....I don't remember any jokes about Anne Frank. I'm sure there were terribly tasteless jokes about similar subjects but they were kept to the playground. Nobody would have dreamed of repeating them on the TV.

The argument you outline is being rehearsed regularly nowadays. I wonder if it's anything to do with the fact that we've got more comics than there is material to go round. Because it's very hard being funny (like it's very hard writing hit tunes) comics try to make up in edginess what they feel their material might lack in funny. If you're going to have a joke fall flat and you're David Mitchell it's probably best to make that joke about Anne Frank (rather than one about, say, penguins) because at least then you're seen to be "doing your job".

The recent Frankie Boyle/"Mock The Week" case was similarly interesting. He made a remark about Rebecca Adlington which was essentially a hurtful personal insult first and a joke a long way after that. You wouldn't have needed to censor that remark on any British Broadcaster twenty years ago because nobody would have dreamed of making it, any more than they would have made it in any kind of public forum. I feel that the current generation of comics are being massively overstretched by the number of programmes that require them to shoot from the hip. Most of them are simply not up to it.

I didn't know who Rebecca Adlington was until that comment. When I discovered she was a young woman basically being called ugly and a tart by a bunch of middle-aged men on TV for no reason I was a bit shocked. Bit like with Ross and Brand. Strange how a lot of the humour has to be blokes being grim and unpleasant about younger women.
Would a kid caught bullying a fat kid in the playground say to the teacher 'I plan to be a comedian when I graduate so I'm just practising doing what will become my job.'?
Ach, now I'm wondering if I sound too PC? I just think a lot of these comedians are desperately justifying themselves and once you get into the 'it IS funny...honest' argument then you've lost.

thing has anything to do with it.

David Mitchell doesn't say anything like that in the article.

The current style of humour which is generally being attacked in certain areas of the media works because it isn't what we're all thinking, and thus the joke is shocking (and sometimes funny).

Whereas Bernhard Manning wasn't shocking in his home patch, he was, as you say saying what his audience found funny. As time went on and thankfully society changed Mannings humour became shocking, and he himself became more and more confrontational with it for two reasons, 1. he felt isolated in a world that didn't find him and his racism funny anymore and 2. that was the only way people would actually pay him attention.

Carr's joke was actually one of his few funny ones. Frankie Boyles joke was only about someone having a big nose and whilst it wasn't that funny certainly wasn't that offensive. David Mitchell's joke (well the one someone else wrote for him) was a bit too clever to be instantaneously funny, but isn't really that offensive, it isn't saying the holocaust is a good thing or anything.

Black comedy and gallows humour are ways of making sense of the terrifying and horrible things in the world. Much of the current generation of comedy is based around the idea of laughing at characters awful beliefs, such as peep show, the office, the thick of it, richard herring, etc... arguably even Jimmy Carr is doing that. Some of them do it well. Some of them don't. Some of them have clever points some of them don't. Some of them are completely shallow and are just trying to get everyone to look at them (i.e. russell brand) but I don't think they are doing the same think as Manning or Jim Davidson.

Paedophilia is not funny but peoples attitudes about it often are. Carr's rape joke is surely suggesting his "friend" is unpleasant. It's really about who you make the victim of your comedy. One way to explore social attitudes is through comedy. It's an important part of comedies role in the world and should be defended.

that today's comics are essentially 'good people' so can get away with saying 'edgy' things, whereas the 70s lot were all horrible scumbags.

I'm not saying I know this to be the case, but it would be interesting to do a comparison between the amount of, for want of a better phrase, 'good deeds' done by the dinner jacketed era of comedians compared to their noughties counterparts, or just generally how well regarded they were as people.

And I also have sympathy with David Mitchell. Because I like David Mitchell.

What I will say though, is his Ann Frank Joke first went out at half past six on a Monday. It was repeated at 12 noon on a Sunday. Had it gone out on Mock the Week fine, but as early in the evening as that? The question which then has to be asked is, was there editorial justification for the joke going out so early?

