Gee, that’s a laugh, innit?
“We really have everything in common with America nowadays except, of course, language.”
When Oscar Wilde wrote those words in The Canterville Ghost, the year was 1887. It’s striking that 133 years later, those words ring as true as ever. The USA and the UK have been inexorably linked since the younger nation’s birth, yet culturally we always forget just how different the two can be. To truly understand these core distinctions, let us examine each through the lens of how growing up and working between the two nations can shape a cultural identity.
I was born in London in April 1999 to an American mother. She had come over to the UK from the US on a semester abroad in the 80s, and never left. Of course, having spent nearly 20 years living in London, she was well-acclimatized, essentially becoming British herself before she started to raise me. That being said, I never felt fully at home in British society. For a start, my accent was never like those of the children around me. I was never going to sound like them, and using British slang to the extent that they did sounded odd. To this day, it takes some doing to convince people that, yes, I really was born in London and that, no, I never actually lived in the US before college. One might think then that coming to America would provide a little haven, that perhaps out here it would be easier to blend into the crowd. Nothing could be farther from the truth. When a Brit arrives in Los Angeles, they have the buffer of an accent to make their more alien mannerisms seem like an artifact of their upbringing. This was a luxury I was never afforded. All of these issues were confounded by my entrée into the world of acting, and specifically, into the realm of comedy.
Robert McConnell, of the University of Ottawa’s English department, wrote a compelling piece describing the key characteristics of British and American comedy in 1987. He described all comedy as “a relatively harmless divergence from an expected outcome or norm.” Put simply, we laugh at what surprises us. “When a man walks down the street, it is not funny. It is merely a picture of everyday, hum-drum reality. But when the man, slips on a banana peel, and falls, that is comedy”. Surprise then, or a deviation from expectation, is what makes comedy a universal concept. So what separates the comedic style of one nation from that of another? It must be the case that what is surprising becomes transformed by the prism of culture. As McConnell puts it, “somebody has to do the expecting, and that person does his expecting based on his view of reality which, as we all know, varies from person to person, from group to group, and from culture to culture.” At this point we start to investigate what it is specifically that differentiates British and American humor (or humour, depending on the day), and how facing those expectations has shaped my interpretation of both places.
Let’s start by taking a look at British humour, and the norms it stems from. McConnell notes: “Much humor can be found in the British attitude and practice of keeping up appearances. There is the official culture, symbolized by the Royal Family, which believes in an supports the values of tradition, ceremony, orderliness and fair play. Yet, behind the façade, there is the low culture of scandal sheet newspapers, Fleet Street, boozers, ruffian and punk rockers.” While some of those references may be dated somewhat today, the core idea remains true. The reason restoration comedies are still as successful in today’s West End as they were in the 1700s is that they hinge on that core idea of a “stiff upper lip” hiding a raunchy world of secrets.
Some years ago, I did some voice over work for London’s Sealife Aquarium, in which I appeared as a little cartoon turtle, leading children around on a guided audio-visual tour. Most of the script was purely informational, but here and there the writers had peppered in jokes to keep the children interested. Looking back, I can remember most of these jokes following the standard British formula. There would always be an animal (let’s say, Sammy the sea lion) who would have an image they were trying to uphold (perhaps he’s a certified accountant, or something even more child-friendly) but they would have a silly secret (he really loves playing with jellyfish). The “reality behind the façade… the very presumption that the official culture is hiding anything or fooling anybody is occasion for endless British humor.” It should be obvious to anyone who knows me that this approach towards humor has shaped my personality heavily. I tend to be careful about revealing much about the more vulnerable, and perhaps the more endearing, aspects of my personality. I feel far more comfortable keeping people at an emotional distance with wit, rather than dropping the façade to form a close connection, at least at first. While this might sound sad to an American reader, anyone who has spent time around British people knows that this affliction is all too common.
The way that this differs from an American approach to comedy is all too clear to see in shows that started off in one country and moved to the other, such as The Office. In the British original, the boss character, David Brent, is decidedly less likable than Michael Scott, his American counterpart. In an article in the Journal of Popular Film and Television comparing the two approaches to The Office’s concept, Jeffrey Griffin argues that “although Michael and David are cut from similar cloth, there are key differences. Although both bosses are windbags, David is more articulate — even glib on occasion. Michael, on the other hand, occasionally mangles his vocabulary or grammar, although he is generally well spoken… in the second season, Michael becomes more sympathetic as the writers make a conscious effort to depict him ‘with more heart’. Then NBC entertainment president Kevin Reilly said, “I think Americans need a little more hope than the British’.” The British audience could take a character who presents himself as an incredible manager, but is utterly irredeemable underneath, but producing a show for an American audience required quite the opposite approach. The American audience needed the character to have a heart. They would feel guilty laughing along with a character they despised. Empathy, then, would seem to be a key component of American humor. As McConnell puts it, a key to American comedy is “the notion of it being relatively harmless… if Groucho Marx did visit great harm upon his fictional victim, then most people would not find it funny at all. Rather they would find it evocative of pity or outrage instead of laughter.” An absence of pure schadenfreude, the concept of laughing at another’s misfortune, would seem to be key to making Americans laugh.
I’ve experienced this professionally as well. In a Cartoon Network show I regularly used to appear on, I once had to play the part of a selfish, mean-spirited teenager at a supermarket checkout. The whole concept of the joke was that the kid wasted the time of the scene’s protagonist, choosing to freestyle rap about bagging produce instead of lending a helping hand. The show was produced by a British creative team, and the influences are undeniable. One entity (the supermarket staff), under the guise of professionalism, is actively antagonizing another character. However, with the show being produced for an American audience, that blow needed to be softened. Perhaps that was why the writers elected to end the scene with the antagonism coming from a series of cuter children, rather than the irredeemable teenager the conflict originally stemmed from. This approach has certainly affected my demeanor since I arrived at USC. At first, I was definitely more abrasive towards people, having become accustomed to that in the UK. However, I quickly learned that softening my approach towards people could help me immeasurably. Simply put, American humor taught me to be nicer.
I consider myself to be, to some extent, stateless. I am incapable of being fully English; I will never truly be accepted by that community. Neither am I able to be fully American; I’m simply a little too alienated from that culture. For the majority of my life, I saw this ambiguity as a bad thing. I was terrified that I’d never experience the sensation of belonging to a collective. As I’ve mature though, I’ve come to realize that perhaps being able to stand back and appreciate both cultures from a distance has allowed me to become a cultural magpie; I can take what I like from one and combine it with what I like from the other. It’s made me a more well-rounded individual, and I wouldn’t wish for anything else.
