Clive Davis in the Times, in the context of the film “Team America: World Police”, wonders about the sad conformism of current British comedy:
There was certainly a lot to be said for the British alternative comedy wave of the 1980s. Nobody would want to go back to the days when Bernard Manning was regarded as suitable prime-time viewing. (As one who had to endure versions of his jokes on the school bus every morning in my teens, I am grateful my sons are not subjected to the same racist drivel.) On the other hand, now that the rebels have become the new Establishment, weighed down with riches and fêted by Question Time producers, an awful complacency has set in: Blair is bad and Bush worse is about the limit of most comics’ worldview.
The rest of the arts world is not much better. The truth, I suppose, is that the baby-boomers who administer our mighty cultural industries are content to behave as if the world stopped on a sunny afternoon in the Sixties. Iraq, to them, is Vietnam; Dubya is Nixon with a twang. Thatcher, Reagan and the fall of the Berlin Wall are figments of the imagination. […]
Perhaps there is a revolution stirring among the video-game-playing couch potatoes. That is certainly a more reassuring prospect than the thought that Parker and Stone’s nemesis, Michael Moore, really has become the spokesman of slackers who not only can’t be bothered to vote, but don’t care how many lies and distortions are crammed into Fahrenheit 9/11. It goes without saying that most of the media have fallen down on the job of educating the film’s audience about Moore’s falsehoods. The good news is that Parker and Stone take their revenge on Moore in Team America by blowing up his puppet on the screen. Another step down the road of bad taste, I grant you, but it will give some of us a lot of guilty pleasure.
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