I honestly think there wasn't. Breaking down the jokes mentioned so far;
- Jimmy Carr's I suspect would have gone down well with a lot of squaddies. Plus he told it at a gig people paid to go to. His audience know what to expect from him, therefore the joke was not offensive as far as I can tell.
- Frankie Boyle's could be construed as a back handed compliment (I know but hear me out). All of us will have known people who have gone out with people who are above them in the shag scale. Boyle's joke may have been personally nasty, but it has the virtue of echoing nasty things I and some of my friends have said about people in the past. In the context of Mock the Week that's editorially defensible.
- Mitchell's joke? Within the context of "The Unbelievable Truth" it's certainly something unbelievable. But why that joke? Was there nothing else which they could have joked about? Ann Frank was the innocent victim of a horrendous crime. Why joke about her? Why is the crucial question here, and I can't come up with a proper why.

OK I also think there's no reason to pillory Mitchell here. I personally think that joke was a misjudged one, but it's not the end of the world, and these things do happen.

I will say this though. The BBC needs to defend its output properly otherwise everytime a joke is made, this will happen. It needs to get sensible.

the funniest people on TV are the ones who are never (or hardly ever) cruel or offensive in their comedy.
Harry Hill and Bill Bailey spring to mind - they are almost 'anti-edgy' aren't they? So far from the 'edge' as to be standing on a different edge completely. But always, always incredibly funny.

Also I thought Ross Noble's performance on HIGNFY on Friday was excellent - his lack of engagement with current affairs was a joy to behold - he was just wonderfully strange and witty.

So - is there any need for 'edgy' comedy. Well probably, but I steer away from it, personally. The only exception I make is Bill Hicks who seemed to be fuelled by a genuine righteous anger, and was properly hilarious too. I don't see that authenticity in today's comedians. I see careerism, by and large.

There's no such thing as offensive or inoffensive comedy, just funny and unfunny.

The more edgy your material, or the more swearing you insist on inserting, the higher you raise the bar for yourself.

My immediate reaction to the David Mitchell joke was to laugh out loud, which in a sense backs up Jerry's point.

intelligent people have painted themselves into a corner. Where they have to justify frankly poor material like the Anne Frank joke. In order to justify his position David Mithcell finishes the piece by basically bringing in Hitler his intention presumably being "look who else was opposed to flippancy". He could have said it was a bad joke and apologised but because he's defending his position/livelihood that's not going to happen. I think the difference here to 70's is that nobody gave Frank Carson a weekly newspaper column to justify his behaviour in.

I find some of these comedians funny, but, and I generalise greatly, don’t they all have a huge sense of their own importance? The idea that they are somehow “challenging” and that comedy is a social force (for the good)? When mainly they are just tailoring gags to their various audiences to build a career– Frankie Boyle as much as Bernard Manning? And reflecting social changes rather than causing them.

There are probably many factors that go in to making someone a comedian, but I suspect that the fame and money are as important as a wish to make the world a better place. As to the social importance of comedy, I think Peter Cook got it right when he said he admired the German satire of the thirties, “which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler.”

Jerry Sadowitz's forthcoming tour will apparently be called "I Would Happily Punch Frankie Boyle In The Face"; enough said about Mr Boyle, probably.

...I don't give a damn about any of these whiney, hand-wringing explanations about 'edgy' being good 'because it's edgy' therefore of-the-moment, or some kind of brave new world or that 'pushing the envelope' is somehow good 'because it is'. Hitler trying to create a master race and killing off disabled kids was the 'pushing the envelope' of his world. To me it's no different: it's all an abuse of power, be it absolute power over life or the 'power' of having media time in columns/on TV to inflict cruelty and the 'power' of being seen to be immune from criticism because you're 'edgy' and therefore anyone who questions you is some reactionary old fogey from the Daily Mail-reading classes.

It would appear, sadly, to be a self-perpetuating industry-of-vindictiveness until enough people get it through to all these loathsome wastes of space and their deluded envelope-pushing-obsessed commissioning editors that the Emperors have, by and large, no clothes.

Nasty, sour bastards like Frankie Boyle and self-righteous near-unaccountable hedonist shites like Ross and his cronies will - I dearly hope - come to be seen in 20 years time as a weird, grotesque product of a particular era, in the same way as we now see the likes of Manning, the Black & White Minstrels et al.

I must say, if I heard tomorrow that Ross, Boyle, Carr etc had all fallen to their deaths off a high cliff they were all loitering near the edge of (because they're such 'edgy' guys) while back-slapping each other for their rib-tickling edginess, I would have a broad grin all over my face for days. I might even start believing there was a God again, and be impressed that He had turned out to be an Old Testament one.

But apart from that I've no strong feelings on the matter.

