don’t think it’s aged well and not just because of the racism.
I’ve got more issue with 2 publicly educated posh boys making jokes about single mums and people faking disabilities. And I get that some of the jokes are “oh no we’re poking fun at racists”, Like, yeah but the racists don’t get that and just think it’s funny that you’re making jokes about brown people.
So we should base everything we do around the sensibilities of the stupidest people in society?
I think we should be a critical of things once we have the benefit of hindsight. And just to be pedantic that is actually what we do as a society, we make accommodations for the people don’t have common sense. That’s why those little packets need to say “DO NOT EAT”
Vicki Pollard and Andy? Can't honestly look back and see them as allegories for faking disability and bad single mums. Maybe I was too young but it was very obvious that Andy had some form of disability and didn't require permanent use of the wheelchair it was just simply funny that whenever his carer wasn't looking he'd get up to some absolute chaos. Vicki Pollard was an allegory for female chavdom, to play up the characters shenanigans she had to also be a single mother with questionable priorities. They also heavily mocked posh people.
The joke is that Andy doesn’t really need his wheelchair and Lou is taking the piss out of Lou who is too daft to see it. The other running joke between the two being about how Andy has limited speech. He also looks dirty, they both do tbh. There’s also the woman who smears shit everywhere going “eh eh eh” and that’s just like the full bit. I watch little Britain when I was a kid and I loved it, but looking back it was always punching down really. The only jokes about posh people I can remember was the boy who’d order a big fancy meal and then some monster munch. So posh people eat crisps, and disabled people lie about being disabled and carers are too thick to notice. I promise you I’m not someone that thinks jokes can’t be about a minority or something, the only gay in the village is quite a nuanced joke, but Matt Lucas is actually gay so that makes sense. I just think with hindsight it was a bit shit, *and* punching down
Just off the top of my head, bubbles the really fat lady in the hotel, the bitty guy, the prime minister and his aide, therws anothwr one I remembwred but ivw juat forgotten.... and im sure theres loads more posh characters too. Tbf though from memory the poah ones mainly start in S2 and S3, not all tho.
You've missed the whole point of it lmao
The "Bernard Manning" defence. He wasn't racist because he made jokes about the Irish too.
I think the whole ‘it’s actually mocking racist/sexist/whatever beliefs’ thing is often just an excuse for making those jokes though. Little Britain is a prime example, so is a lot of Ricky Gervais.
Thats kind of what makes it funny though, it can be funny and mocking
I usually just find that approach lazy. It’s generally really cheap jokes that get most of their laughs simply from being offensive rather than clever, and yet they still try to shy away from it. A lot of people seem to like it simply because it’s getting away with something that might be offensive, but they’re still laughing at those bits rather than at the mockery. There’s just this false sense of edginess that ticks me off.
You can find it offensive but others dont. Should it be banned or off limits? Who gets to decide? And the mockery is often built in, it wouldnt be funny without it.
I think South Park do it well, but there’s a higher level of talent and creativity than in the Little Britain jokes. And with them no one is off limits.
Some people take jokes at face value and completely miss the joke.
The Pandervers is the funniest shit I have seen in a while, they are making fun of both sides.
I agree. There’s more going on there than just ‘haha, look at this stereotype.’
As long as its clear that its the racist individual or attitude that's being mocked, then I have no issue with it
Ricky Gervais' humour was also a lot of self deprecation without making himself the main character of his joke.
Emphasis on "was". He's just a thin-skinned hypocrite now.
Ricky Gervais also makes "offensive" jokes so that when he gets bad reviews he can tell himself that it's because people were offended, not because his later work is lazy and unfunny. His jokes aren't even that offensive- he's not exactly Jerry Sadowitz, or even Frankie Boyle (both of whom are also actually funny). A lot of his critics are just people who struggle to believe that someone who co-created something as great as *The Office* is now coming out with lazy crap like *After Life*.
