[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnq96W9jtuw]
Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy.
Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy.
[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnq96W9jtuw]
{ 10 comments }
You know it’s long struck me that most Python fans kind of miss something about them: their Britishness. By saying so, I don’t mean they’re stupid and don’t know these guys are British (primarily English I think). But, over in the UK they’ve never been as popular as they are here. Which I think is not all that hard to understand, actually; a good deal of their humor involves poking fun at things in British society that Americans are barely cognizant of, which makes their world seem more strange (and strangely hilarious) to us than British audiences. Furthermore, most of those funny voices they do? They’re just doing various regional British accents–various forms of Upper and Lower-class English, Scots, Welsh, etc. About the only members of UK society they rarely or never seemed to make fun of were the Northern Irish, and I suspect that’s true because at the time they were at their height (the 1960s and 1970s) The Troubles were still raging and poking fun at the Irish probably just didn’t seem like a very good idea. So they’d go after the English and the Scots and the Welsh, and occasionally Europeans like the French and Germans and the Dutch and such, but they almost always just left the Irish alone.
Our lack of familiarity with these subtleties actually makes some of us feel they’re a bit more clever than they are–at least, in their sketch comedy. Not that I’m running them down, I’m a big fan, I’m just saying, they were really often just making fun of everyday life in the UK in the 1960s and 1970s but to us it was all so unfamiliar we didn’t "get" that, but British audiences did: they were a popular sketch comedy group with a few good stars, like you’d see on Saturday Night Live. Great, but some of what seems (or seemed) explosively funny and strange to American audiences was just, well, typical British sketch comedy over there, making fun of everyday life in the UK in that era.
Am I making sense? This is mostly about their sketch comedies not necessarily their full-length movies (although there was even a little of that there).
That makes a lot of sense, actually. I’ve always thought that much of the appeal of British comedy to American audiences was novelty — SNL sketches often seems lame because they’re minor variations on a well-worn trope that we’ve seen dozens of times before. See Monty Python do something equivilent where we aren’t familiar with their forerunners, and it seems extremely original and fresh.
The funny voices being regional accents had never occurred to me, but makes perfect sense now that you point it out. Same with the absurity of the situations — they’re exaggerating for comic effect, but it’s all the stranger to us because the thing they’re making fun of is alien to us because we’re not familiar with their institutions. You could do five minutes of straight news reporting on the TV Detector Vans alluded to in this clip, and most Americans would think it’s a hilarously absurd sketch.
There’s also the distillation effect. A big part of why British comedy seems so much better than American comedy is that only the best stuff makes it over here. So we’re comparing average American comedy to the best 20% of British comedy.
Yep.
It probably helps that they really do have an AMAZING number of quite distinct accents on that relatively small island (I think it’s about the size of Oregon, with about the population of California). Just the number of distinct accents around London is quite impressive. We have a somewhat similar number in the United States but we’re ten times larger, and so diffuse that people don’t seem to quite recognize it. Still, a valley girl accent, a Chicago South Sider accent ("da Bearsss"), two or three different southern accents, the quite distinct Black Vernacular (two or three varieties of that, actually), hispanic accents, the New Englander accent, and a few others are all immediately recognizable–and our own comedians do derive comedy from that quite a bit. It just seems fairly mundane to us as we’ve all heard most of it before.
But when the Brits do the same thing, we don’t really recognize half of them so they just sound FUNNY. Plus those accents are a great demarker of social and class status over there too, and are a rich source of cultural in-jokes that won’t be immediately obvious to us.
Our own national accents are like that as well, but they’re a bigger deal over there, probably because the people all live so much closer together, and they don’t have (quite) as much in terms of racial diversity to serve the same function. Or, they didn’t in the ’60s and ’70s anyway, they certainly are getting it now with all the Chinese, Pakistani, etc. immigrants, and what with London being one of the world’s most important economic and travel hubs in an era of increasingly easy international travel.
I imagine Python seems rather quaint and old fashioned to a lot of Brits. Strange to think, but…
Case in point: all the Python fans I know love the wizard Tim from Holy Grail.
Tim speaks in a fairly run of the mill, slightly exaggerated moderately upper class Scottish accent, at least as interpreted by an Englishman (Cleese). He otherwise just makes his voice go low and growly.
If you don’t know this, it sounds wonderful and weird. If you do, well, they’re poking fun at the Scots. Doing it very well, but still. One of my favorite lines of that scene is "You manky Scots git! I soiled my armor I was so scared!" But I’d seen that scene many times before I finally realized they were just calling him a stupid Scottish jerk.
