Anatomy of a joke: The Four Yorkshiremen
Ok, deconstructed jokes. What do I mean by that? I'm working on it, I'm working on it...
Here, I mean a joke that says "I'm not working with stereotypes, I'm working with universals". The things we all share.
So, if you haven't seen it, the Four Yorkshiremen (link here) is Marty Feldman, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, and Tim Brooke-Taylor in the pre-Monty Python days, playing "who can top who". It's an absolute hoot.
There are two universals that make it work. The first one, the surface one, is gone now: it's the shared experience of approximately 30 million Britons from the Great Depression through the post-World War II rationing and scarcity (and before that WW I and the first round of it). Everyone watching this skit in the first viewing had extra-intimate views on what hardship meant.
That's the easy universal, and it's the one that almost doesn't exist anymore. The generations involved are almost gone. And their kids just don't have the same background. How many kids these days even know what a ration book is? And that yes, everyone had one.
On the other hand, the true universal is still here: most of us have had at least some experience of watching some old blowhard sit there puffing their cigar/cigarette/drinking their whiskey and telling us about how easy we've got it. There are entire industries devoted to telling us how easy we have it.
So, the real universality (look up the four respective ages for the actors involved in the bit) peeks through. I suspect all four of them were at a point in their careers where they were more than a little tired of the generation before them telling them what made a good joke.
And it slides in like a stiletto.
What doesn't quite fit here? The stereotypes. Classism has its downsides, whether you're standing on the floor looking up or up on the roof pissing down. It seeps into the jokes, and while the Python gang and Feldman are more than capable of playing on it, and they know damned well how obnoxious the twits are, the fact is that the joke relies on it, to only a small degree but it's there.
It doesn't spoil the joke, but it does at least make my analogy go only so far. Eh, I'll take it. I love the bit, I think it still holds up, and the universals still sing. I'll take it.
But what I really learned thinking about this was something else. What other universals can I think of? Or, least, bits that required that sort of universal experience to work?
MASH the t.v. series. The movie to a much lesser degree, mostly because the movie reads better to later generations as pure surrealist absurdism. You can see the humor in that way much better, MASH on t.v. works with a different set of knees because they had the space to develop away from the initial basis.
Hogan's Heroes. Not because we've all been in a Nazi prison camp, but because I think we can all identify with having to make do with whatever nitwits are available (retail lifers, you know what I mean, plus anyone that's ever had a Dilbert sketch strike a little too close to home).
Gideon's Band. Can you imagine being the poor schlub watching first Joe go home, then Murray, then Carl, until it's just you and the dog and the guy who drew boobs in his math notebook in fifth grade? And you want us to attack who again?
The Odyssey. Hear me out. Odysseus the genius who won the Trojan War? Of course not, we're just Janes and Joes here.
Odysseus the dude who had yet another wave come in and crash his boat into a rocky little island in the middle of nowhere, and how long is this trip gonna last, anyway? Him, we can all sympathize with.
And Penelope? How many of these schmucks are going to come out of the woodwork, tear up my house, where the hell is Odysseus, anyway? Her we can all sympathize with, too.
Universals.