Saturday, September 29, 2007
Goons
Before Monty Python, before Beyond the Fringe, before those well-known comedians the Beatles, before the Firesign Theatre, there was a comedy group that was a huge influence on all of them, the Goon Show: Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, and Harry Secombe. The odds are you don't know enough about them, so here's their Wikipedia entry and their official Web page.
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4 comments:
Estiv, dude... I am a huge "Goon Show" fan. I've been wanting to blog about them for a while.
There's a Brit shop in Santa Monica (lots of Brits in Santa Monica) where I've purchased a lot of the BBC Radio re-issues on CD.
I think Spike Milligan is probably the greatest vocal comedian in the English language. (Have tried to think of an American equivalent... Mel Blanc? Sid Ceasar?)
I also think much of the humor reflects the psychology of an Empire in decline... but I haven't worked all that out yet.
How'd you get turned on to them? National Public Radio briefly aired old "Goon Shows" in the mid-'70s... and as an adolescent, it captured my fancy.
Thanks, UBM, nice to see you here. I think I first heard of the Goons while reading about the Beatles, since their producer George Martin had worked with them. He said that a lot of the studio tricks that so distinguished his later work with the Beatles would not have been possible without his earlier experience doing similar things with the Goons. And the Beatles were unsure how cool Martin was at first, until they found out he'd worked with their heroes the Goons.
As far as the idea that "the humor reflects the psychology of an Empire in decline"--agreed, but...the subversion of the rational that characterizes so much of the Goons' work, the reliance on a sort of dream logic, is in fact very characteristic of a strain dominant in English humor (literature? art? I don't know exactly) at least since Lewis Carroll. And his works, along with Edward Lear's, were written at pretty much the height, or at least the upward slope, of imperial English power. So then what was Carroll doing? Deconstruction?
Without a doubt, though, the Goons were taking the mickey out of a lot of their childhood heroes, like statesmen and explorers identified with the Empire. And their audience loved them for doing so.
You wrote: Without a doubt, though, the Goons were taking the mickey out of a lot of their childhood heroes, like statesmen and explorers identified with the Empire.
Oh man... I love having someone to talk Goons with.
I'll hurry up and figure how to frame a post for my blog. (The politically incorrect racial humour is its own subject.)
Meanwhile, two of my favorite episodes illustrate your statement above: "The Mountain Eaters" (tweaking Hillary) and "The Flea" (mocking Samuel Peyps).
I'll hurry up and figure how to frame a post for my blog.
Sounds good--I want to read it.
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