I'd just like to point out that the joke isn't even a David Mitchell creation. He just adapted a line that I heard quite a few years ago, which was '(insert item/person's name)...is about as useful as Anne Frank's drum kit.'

As for Bill Bailey (when he was in a duo called the Rubber Bishops in the late 80's), I remember him doing a song about the Yorkshire Ripper to the tune of 'If I Had A Hammer'. It was wrong, but very funny at 1am down the Comedy Store.

And 99% comedians will tell you that no subject is taboo in comedy.

what is fine with me as my opinion is no more valid than yours or anyone elses.Bernard Manning,chubby Brown,Jim Davidson etc I can't personally stand but as a man once said I will defend to the death their right to make pr!cks of themselves on stage.
If they are breaking race hate or other laws then they should be prosecuted but otherwise we should give them enough rope to hang themselves.
Also,there is a bit of a difference between the cases,as Manning,Davidson etc have a pretty much whole show built around racism not just the odd joke.
Jimmy Carr was made to appologise for saying about disabled soldiers that we would have a great para olympics team in 2012.We really have to be careful that with all the things out there in the world to really find offensive we don't waste our outrage on the undeserved.

Laugh if you like it, don't laugh if you don't.

Comedy is a matter of taste, always has been. It's just taking offence that has got bigger.

I would say that Mitchell's joke is a funny joke.

It's not condoning the Nazis, it's not laughing at people who were murdered by them.

It's a joke about the need to remain quiet when you're hiding.

That's it.

Nothing to do with Nazis, apart from the fact that - if they were after you, you'd better hide.

It's all very well remaining alert for insensitivity, but in this instance, I don't think the example is a good one.

Maybe something about 'not laughing at the events (perish the thought, I am a demonstrably nice person after all), just the comedy value inherent in desolate moorland'. That it? Nothing off limits, after all.

then Dougie? You said before that you weren't offended by Carr's paralympic remark but you are by the Anne Frank one. You seem to be putting your own personal taste up as a marker for what's allowed and what isn't. Why not just turn off if you are upset by the comedian in question?
Since when did we all become so damn delicate?

...in some way, so what is wrong with '(self)censorship' of some sort (if that's what you want to call it) in broadcasting? I'm getting the impression that the c-word is one that no one dare say, 'actually, I AM in favour of censorship to a degree...', because we're all such right-on types that it would seem monstrously medieval and po-faced. I don't believe it is.

People become unquestioning or too passive to do anything over time if something that offends the (I believe) innate human 'live and let live' sensibility becomes 'normalised' through endemic use - gladiatorial combats in the Roman Empire, big game hunting, the final solution, racist humour in the 70s, and now the kind of cruel, snidey, vilifying school-bully invective that gets called 'edgy' comedy. It's the banality of evil regenerated.

As a society we get what we tolerate - and if we tolerate this, who's to say your children won't be next? One reason I would never be responsible for bringing a child into the world - and I'm entirely serious here - is that it's becoming an increasingly cruel, vile, grotesque place and there is virtually nothing an individual can do about that. Why put someone else through that? To think you can make it otherwise is just the arrogance of hope.

I sense that the same inescapable realisation (and sadness and righteous but futile anger) subtley, and sometimes viscerally, underpins everything the TV scriptwriter David Renwick does - from One Foot In The Grave to Jonathan Creek to the series with the woman from Black Books (the name of whom, and the name of which, I've momentarily forgotten. Now there IS a comedy talent with something to say and targets worth hitting.

My father was one of the liberators of Bergen Belsen, and yet I found the Mitchell joke funny.
I was about 30m away when Peter Sutcliffe murdered his last victim Jacqui Hill, and found the joke song attributed to Bill Bailey distasteful. And I've always like Bill Bailey.
I also think the Rebecca Adlington joke is totally uncalled for, then again I don't watch Mock the Week.

Judging taste and humour is always going to be personal and we all draw the lines in different places. Things well away from the boundary are easy to judge - we are going to disagree about the close calls.

I was in the audience last night for As It Occurs To Me

and I have to say that Richard Herring pretty much says a lot of sensible things (in a funny and offensive way) about this topic and pretty much covers all the issues discussed in this thread.

