Ben Abraham On British Comedy

Secretly Canadian artist writes for Clash...

Ben Abraham tends to craft songs capable of picking apart the heart's innermost workings.

Tender vignettes of subtlety and strength, the Australian songwriter will release new album 'Sirens' through Secretly Canadian on March 4th (pre-order LINK).

It's an open, personal collection, as affecting as it is emotional. At heart, though, Ben Abraham loves to laugh at life's absurdities, to switch off and enjoy some prime British comedy.

Here's a few words on his favourites.

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I feel self conscious writing for a largely British audience on the subject of British comedy – particularly when I am an antipodean pursuing a career in music. But I have a good publicist who took note when I told him I was a one time screenwriting student, and so here we are. These days I mostly write songs but more importantly I’m here to tell you why the Brits make me laugh so hard.

I love all the UK comedy shows you might expect. Spaced, Blackadder, The IT Crowd, Black Books, The Office, Green Wing, Father Ted, Garth Merenghi’s Dark Place.

I think what draws me to British comedy is the collision of the serious and the absurd.

Generally speaking, the most successful American comedies are equal parts humour and pathos where the characters and therefore the audience come to understand some kind of moral-of-the-story. (The great exception to this was of course Seinfeld with their famous ‘no hugging, no learning’ policy, or the more recent – and grossly under-appreciated – cult show ‘It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia’).

British comedy however, has this beautiful way of putting very serious people in outrageous situations without requiring any kind of compassionate resolution.

There’s a great clip on YouTube of Stephen Fry addressing a writer’s conference on this very topic where he points out that the archetypical American comic hero is a wisecracking, victorious rebel, whilst the British comedian plays the failure who constantly has their sense of dignity worn down.

It makes me think of a show like Arrested Development – one of the best American comedies of the last 20 years – which was all about stripping its characters of their dignity, and yet the writing still had of moments of truth and real-world sincerity.

This isn’t to say that American’s don’t deal in the absurd or the brutally satirical. My favourite screenwriter of all time was Paddy Chayefsky whose ‘Network’ stands as one of the most remarkable and unusual screenplays in the history of cinema. But even that film, at its most farcical, was as sincerely angry as it was funny.

The British willingness to celebrate absurdity without a sermon means we get shows like The Mighty Boosh and Monty Python, characters like Bernard Black, or Vyvyan. There is no concept of “why”. We don’t even ask the question.

It means we get to see great comedic-actors perform the absolute shit out of outrageous writing. I think Katherine Parkinson’s Jen from the IT Crowd is one of the funniest physical-performances I’ve ever seen.

“Oh damn, I must have left it on the dresser” is still one of my favourite final lines for a show (Blackadder The Third) and it occurs to me that it’s a moment that couldn’t have taken place anywhere but in a British comedy.

The only context I can imagine in America for such a ridiculous gag, is in an SNL sketch where it would perhaps require an added layer of self-awareness to land the joke.

In Blackadder, it’s the underplayed, straightforwardness of Hugh Laurie’s delivery that is part of its genius.

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Australian humour is different again. We have a great tradition of absurd and surreal comedy writing, but our greatest comedy exports like The Castle, Kath and Kim, and the work of Chris Lilley (Summer Heights High) will show you a strong culture of affectionately celebrating the underdog.

Sure we’ll have a laugh at our own expense, and are no strangers to self-deprecation, but we’re also fiercely proud in a short-man’s-syndrome kind of way. You see that all through our comedy writing.

The TV show Spaced is perhaps my all-time favourite British comedy because it came along at such a pivotal moment for me. I was introduced to the show right in the middle of my screenwriting studies and was floored by how layered the writing and directing was. There isn’t a wasted frame in that show and Edgar Wright’s work is always a great watch.

As for what this all has to do with my with music (bear with me) I’m quite interested in the link between comedy and beauty, and I wonder if a keen instinct for one brings with it a facility for the other.

They say that comedy and tragedy are flipsides of the same coin, and we humans tend to identify beauty as it exists in contrast to the pain and tragedy of the world. Perhaps we perceive humour in the same way.

At the risk of sounding like an American, maybe somewhere in the middle of it all is a kind of truth we are each grasping for.

It’s why John Cleese, Stephen Fry and Stewart Lee all seem to know something we don’t, it’s how David Lynch and Terry Gilliam are actual human beings, it’s why appreciating Randy Newman’s repertoire is so important and perhaps why people are showing up in droves to see Father John Misty.

Or at least so say the ravings of this one-time-attempted-screenwriter from the colonies.

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'Sirens' will be released on March 4th pre-order LINK.

Catch Ben Abraham at the following shows:

March
7 London Servants Jazz Quarter
8 Bristol The Old Bookshop (instore show)
8 Bristol The Gallimaufry
9 Glasgow The Hug & Pint
10 Manchester The Castle Hotel
11 Brighton The Latest Music Bar

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