I needed something to read for a long tube journey today so I popped into a charity shop and I picked up Ben Thompson's Sunshine On Putty: The Golden Age of British Comedy, from Vic Reeves to The Office (no, I don't know what the title is about either) for a couple of quid.
A reasonable enough read and enjoyable to dip into where my fancy took me, and I did like the fact that he sticks the boot into David Baddiel. You can never do enough of that. However, the following quotation did sort of leap out of me when fast forwarding through the pages:
"In the opening episode of 2003's Ali G in Da USAiii, for example, Baron Cohen outrages respectable US opinion by talking about the 'terrible events of 7/11'. On first hearing. this joke seems crassly obvious, but it also enables him to make a devastating satirical point in the space of five words. By mistaking the date of the attack on the World Trade Centre for the name of the grocery chain which pioneered late-night opening, he not only alludes to capitalism's capacity for making a fast buck out of unthinkable horror, but also to the ever-tightening global grip of the US military-capitalist complex which was instrumental in provoking that murderous attack in the first place." [My emphasis]
Christ, how is it when members of the chattering classes seek to intellectualise comedy they come out with pieces of doggerel like this? It doesn't matter that this crass piece of pseudo-profundity is buried on pages 337 and 338, it marks Thompson out as a card carrying tube. Spolit the rest of the book for me.
2 comments:
You can read up to page 338 in one ride on the tube? I'm impressed.
Anyway, Thompson is annoying, and he misspelled the World Trade Center.
"You can read up to page 338 in one ride on the tube? I'm impressed."
As my original post stated:"A reasonable enough read and enjoyable to dip into where my fancy took me" Books like that, you've read from the start - you just open up chapters randomly and read what interests you.
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