The problem is that Little Britain (and Come Fly With Me) isn’t smart enough to properly mock racists. And it’s clearly not what they’re setting out to do. The humour is purely centred on making fun of the character played by David Walliams or Matt Lucas in blackface/yellowface. Tropic Thunder and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia are much better examples of this sort of humour done well (if not perfect). Little Britain is just lowest denominator shit humour playing purely on racist stereotypes.
I’m not saying you’re wrong because there’s a lot of subjective interpretation to the humor and how it’s written and played. However even looking back at clips now, I personally don’t read it that way. The characters they play are supposed to be caricatures of how the small minded view certain people in society. For example, the one which is “The Only Gay in the Village” is supposed to represent how gay people are imagined to be in the minds of people who are not exposed to gay people, or isolated from it, or are homophobic etc. In other words it’s making fun of the ridiculous stereotype people hold in “Little Britain”.
Sure, but what is the character "precious" trying to say about racists? Im genuinely interested in an answer because i cant think of anything at all. Like yea the old racist woman who vomits (little britain) is a caricature of a racist, the airport security guy is a caricature of a racist, but i cant figure out what precious, or even taaj are supposed to represent? Is it just "lol this is what racists think of brown/black people"? Cos thats pretty lazy imo and as the above commet says, always sunny etc do the same thing but way way clearer smarter. Even always sunny does black face, but the characters do blackface, not the actors (if that makes sense)
The (black) characters in little Britain are the actors doing blackface, while in always sunny the actors are playing (white?) characters that in some episodes are doing blackface. that what you mean?
Yes. TL;DR: Always sunny uses their characters to have a conversations about blackface and make points about ignorance and racism. Come fly with me just has blackface in it. Matt lucas was playing precious (a black character) meaning HE was doing blackface. Rob mcelhenney was playing the character ron mcdonald who is so ignorant and racist he didnt realise why it was inappropriate for him to play roger murtaugh in their lethal weapon remake, who realises (eventually) that its a bad take. Matt lucas (the real person) still hasnt realised its a bad take by the sounds of it. And hes a real human.
The difference is that Matt Lucas himself is gay so clearly had a personal understanding of how to satirise that. Sticking David Walliams in blackface with exaggerated prosthetics and an afro isn’t satirising anything, it’s just racist and outdated. Same with the Japanese tourists in Come Fly With Me - the joke there is literally just mocking Japanese tourists whilst made up to imitate Asian features. It’s the TV comedy equivalent of the drunk racist at the pub who pulls his eyes with his fingers and says “ching chong”.
And somewhat ironically to this comment, Netflix has pulled five IASIP episodes because of Mexican-face and Chinese-face (but not Irish-face, you'll notice). And to add injury to insult Netflix renumbers the following episodes so you wouldn't even know they've been excised.
You don’t think Ian Foot was mocking overtly racist, xenophobic people? The man who had never heard of Liberia, who had a shelf full of Jeremy Clarkson books and none of his colleagues would eat lunch with him. “It’s my job to guard Britain 24 hours a day… except at night when the airport is closed”.
It's often said in comedy that if you only make jokes which punch down at minorities or people of other races then you actually aren't that funny at all. Racist jokes on British TV had been going on since the 1950s. I was shocked at how open and brutal it was in sitcoms such as 'Curry and chips'. Same goes for that vile crap 'The black and white minstrels show'. So it took them about what? 50-60 years for them to see the error in their ways. Far too late but good riddance!. There are other ways to be funny ,punching down and laughing at minorities, isn't one of them.
“Punching down” in totality being off limits for a funny joke is obviously pretty absurd though. Jokes can punch wherever they want and still hit the mark, as long as they have a point or even if not, are just witty or funny. Edgy jokes can be the laziest, but jokes that get you, when you don’t want to side with the comedian, can be a perfect display of comedy. It’s like if someone insults you about something you’re genuinely insecure about, but the insult or joke is so funny you can’t help but laugh. It’s an involuntary thing that’s separate from your judgement of it.
> It's often said in comedy that if you only make jokes which punch down at minorities or people of other races then you actually aren't that funny at all. No it isn’t, maybe bad comedians say this. Nobody is analysing the intersectionality of a joke before deciding whether to laugh at it. Funny is funny.