Oh, and many English of the Python generation particularly enjoyed making fun of small-time authoritarian Scotsmen, because at one time a *huge* number of schoolteachers in England were Scottish, and the style of teachers in those days was to be strict and authoritarian. Listen to "Another Brick In The Wall" by Pink Floyd for an example of this common British stereotype; that "You, yes you, stand still Laddy!" guy is supposed to be an angry Scottish schoolteacher. Also Mrs. McGonagall from the Harry Potter movies: portrayed by an Englishwoman, but given a Scottish accent and name because, well, she was a prissy teacher and that’s a common English stereotype.
The Mighty Wizard Tim was likely inspired by one or more teacher they remembered terrorizing them when they were kids.
(Why yes, I really do sit around late at night thinking about things like this. Don’t you?)
Regional accents tends to be one of the first things to get lost in translation. When I watch anime, I usually watch it in the original Klingon with subtitles rather than watching an English dub. The translation’s a bit better since it’s not as constrained to match the original duration, and the Japanese voice actors usually sound much better than the English voice actors. One thing you do miss, though, is the accents. In the subbed version of Cowboy Bebop, Faye Valentine has some strange speech mannerisms to which I attached little or no significance, until I saw a dubbed episode on Cartoon Network and noticed that the English voice actor for Faye speaks with a distinctly valley-girl accent. I assume the Japanese voice actor has an equivilent accent.
Another thing that intrigues me is what a mess Americans and Britons make of imitating each others’ accents. Britons will complain to no end about how bad American actors faking British accents for American audiences sound, no doubt with some justice. But they seem oblivious to how bad most British actors sound when doing American accents. Hugh Laurie is a notable exception.
The Cat on Red Dwarf talks funny. Likewise Perry from classic Doctor Who. It took me ages to figure out that both of them were supposed to be speaking with American accents (the Cat because the cast and crew thought he was funnier with that accent than with any other accent they tried, and Perry because the character is American).
Going the other direction, Spike from BtVS sounds fine to my ears, but I’ve been assured by friends of the British persuasion that he’s mangling the accent pretty badly. Although he supposedly gets significantly better over the course of the series, thanks to coaching from Tony Head, who actually is British.
Why yes, I really do sit around late at night thinking about things like this. Don’t you?
I just came back from two hours of poking around on tvtropes, so I can’t really deny that.
An interesting bit is that Marina Sirtis, who plays Deanna Troi on Star Trek, has a pretty thick cockney accent normally. She sounds a little strange on the show because she’s trying to do an American accent. It gives her an exotic sound because she just sounds strange.
Oh, by the way, once I realized that Hugh Laurie was English, I realized that "Dr. House" partly sounds so harsh is because Laurie’s American accent is slightly exaggerated and overdrawn–he’s an Englishman trying really really hard to sound American, so hard he’s overdoing it a bit. It makes him sound really sarcastic pretty much all the time.
I’ve been told that the typical flat midwestern-style accent (as used in most Hollywood movies and television news broadcasts) sounds sarcastic and rude by nature to many Brits. It’s probably part of why Laurie does it that way.
Americans tend to think the English sound snooty and condescending or a little gay, so it kinda evens out. ;-)
I’ve been watching Hugh Laurie on British shows (Blackadder, Jeeves & Wooster, etc)Â for years and have only seen a couple episodes of House, so I hadn’t noticed his American accent was overdone, only that it was much better than other fake American accents I’ve heard.
Come to think of it, the Cat on Red Dwarf is a decent guy at heart, but shallow, impulsive, breathtakingly vain, and unashamedly ignorant of every culture but his own. No wonder Danny John-Jules plays him with an American accent.
Now, the real question is do the British seem snooty and condescending because of their accents, or do their accents sound snooty and condescending because we associate the accent with the culture clash? My guess is mainly the latter.
It wouldn’t surprise me if it’s a little of both. I would think that if culturally you tend to be reserved emotionally (or tend not to be), this might actually do things in the developing language centers of the brains of those in that culture that may well influence their manner of speaking starting in early childhood–a layer on top of the raw language development itself, in other words. It’s only a theory but I’ll betcha anything that as we continue to learn more about brain development in coming generations, we may just find one day that linguistic software can analyze any language with multiple accents, and identify common cultural traits associated with each accent, independent of the language or any prior knowledge of its culture. It’s only a wild guess on my part but I’ll bet it’s a good one. ;-)
Do watch House some time again and listen carefully to the way he PUNCHes his woRds and EMphasiZes and drAWS OUT ceRtain letteRs and SYLLabllles–especially the letters "r" and "s". It’s pretty funny once you catch it. He’s making fun of our accents, and we just don’t notice it! ;-)
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