Christina here with this month’s ASK A WENCH and today we’re going to talk about what we find amusing. We are living in such dark times that some humour is essential to lighten things up and therefore the question to the Wenches was:
What makes you laugh – jokes, funny TV shows, books or films?
Anne here. I love to laugh, but laughs are often hard to come by when you most want them. A few books/authors can be expected to reliably deliver a laugh or three — Terry Pratchett, PG Wodehouse, JD Kirk (who mixes laughs with crime that's often quite grim), and Jenny Crusie who writes wonderful rom-com, but mostly when I want or need a laugh, I return to old favorites on the screen. These are all on YouTube, so are always available. And they're all British, and a bit over-the top/off the wall.
Catherine Tate is an English comedian who does wonderful skits. They're on YouTube, and really worth watching. Here's a great one with Catherine Tate and David Tennant — she plays an outrageous schoolgirl and he's her new English teacher. You need to watch it to the end.
She did another one with Daniel Craig, also well worth watching. (You can find it here.)
I've always enjoyed PG Wodehouse's books, and I really enjoy the TV series of Jeeves and Wooster with Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry. Here's the first episode.
And here's a compilation clip.
Black Books is another favorite TV series, with Dylan Moran as the mad, curmudgeonly bookshop owner, Bill Bailey his hapless employee, and Tamsin Greig his crazy neighbour. All eccentric, all very funny. (See here).
Finally there is The IT Crowd . Set in the relatively early days of computers, it's about two computer nerds who run the IT section in the basement of a large company, and Jen, their supervisor who knows nothing about computers. Their classic advice to people needing help with their computers — turn it off and on again. (Which I use often and it almost always works.) Here's a two-minute clip showing the guys dealing with help requests.
This is my favourite episode, where the guys trick Jen into presenting "The Internet" at a talk she is giving to the shareholders. But the last laugh is on them …
But my most regular source of laughs is my dog. Every day she makes me laugh, whether it's skidding on my polished wooden floor like a beginner ice-skater, or walking on it with Extreme Caution. Or doing all sorts of other funny things. This morning, for instance, when I went to let her outside, it was raining, and she peered out the door, stepped onto the covered deck, looked out at the rain, turned around, stepped back inside and then shook herself really thoroughly, as if she'd been utterly drenched.
Susan: What makes me laugh? A lot! There's something to enjoy every day – family, friends, kiddos around me, memes, silly videos coming past my radar. Especially in the last few years, humor has helped all of us get through some tough times.
On TV and in movies and books, here are some of my favorites:-
Top of the list for me has to be Derry Girls, an Irish comedy about teens in a Catholic school in Derry during the conflict. It's one of the funniest and smartest comedies I've ever seen – hilarious, clever, raunchy, heartwarming, and truthful. Here's a trailer.
I heartily agree with Anne's picks of The IT Crowd and Black Books – both are high on my list of favorites too, along with Fawlty Towers, one of the best TV comedies of all time. In our household, no matter how often we watch these series, we laugh every time. Some favorite movies that are truly funny and delightful are Home Alone and Bridesmaids (some scenes are so funny you'd need to run them back to see what you missed while laughing). I love really smart stand-up comedy too – some favorites are Trevor Noah, Lewis Black, Fluffy (Gabriel Iglesias), and back in the day George Carlin. For truly funny books, I especially love humorous nonfiction, such as Dave Barry's many essay collections; also, Justin Halpern's Sh*t My Dad Says is just plain hilarious in the delivery of its blunt truths, and Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods is a laugh-out-loud favorite too. Just recently I came across a very funny essay, "Godzilla's Journal" by Sean Hewett – a brilliant little comedic twist on a familiar character.
What makes me laugh most, I think, is a wry blend of plain truth and real heart in humor. Sometimes we just have to laugh at life to get through it and to feel better about everything. It's the very best remedy for any situation.
Mary Jo here. Humor is wildly subjective. Melodrama is easy: threaten a child or a pet and readers are automatically worried. But with humor, there are books and movies that some people find wildly funny that make me cringe, just as there are things I love that other people just don't get. That's why Christina's question for this month is so good!