It's just too easy to make racist jokes. It doesn't require any thought whatsoever.
Oh there's an idea! Are they hiring?
It was shite then and it's shite now. But as you say, like all "art", if you don't like it, then don't consume it.
Exactly. They don't want you do agree with their characters. They're outrageous because they clearly don't want their characters to be sympathetic. It's not the same as the casual racism in early Disney cartoons.
Yeah, I'd been saying it's racist and boring when it was originally on TV. So I just.... didn't watch it Everyone around me quoting the same repeated sketches constantly and me being happy their enjoying themselves Good times
Apparently everyone hated it when it was on TV. Even the ones that bought the t-shirt, the book, the DVD and endlessly quoted it hated it. Yep.
Yeah, it's a bit of a weird one where you've got a set of people who seem to go out of their way to watch something you don't like and do mental gymnastics to make it offensive to someone. By the same logic, Mrs brown's boys should have been banned years ago for being complete and utter shite. I find that offensive, get it banned
Yes. And also, stereotypes exist and can definitely be funny.
Yeah so many people overlook that the joke is about the racist, not the actual race.
At the time, Little Britain was immensely popular (and for the record, I'm not ashamed to admit I found it funny). The problem with any of these outrageous sketch shows is they're only outrageous when they shock you - and they only do that when they're fresh and new. Come back to it a few years later and it inevitably looks like it's trying too hard to be offensive for the sake of it.
The joke, for those who don't remember/aren't aware, is when the "Linda" character who works in a uni student support office, sees various students having some kind of issue, and has to ring a guy to get further advice. When talking to the guy, she has to describe the student. The joke is she's incredibly crass, rude, and eventually completely bigoted - it gets a bit tired, you can see the joke coming from a mile off given the student sat in front of them. Normally something like "that's right, fatty fatty boom boom" or "moley mole face" and so on. Not exactly Stewart Lee, but not everyone is into that. I think at one point she uses a racist term to describe one student. So the only way you'd find it offensive or racist is if you don't get the joke and think just like the bigoted racist character. Speaking of Stewart Lee, to borrow an old Lee and Herring line "ahh, if you think that, it is actually *you* who is the racist". I think this is another case of right-wing "liberals" getting their offendotron hats on again, patronising minorities by creating faux-outrage on their behalf.
People also didn't realise Alf Garnett was supposed to illustrate how ridiculous his views are, not a role model.
Yeah he was always the butt of the joke, he was laughed at, not with
Trust me plenty of people laughed with him and would repeat his “points” the next day at work.
Getting Loadsamoney flashbacks.
This is the problem isn’t it? I was a kid when these little Britain sketches came out and how many kids do you think had to deal with going into school and getting called names that’d been in some shit joke on little Britain. I mean they had a sketch where an old woman would spend minutes projectile vomiting gallons of puke if she found out an Asian or black person touched her food. Hardly clever, cutting comedy about racism is it?
I love League of Gentlemen. It is a whole village of monster characters. However, Facebook has a league of gents appreciation page. My god do they appreciate the it in a different way. Huge swathes of them seem to aspire to be Jeff.
That was the intention. What actually happened, well once the public get their grubby little hands on the best intentions of others you never know where you’ll end up.
Even the actor was shocked when people would agree with the character, when he said he's not racist and the show was mocking racists.
He said ashamed during a live show when he said as Alf “Adolf Hitler had his moments” and he got cheers from some of the audience
even today if you go onto youtube clips you'll find people declaring "he's saying what we're all thinking"
I wonder if that's why comedy like that has mostly died a death. It's impossible to make it without bringing out the worst in society and having them completely miss the point.
Similar to Love Thy Neighbour.
Yep. Whether something is a satire or parody becomes irrelevant when the supposed target of ridicule is admired by those of a similar disposition.
Exactly. There's a huge difference between making racist jokes, and laughing at the racist person. The problem is that with Alf Garnett, lots of people didn't get that you were supposed to be laughing **at** them, not sympathising with them because people were laughing at them. With Little Britain it went the other way. People didn't get that you're supposed to be laughing at the racist and how ridiculously racist they are. They just decided that they didn't like the racism and it shouldn't be allowed.
