Nebelhom's Miscellaneous: My personal comedy favourites

During the writing of the last blog entry, I started wondering what makes good comedy for me. To be honest, I find this hard, because I like many different types and I tried to categorise, which is in most cases impossible because every comedian is different, and this will ultimately lead to a plain compilation of my favourite comedians with some inane and uninspired writing in between... And at that point, I realised that a compilation of my favourite comedians is maybe not such a bad thing.

Eloquence (and no swearing)

To start off this little compilation, I best start with very eloquent comedians. I am quite a fan of the comedians who tell funny stories without having to swear. The best examples are probably Bill Bailey and Jerry Seinfeld. Not one single time, I have heard either of them use swear words in their stand up. It's just not necessary. The games they play with the English language is just fantastic. As an example I will give an excerpt of Bill Bailey's Part Troll.

Taking every day life as their inspiration

This one may tie in with the one mentioned above, but doesn't have to necessarily. Taking regular every day occurrences or things you come across (like TV programs) as inspiration is in my eyes fantastic. The more I watch comedians who do this well, the more I catch myself doing it. The German comedian Michael Mittermeier once described the elevator lift as a "humourless zone". Every conversation ceases when entering. It sometimes even feels like some are holding their breath... You know what, it is true. So painfully true. I've watched a group of three guys laughing heartily and gasping for air out of hilarity. The moment they enter the elevator, the funny gene seems to have left them completely.

Two perfect examples here. A part of Jerry Seinfeld's routine talking about airports. This one ties in quite nicely with being eloquent and not insulting. The second is the already mentioned German comedian Michael Mittermeier in a compilation about his experiences with Austrians.

British humour

Now this one maybe due to my extended ten year stint in the UK, but I think the British have the best sense of humour in the entire world. Their ability to really take the piss out of themselves in any aspect of life coupled with the ability to insult you in such inventive and eloquent fashion with the perfect feel for a punch line is legendary. To showcase this, I chose the two comedy series, I came into contact with first and which stayed with me for such a long time; Blackadder and Fawlty Towers.

John Cleese's Fawlty Towers was my direct icebreaker in any chat with a new British acquaintance. Saying: "Hi! I'm Johannes. I'm German... Don't mention the war." made every person relax. The comedy is just so well-known over there.

Strangely enough, the most popular comedy has something to do with one of the two World Wars with Germany. Wonder why that is. Interesting side note, will you recognise a young dr. House (Hugh Laurie) in the Blackadder video.

Swearing and political correctness

Now I said often time before, that I like eloquent humour without swearing, but then again political UnCorrectness is also awesome. Boring swearing is one thing, but taking it so far that it is funny again, is quite the other thing :D

Random rants

This is by far my favourite type of comedy. why? I don't know. Maybe it brings me furthest away from the toils of real, serious life. A mental break so to speak. It is an interesting exercise to take an every day occurence and spin it so much out of proportion and remove it so far from reality that at the end of it the sentences maybe grammatically sound, but the content is just utter nonsense.
This one features Bill Bailey yet again, because he is a master at these :D