comedy?

Last night we watched "Thank you for Smoking". I had wanted to see this since it was advertised as being in theaters so I was glad when we got it on dvd. What a disappointment. I sat down for a good laugh but did little more than smile once or twice during the whole thing. We agreed that some of the deleted scenes were funnier than what was left in the film and we were both disappointed not to find the whole thing more entertaining. It was "ok". Nothing more. I think some of the deleted scenes were too far from being "pc" and the producers were scared to put them in. However as everyone knows, that is why comedy is funny - often it is the outrageous that makes us laugh.

Back in the 70's when I was a teenager in England, Monty Python, Fawlty Towers and the fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin were what made us laugh. things like that were also watched by the next generation of comedy writers and performers such as Rowan Atkinson, Ben Elton, Richard Curtis, Dawn French, Jennifer Saunders and others. They didn't get laughs because they were pc, they got laughs because they exposed the truth. A bit like Borat really, although Sacha Baron Cohen takes it even further.

A politically correct world isn't a fun place to be if one has to follow the same rules in comedy. You can't mock racists without imitating them. During the second world war it was perfectly acceptable to ridicule Hitler on stage, in public, in polite company, but nowadays it is thought not to be in good taste to put a Hitler impersonator in a show - although it is still done.