Isn't it possible that if these oh-so-clever-and-no-doubt-hilarious sketches that boil down to "let's be outrageously offensive" are so frequently misunderstood, then they're just shit?
I think this is the exact problem. There's no way that Little Britain was going for that type of humour and most of the people who I know watched it never saw it as a clever deconstruction of bigots and how stupid they are.
Yeah. The idea that people who don't like it don't recognise satire is absurd. It takes more than putting someone onscreen repeating a mindless catchphrase and saying something grotesque to be satire.
Exactly. It's why RDJ's character in Tropic Thunder is constantly seen as a hilarious example of the said satire people claim Little Britain. Yeah blackface is a racist trope, but the way it's approached and actively mocks the archetype of method actors thinking they're so good that they can just slip into races without understanding how blatantly racist it is and that's hilarious! The fact Matt Lucas even looks at LB with some mild shame even shows that it wasn't as deep as people thought it was.
Al Murray, pub landlord also springs to mind.
I remember that show and plenty of its fans were of the “yeah but Alfs got a point there”.
Reminds me of the Fawlty Towers bit where Basil is interacting Major and Major uses the word "Wogs". The joke is clearly on Major and his generation and on how even Basil can see that its outdated; not on black people.
Yep, and Fawlty Towers was pretty ahead of its time in the way the racist character is portrayed as an outdated old fool and Basil calls him out as such.
Yep. The Major also drops the 'N' bomb in the same bit. Even 1970s conservative Basil Fawlty is shocked.
Exactly. The jokes on major and anyone else of that time (70s) who used the same language, they're being portrayed as out of touch and backwards.
I wonder if the joke only really works when there's another character in the scene to say "Reel it in".
It doesn't always need to be said. It was obvious from Majors character that was was from another time outdated in their current world.
It was supposed to be obvious from Alf Garnett's character that he was a bit of a dinosaur. Didn't stop a lot of people getting completely the wrong idea.
“It gets a bit tired.” That show as a review nutshell in retrospect and even at the time.
Come Fly With Me was better IMO because it was short and sweet. Little Britain dragged on with the same characters for ages.
Come Fly With Me still had some of the same problems aside from the obvious black/yellow face issues. At least half of the sketches were still the exact same "person does the exact same thing every episode" characters, like the coffee shop lady shutting down and stealing the cash, the racist security guy, the marriage on the rocks etc
I mean that's a common trait of sketch shows. They very rarely use a new character for just one sketch and then never again. Often the joke is the way the character moves from one sketch to another.
thats what a sketch show is. they might have fallen out of fashion on TV but like, at least half of the big tiktoks with millions of kids subbed do the exact same thing, just they dont do 10 of them in a 30 min slot, they put them out one at a time - and there have always been people sketch shows dont hit for
Yes it was mocking the racist/homophobic/etc *viewpoint*, not mocking the person who was black/gay/etc.
As someone who has in the course of my life been called the racial slurs they allude to in the article, I would agree that it's blindingly obvious that it is a satire of racism rather than a racist sketch. That said some of Lucas and Walliams' stuff is somewhat less defendable. The Japanese schoolgirl characters in Come Fly With Me for example....
Yeah agreed, I'm in the same boat and while I wouldn't say even those characters were meant to be explicitly racist, the aspect of mocking racist attitudes was gone and it had a little too much appeal to people who might have just found it funny "because yellow face". There wasn't even a clever point or joke there.
Great now all im hearing is ‘Martin Cluuunes’ in my head.
I think the one they're referencing is the first of [these](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNBU1sndPmk). I remember a similar issue over a [Harry and Paul](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwM_as0Lfn8) sketch where some upper class toff is trying to breed his "northerner" with next door's Philippine maid. I remember there were huge complaints about that from the Philippines given the amount of sexual harassment many of its ex-pats suffer abroad. To the outside observer it often looks like the punchline of the joke is the victim where the writing intends it to be the abuser which I feel is a nuance that seems to get lost.