For movies, a long-time favorite of ours is Dave. It was made in 1993 but is still available in DVD and for streaming, and is still very, very funny. Dave, played by Kevin Kline, is a nice regular guy who runs an employment agency in Baltimore where he's always trying to find work for people who desperately need it. He also looks a whole lot like President Mitchell, who lives just down the road in Washington, DC. Dave has a nice side gig doing impersonations of the president at things like car franchise openings.
Then the president has a stroke and ends in a coma, and two of his chief aides want to cover it up so they ask Dave to fill in for the real president. He's uncertain but the aides convince him that it's for the good of the country so he promises to give it his best shot. Luckily, the president and the first lady are barely on speaking terms, so Dave isn't in danger of being outed by her.
But oops! All kinds of things happen, and Dave's version of the president is more popular than the real one. Plus, the First Lady, played by Sigourney Weaver, figures things out and the complexities keep growing. There's a stellar cast, including Ben Kingsley as the vice-president. There is much cleverness and sweetness and a very satisfying end. We have a DVD and watch it with some regularity.
Other humorous movies we really enjoy are The Princess Bride ("He's only mostly dead," or "Never start a land war in Asia."). Plus at the Mayhem Consultant's suggestion, Back to the Future, which is also very funny.
For reliably amusing books I usually reach for something by Jennifer Crusie, who has clever banter, over the top situations, and generally dogs but occasionally a cat. If you've not read her, look for Bet Me or Anyone But You, among others.
Pat: I think surprising me with a particularly funny word play, a witty comeback, is the one thing guaranteed to make me laugh. My tastes have become jaded over time and while Terry Pratchett’s satire still makes me grin, it’s not quite so easy to make me laugh out loud anymore. Some of what he’s satirizing is just too grim and real in these uncertain times. I miss Jennifer Crusie books because the repartee is hilarious. Susan Elizabeth Phillips contemporary romances are terrific, and the humor is cocky, but the days of grinning all the way through her books seem to be gone. So it really is me.
I hunt for TV shows that make me laugh but canned laughter turns me off, and dry humor is rare, so I take it where I can find it. I used to howl at TV shows like All in the Family and Mash, but my reading time is spare these days. I don’t spend much time at TV and even less with movies. (Although I have seen the Princess Bride and grinned at the marvelous one-liners). I definitely haven’t tried YouTube the way Anne has, so I’m pretty useless in that department. I’ll be looking up all the recommendations though. My husband and I watch TV together, and I don’t know if YouTube is shareable, but if I can find humor there, we’ll have to learn!
Christina: I’m a great fan of witty come-backs and sarcasm, and love it when characters in books have conversations that make me laugh out loud. It’s usually the small details that make it funny – as we have discussed before on this blog, Georgette Heyer was a mistress of this with pithy comments from dowagers in turbans for example. What I really can’t stand is when a book is recommended to me as “absolutely hilarious” beforehand because then I know the humour will be forced. The amusing parts have to be organic and develop out of the situations that arise without the characters consciously trying to be clever and/or witty. Usually it’s a build-up as well and not something that happens immediately.
I dislike stand-up comedy for the most part and don’t like watching it on TV – again, too forced – but there are exceptions and some of the comedians are genuinely funny. I prefer humorous films and my all-time favourite is Young Frankenstein. The combination of the dialogue, with lots of double entendres, and the looks of Gene Wilder and Marty Feldman get me every time. I must have watched it at least 20 times and I still laugh (although I once watched it in Spanish and found that they had cut out all the funniest bits because they just didn’t translate!). The same goes for some of the Monty Python sketches and films, which have some truly hilarious moments. Again, with them it is the little touches – for example, I didn’t enjoy the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail as much as some of the others, but the spoof “moose” credits had me in stitches. They appeared as subtitles inserted into the real credits in a sort of weird Pigeon-English-Swedish (although not spelled correctly and using the Danish alphabet for some reason) and starts talking about “møøse”. You can read the entire sequence here and it’s ridiculous!
So what makes you laugh? Any recommendations gratefully received!