A Great, Silly Grin: The British Satire Boom of the 1960s

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Summary: for Monty Python fans
Review: Although it has aspirations to social history this is largely celebrity bio. Those who have an interest in Dudley Mooore, John Cleese, David Frost, Alan Benett, Jonathan Miller and so forth, and who remembember Beyond the Fringe and That Was The Week That Was will find it interesting. The number of characters becomes bewildering and boredom sets in as accounts of the obscure and forgotten multiply. It livens up when it recounts some of the skits we thought funny at the time.
It is perhaps deflating to realize that these satirical iconoclasts owed their initial careers to the British governmemt. They got their starts on the payrolls of the government-sponsored Edinburgh Festival and as employes of the British Broadcasting Corporation. Would they have fared as well in an open marketplace? Were they causes or beneficiaries of the breakdown in censorship in the 1960's? Carpenter touches on some of these questions but is, I think, too much in awe of the genius of those he writes about. While undoubtedly entertaining their talents for writing funny things and doing funny imitations were of a kind that is widespread.

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Summary: Grin or Grimace?
Review: Carpenter examines English cultural values during the years immediately following World War Two and focuses specifically on the 1960's when students from Oxford and Cambridge universities (with others) challenged those values with immensely entertaining satire. Theirs were significant contributions to a tradition of creative ridicule which extends back more than 2,500 years. Of course, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens are among those English authors properly renowned for their comic genius but are not usually thought of primarily as social satirists. Throughout the Age of Victoria and well into the 20th century, the British Empire flourished within a somewhat rigid social order, one which (generally) seemed to lack a sense of humor. By 1960, England had become "a bankrupt, defenseless little country run by a ridiculously elderly prime minister" (Harold Macmillan) when Jonathan Miller, Peter Cooke, Dudley Moore, and Alan Bennett introduced "Beyond the Fringe" at the Edinburgh Festival. Out of that developed Private Eye magazine, The Establishment (a men's cabaret featuring satire), and the BBC's That Was the Week That Was. Carpenter devotes substantial attention to Miller, Cooke, Moore, and Bennett as they and others detonated a "boom" of social satire whose reverberations continued through Second City, Monty Python, and Saturday Night Live. Carpenter duly notes the influence of the Goon Show (Millgan, Sellers, et al) as well as American humorists such as Mort Sahl, Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce, and Tom Lehrer on their English counterparts. Of special interest to me is Carpenter's suggestion that, as England continued its decline among world powers in the 1960s, social satire served as a medication to deaden the pain. At one point, he reminds his reader of Cook's warning that England was then in danger of "sinking giggling into the sea." That has not as yet happened and never will but the image remains vivid nonetheless.

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Summary: The evolution of British satire
Review: Humphrey Carpenter's Great, Silly Grin follows contemporary British humor, beginning with the 1960 Edinburgh Festival when a satirical review Beyond the Fringe fostered a new breed of British humor. The evolution of British satire that followed through the 1960s receives close examination in this involving survey.

Rating:
Summary: As Peter Cook used to say...
Review: Just read A Great Silly Grin: The British Satire Boom of the 1960s, by Humprey Carpenter. This period has long been a subject of interest to me despite the fact that I'm too young (and geographically challenged) to have seen most of the programs in the first place.

Besides being a linked series of show business biographies of key figures of the time (The Beyond the Fringe foursome, etc), the book raises some good discussion.

Just how much does satire really matter, if it does at that? As Peter Cook used to say, the peak of satire was 1930's Berlin--and look how much that did to prevent the rise of Hitler.

But the best part of the text may be the final chapter, which paints an unflattering picture of the state of the art in 2000-era Great Britain--and it's sobering how much of it applies to the US as well.

Rating:
Summary: As Peter Cook used to say...
Review: Just read A Great Silly Grin: The British Satire Boom of the 1960s, by Humprey Carpenter. This period has long been a subject of interest to me despite the fact that I'm too young (and geographically challenged) to have seen most of the programs in the first place.

Besides being a linked series of show business biographies of key figures of the time (The Beyond the Fringe foursome, etc), the book raises some good discussion.

Just how much does satire really matter, if it does at that? As Peter Cook used to say, the peak of satire was 1930's Berlin--and look how much that did to prevent the rise of Hitler.

But the best part of the text may be the final chapter, which paints an unflattering picture of the state of the art in 2000-era Great Britain--and it's sobering how much of it applies to the US as well.