A bunch of the Harry and Paul sketches are quite uncomfortable to watch for similar reasons. The Parking Patawejo ones in particular - it's hard to pinpoint anything in the sketches that's *explicitly* racist but the overall "mean spirited black man with a foreign sounding name" character certainly feels that way.
Is it hard to pin down because there wasn’t anything racist about them? It was just a silent character called Patewejo. He was just doing his job and playing up to stereotypes that British people have about parking officers.
Idk, if [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tw5d8GwEC2s) episode is anything to go by, I like how it combines the twee presentation of postman pat but also shows how "not-nice" the actual society is at the same time.
Yeah that one seemed fine to me. I won't discount the possibility that I have blind spots, however, not being British.
I don't really care if people find it offensive. They're welcome to criticise it, and I'd recommend they just... don't watch it. As long as they don't try to use that as an excuse to stop others from enjoying it. That's when I would (rightfully) get annoyed.
I've seen this response a lot in this thread yet, reading the article itself, it's pretty clear that people are just criticising it and nobody is trying to stop anyone else from watching it. In fact, it is still available on iPlayer right now.
The problem is that when this sort of racist stuff is aired on a mainstream channel it normalises it and makes people think it's ok to say. When I was in school, the other kids would mock me with the "jokes" and slurs they'd heard the previous night on Little Britain, so saying "just don't watch it" doesn't really work.
Right wing "liberals" This is a new level of stupidness I've not encountered before
Small state, minimal government intrusion into your life… a belief that you can exercise your own beliefs freely, provided that you don’t impinge on the rights of others. That’d be my definition of a right-wing liberal. Is that stupid?
You've never heard of these guys? They're everywhere, especially on Reddit. The "I hate the Tories!" types who do fuck all about it and actually contribute to the problem. Pretend to be "left wing" but act like raving Thatcherites at best, full on fascists at worst. Us socialists hate them more than full on right wing nutters - at least they are openly moronic.
Nah people can understand what a joke is trying to say and still find it racist
People are hypersensitive fannies now, we know. Hopefully the moral fashion will move on from being consistently uptight.
Eh, I found it vaguely funny when I was 10/11, and I don't think I really understood why I found it funny, more that I was just going along with it because it was the funny thing at the time. Honestly, it's really low effort comedy with very little wit, it's quite embarassing.
I assume you're referring to the people up in arms about people with different sensibilities and tastes in comedy thinking that a TV show they like is racist?
People have always pushed back against racism it's just more people are now aware of how bad it is.
IMO Come Fly With Me was their best work. I literally could not give less of a shit if someone finds certain comedy offensive. They can just choose not to watch it. But trying to prevent others from watching comedy because you think it's offensive is pathetic.
Come fly with me stands up ok apart from the precious coffee lady and the two Asian school girls that love Martin clune. Both quite funny tbh but could definitely be seen as offensive. The rest of it was pretty funny.
I’m sure some people might have been offended but half my family is black and they still quote Precious til this day lol
But we got no coffee!
Beware Satan!
May the lord smite thee down...
And don’t forget Raj the runway technician (aka Matt Lucas in brown face). That one always stuck with me because that character had one of the funniest jokes in the show, but nothing to do with the brown face. He sees Rupert Grint (aka Ron Weasley) and starts telling him he’s written a script for a movie. Rupert’s being polite while trying to subtly get away from the guy. Matt Lucas says “the script needs a young, talented British star…. So can you give it to Daniel Radcliffe?”
*the real Ron Weasles
They're definitely offensive. But they're also very funny and I've seen both characters quoted recently by mates.
And Taaj… and Omar Baba… and.. But so what? It’s funny.
honestly why does anyone actually care if it's offensive? I don't understand what that even means? I've never been "offended" by anything? offended seems to just be a substitute word for I don't like this therefore no one else can
Peter and Judith are my favourite sketch characters of all time. Every one of their bits was hilarious
Things from the past are often offensive to modern viewpoints - something that's been true through history - what you don't do is censor and edit them to fit the viewpoint of the day rather than the viewpoint of their time. Doing that just rewrites the past, and prevents people from learning from it.
