How is British comedy different from American comedy ?
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This is a way deeper question than it first appears. It really depends on what level we’re talking about
For the most part, British and American comedy is pretty interchangeable. As a Brit who lived in the States for 10 years, I can say about 95% of our comedy ‘travels’ really well in both directions.
Growing up in the UK, in the 80’s we had Cheers, The Golden Girls, Roseanne… in the 90’s Friends and Seinfeld where as big over here as they where over there, and since the interwebs came along we watch a lot of the same stand-up.
The only thing that doesn’t really translate are a few of the bigger comedies that rely more on context. Like, very few people in the UK have ever heard of Jeff Foxworthy or Larry the Cable Guy…and I don’t think many Americans have heard of Peter Kay… but even that isn’t so much a difference in sense of humor, so much as it’s assumed Brits won’t get Redneck references and Americans won’t get Northern English humor. My wife’s American and while some British stand-up went over her head, she still found most of it funny… and the same was true for me in the other direction.
I think the best way to explain it isn’t that British and American people have a different sense of humor, it’s more that the people controlling the purse strings *decide* that we do, so don’t bother marketing it, or adapt it in a different way.
I think a good example is the British and American versions of ‘The Office’.
The whole point of the UK version of The Office is it was a sitcom that wasn’t very sitcom-like. Ricky Gervais said the whole point was that you could watch an episode not knowing what it was and genuinely not be sure if you were watching an actual documentary or a comedy show. The most sitcoms were too ‘eventful’ and full of wacky misunderstandings, so wanted The Office to feel more ‘real’.
The American version was a pure sitcom. It had those wacky over-the-top situations and was way more of a traditional sitcom format…. but the thing is, I like both versions. They’re very different shows, but it’s not like one version is funny and the other isn’t.
Basically, I’d just say that British and American comedy isn’t all that different. I think a lot of us Brits like to think that our humor is more sophisticated and high brow and that American comedy tends to talk down to the audience, but you can always find examples that prove those stereotypes wrong. I mean, Benny Hill is hardly high brow, and Frasier wasn’t known for spoon-feeding the audience.
In the end, I’d just say the difference in our various brands of comedy tend to come down to the fact we just have different cultural reference points.
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