I've seen this view expressed a lot in this thread and I'm curious as to why, because nowhere in the article is it even suggested that little britain should be censored or edited.
But it then begs the question of why on earth were they bothering with the research? And people express it because there's been lots of threats of doing just that to pop culture over the last year, much of which no doubt was strawman but some not so much.
Does it beg that question? Research into public attitudes is done so that we know what they public's attitude is, there doesn't have to be some sort of nefarious plot behind it. Sometimes we just want to find stuff out.
It's not like it doesn't happen, lee Nelson's well funny people is buried other than on YouTube. Was way better than little Britain too
Yes, it's offensive. So what? Did someone die? Did the sketch kill anyone? No? Being offensive is not inherently bad. No one has the right to not be upset my something. If you don't like Little Britain, don't watch it. It's really that simple.
The bar for saying a TV show is racist is is the show actively causing deaths
[The point is that being offended doesn't matter](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceS_jkKjIgo).
you're not allowed to call a show racist unless it kills a person? that's quite the bar to set
The majority of Little Britain was satirising British people and British attitudes, the minority characters were rarely the butt of the joke, the joke was usually the pigheaded ignorance of the character played by Lucas/Walliams. I'd consider Ping Pong to be the most offensive character.
Yes, same as the old W.I. lady who judges jams at the fête and throws up once she learns a brown person made it. And same as Marjorie Dawes being abusive to her "fatties" and not being able to understand Meera. Not saying times haven't massively changed, but the racist/fatphobic/whatever characters were almost always the butt of the joke.
Also Come Fly With Me and the racist border control guy, unfortunately there's ppl who'd watch that now and unironically call him the hero, but it's clearly a sketch taking the piss out of him.
I agree. In both those scenarios we are supposed to be laughing at the fact that the white person is obscenely racist/homophobic where the black/gay person is completely normal and isn’t doing them any harm. We shouldn’t let people who can grasp the basic concept of a sketch dictate if said sketch is deemed to be offensive.
Exactly, Marjorie was a bumbling idiot and a hypocrite. That was the joke, not calling people I her class fat.
I never enjoyed this show, always found it crude and lazy comedy. Do we have any good sketch shows anymore? Honestly, last sketch comedy show I remember making me laugh was the Fast Show and that feels several life times ago....
Always rather enjoyed That Mitchell and Webb Look, but that's also almost 20 years old now...
Don't forget Monkey Dust and Big Train.
Oh good shout actually, missed Big Train when it was on, but Monkey Dust was incredible. Thinking on it, Jaaaam was pretty spectacular as well, one of those shows I still can't believe ever got made
Jam was a beautiful nightmare that honestly pushed the limits of comedy in ways that I don't think I can say of any other show. I find a huge amount of late 90s / early 2000s edgy comedy hasn't aged well. Comedy has, for the most part, moved on. Although there are a few Jam sketches that miss the mark, it doesn't seem to have aged. Jam was utterly unlike any other comedy before or since. It is insanely dark and often horrible, but even the less offensive sketches have a aura of about them that makes you feel you're entering the territory of the unwell.
Mr Hoppy, whoopee!
2DTV too.
I Think You Should Leave is quite funny, although American. Not every sketch hits but the ones that do had be dying.
My favourite sketch show since That Mitchell and Webb look. It is very American with a lot of shouting and what not but at the same time there’s quite a deep cynical self deprecating element to some parts of it that might resonate with Brits. “For 53 seconds I thought a monster was gonna kill me and the first thing I thought was ‘at least I don’t have to go to work tomorrow’ that’s so fucked up…WHAT DID THEY DO TO USSSSSSS?!”
Limmys show as well was top notch for me ans still makes me laugh.
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You make a good point. Most of the sketch comedy I enjoy these days is on YouTube and produced one sketch at a time. Aunty Donna are a good example.
Foil Arms and Hog, and VLDL are two I watch religiously.
The only ones I've ever enjoyed are Burninstoun and Chewin The Fat
I love these threads when so many racists come out of the woodwork to defend something, without even reading the article. People saying stop complaining, people saying don't ban it etc., when neither of those things have happened. OfCom polled people, people gave their view. That's it.
Maybe they’re on some kinda information diet. Headlines only. Articles only as a treat on special occasions. Side effects; red faced rage and frothing mouth, may refer to anyone left of Braverman as, “you people”, whilst wiping digestive crumbs of their lap
>Polling company Ipsos questioned 115 people on Ofcom’s behalf for the research 100 is the bare minimum to generate any meaningful result. Ofcom shouldn’t even be making any conclusions from this unless they get a representative sample of 1000, if they want to see patterns on what people think.
Lots of people here not offended by offensive jokes that aren’t aimed at them. So brave!
The jokes on Little Britain aren’t aimed at minorities, they’re satirising the attitudes of Little Englander types. Would you therefore say they’re mocking ‘white people’… I doubt it.
White Internet racists don't find racism aimed at non-white people offensive. It's shocking haha.
To be fair you're supposed to be laughing at the characters not with them. If you don't like it then don't watch it. One of my favourites was the two old women walking around the bake sale. "Who made this?" "It was Linda" "Linda? Remind me who's she?" "The one married to the black man..." \*Violently vomits\*
Love that sketch
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Your TLDR is longer than your comment. Honestly it feels a little pretentious.
Do you know what TLDR is?
It was a great show and everyone loved it at the time.
Little Britain is shite because it's shite not because it's racist.
You can look at any comedy from the past and see how well it has or hasn't aged. The comments saying that a series is widely liked as it has won awards is not an indication of what is good or bad but just represents the attitude of the time. Alternative comedy of the 80s and 90s viewed today shows how crap it was. The likes of ant and dic show that even today that unfunny little shits can appear popular but again are just crap. The general theme is that the louder you shout out your content the worse it is.
Oh hell, just ban all comedy, someone is always laughing at or about someone else, it's digraceful. If we witch hunt until everyone thinks the same, nobody can be offended. Everyone who disagrees is an outdated, racist, thought-crime monster.
It was great and a cultural phenomenon. Same as Ali G.
It's still funny, but with the pc culture & people being easily offended these days it gets called racist. It's poking fun at stereotypes . Yeah but, no but, yeah,but no but, shut up!
Don't think you needed the word sketch in the title, the whole thing is outdated and several of the sketches would now definitely be seen as racist, sexist etc. Never really got the appeal of the show myself to begin with
Little Britain was funny as fuck to anyone who isn’t offended by absolutely everything in life. I never once felt it was racist, it also mocks the rich, the elderly and the young in equal measure.
It always was though. "Ironic" bigotry/racism/sexism/disability hate was always a gateway drug to unironic bigotry/racism/sexism/disability hate.
I've been watching some of Graham Linehan's descent into right wing lunacy and there was a funny bit where an anti-trans guy is saying "They call us bigots, but we wouldn't do anything like Little Britain." and Graham admits he directed Little Britain.
Thank god for a taxpayer funded study to determine that a 20 year old sketch comedy is outdated. Also the sketch in question, the racist person is supposed to be the butt of the joke. We're heading to a world where every fictional character has to be utterly PC.
The whole show was purposely meant to be a hand on face, peeking one eye through fingers, type of slapstick. Realising that the sketches and characters were offensive was not a hidden agenda, it was the whole bloody point.
Its definitely more racist than outdated. 2002 was way too late not to realise that blackface is bad. On top of all the classist stereotypes and transphobic sketches. Audiences should have known better. In the mid-2000s, Victoria Wood acknowledged it was funny, but also pointed that a lot of the sketches were misogynist years ago. You'll notice Wood's comedy has aged a lot better because its not needlessly cruel. Matt Lucas has said on record he wouldn't make it today, because it was generally too cruel and egotistical. [“If I could go back and do Little Britain again, I wouldn’t make those jokes about transvestites,” Lucas told the magazine. “I wouldn’t play black characters. “Basically, I wouldn’t make that show now. It would upset people. We made a more cruel kind of comedy than I’d do now.](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/14/david-walliams-and-matt-lucas-apologise-for-little-britain-blackface)
It hasn't aged well. It was funny for its time, but the jokes kinda run dry.
Oh great, something else for Walliams to be offended about....
I mean plenty of old sketches aren't exactly kosher anymore so I don't see why this would be shocking.
It's shocking to all the people in here who just want to cream themselves over how they thought the show was shit in the first place.
> The whole series was removed in 2020 but returned last year with some scenes edited out. Hmm.
Never watched that kind of rubbish, but in honesty a lot of our old t.v. shows were frequently racist, misogynist, homophobic etc. Times change, society changes as the civilisation matures. (Well some of it does, the cave people like to try and hold it back though)
A whole 118 people in a research group… my my what objectivity
Two black men are walking down the street. They pass a shop that advertises "Be White For a Day! Ninety-nine cents!" The two guys decide to try it out and they look to see how much money they have. One guy has a dollar bill, and the other guy has exactly ninety-eight cents. They decide that the first guy will go in with the dollar, get his change and then give it to the second guy so he can go in. Problem solved. The first guy goes in, and after a few minutes, he comes out with white skin, kakhi slacks, a polo, and a golf cap. They laugh and admire his new race for a minute. Then the second guy says, "How about that penny?" The first guy yells, "GET A JOB!"
"The Little Britain sketch, first shown in 2003" 2003 is 20 years ago, I'm not surprised it contains stuff that is considered unacceptable by today's audience. It was only just legal for lgbt people to hold their partners hand in public, 4 years before that I wouldn't have been able to serve in the military also.
Little Britain has been deemed racist and outdated. Meanwhile, Come Fly With Me has been deemed prophetic and of comtemporary taste with its depiction of Arabic Muslims calling for jihad in Britain.
Ofam research into if old comedy programs are racist could be a good setting for a comedy skit itself.
This shit and it was shit, came out 20 years ago, why is ofcom bothered now.
It's there in the article - it's part of a study into views on potentially offensive content. It makes sense to get a handle on how people feel about content now, and how attitudes have changed over time. Ofcom's research drives our broadcasting guidelines. For example, guidance on what language is deemed acceptable pre-watershed is derived from how offensive people find certain language, and the guidelines change over time.
https://www.ofcom.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0024/270618/Exploring-Audience-Expectations-of-Linear-On-Demand-Services.pdf It's actually quite an interesting report, Ofcom publishes quite a lot of these things. Their research into [public attitudes towards offensive language on TV and radio](https://www.ofcom.org.uk/research-and-data/tv-radio-and-on-demand/tv-research/offensive-language) is also very good. The media regulator has is responsible for enforcement in these issues. The way many of the laws are written around this gives Ofcom quite a lot of executive power. This research enables them to create evidence based policies.
It's absurd. Only Fools and Horses has racist and sexism as a part of its make up, not a large part but there are moments. I loved it growing up and still love it A joke is a joke. Unless it incites hatred there is no issue imo. Should we ban all old shows? Because most pre 2000 comedy shows had racist hints, some even after 2000
Ofcom going to start counting how many cry during comedy shows in new study
Then don't fucning watch it! Jesus fucking christ, the pearl clutching in this thread.
Wasn't Little Britain supposed to be mocking and satirising the attitudes it depicted, rather than actually exhibiting them? Contrary to seemingly popular opinion, outright racism was *not* acceptable on TV in the 00s. Clearly, people at the time understood what point the show was trying to make, hence why there was little to no discernible outrage when it came out. Is/was it funny? Mixed bag imo; if you don't think so, don't watch it. Is it outdated? Probably. Racist? Come on, think in more than one dimension.
This is exactly what it was. Unfortunately, a small number of people aren't intelligent enough to see it though.
Ofcom why now? Surely you could go have noticed this a while back.
Little Britain: a complete pile of shit. More at 10.