It starts at 21 minutes in if people only want to hear that bit.

http://www.comedy.org.uk/podcasts/as_it_occurs_to_me/

...in terms of people walking out of his show was when me and my friends were able to relax and stretch out in the Free Trade Hall in Manchester in about 1992 when more than half the audience walked out after half time due to crude puerile gynaecological comedy. The comedian in question? Ben Elton. Thank you and Goodnight. The only musical equivalent I can think of is a free-jazz throat singer from Tuva in terms of walkout probably emptied the Purcell Rooms by the end of her third song. The "alternative" mantra of inclusiveness has fallen by the wayside if it was ever there in the first place.

...people (us) talking about comedy (what is or isn't funny/acceptable/justifiable ad infinitum) is no different to Frank Zappa 'dancing about architecture'.

I DO think that someone on a terrestrial broadcasting network funded by an entire society has a responsibility to say to those on their network, 'Right lads, here are the rules... and if you don't like it you can **** off to ITV (or BBC3) or get a broadsheet column and whinge on to people about why you think society might be better off with no rules whatsoever. Your choice.'

I don't, however, think there's much value in spending hours pondering and evaluating individual jokes by all our slightly different perspectives and worldviews and moral compasses.

Yes, there's value in doing that if the subject is this or that film/book/record and so forth - because sometimes fresh perspectives and more background info and the like can encourage us to give something another try or a fairer hearing. But with humour I really think it's necessarily a 'gut' thing with each individual - for all the analyses of Anne Frank, spoons, Nazis, gays and whatever else, it all comes down to whether each one of us think - within a couple of seconds of hearing it - a given joke by a given comedian was or wasn't funny. And - whatever the answer to that - whether it was or wasn't acceptable to us. Listening to a load of apologia about something we thought unfunny or offensive for ages after the event will NEVER prompt any of us - through force of argument - to suddenly burst out laughing and say 'Hurrah! I now see the Nazi/nastiness thing wasn't quite so bad as I thought - and now I can see it's funny!' If we missed the moment, we missed it.

Personally, I never watch Carr/Ross/Boyle/Brand etc - anything I've seen has been in passing, but it's exactly enough to know what they do and to know that it's not for me. So in conclusion, as several have said above, 'If you don't like it don't watch it.' And I don't.

....and it's invariably someone being offended on behalf of the group in question. As far as I can see it's usually not the group in question that does the complaining.

Time, distance and context. So can you make jokes about the war ? "MASH" ? Soldiers were doing that at the time - Spike Millgan et al. How about prisoner of war camps ? "It Ain't Half Hot Mum" ? Can you make jokes about the nazis ? "Allo Allo" anyone ?

Can you make jokes about prisons and prison life today ? Can you make jokes about men being sent to prison and effectively sentenced to homosexual rape ? Can you accept that this is what a prison sentence is and laugh at the joke and not do anything about the underlying fact. I'd venture that comedians do and people laugh at it regularly, and on prime time TV.

There will always be plenty of tasteless jokes, and they're usually in circulation pretty damn fast. Pricess Di jokes anyone ? There's a telling point in "The Aristocrats" where Gilbert Gottfried was doing a gig in front of an audience of comedians, and he made a joke about the World Trade center not long after 9/11 - the joke dies, "too soon" he says, so then launches into the Aristocrats joke (the filthiest joke in the world), one that all the audience knows and knows they can't use in public, and he makes a very clear point - careful with your self-censorship (among other things). Great film that one too.

Would anyone under 25 even know who Anne Frank was? I'd say the joke probably made a very loud whoosh sound for most viewers.

Anyway is this the time that Mr Mitchell's talents finally get spread so thin that this once solid (almost fleshy) fellow becomes see though? The BEEB in their wisdom have commissioned another panel show featuring DM.
The rest of the schedule doesn't look too bad but does the world need another panel show about the news?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2009/11_november/...

The difference is that the 'Anne Frank gag' is about the situation not the person (added bonus is the distance of time since WW2 - at the time of the Battle of Hastings, jokes about Harold getting something in his eye would not have led to much laughter from the English 'army'), but the Frankie Boyle comment about Rebecca Adlington was about the person not a situation. Thus Boyle was simply being rude and hurtful.
My rule is - I don't find 'comics' like Boyle & Herring amuse me even a teeny bit, so I avoid them. Works for me.

Would Boyle have made the comment in a social situation with Ms Adlington and her family? Of course not.

..I can't stand stand-up comics.

Like AA Gill says: 'Stand-up comics have the same relationship with humour as Lap Dancers have with sex'.

Everything's a blxxdy gag isn't it? I've been in the company of stand-ups & my god it was blxxdy awful - enough to make me gag boom-boom!! All trying to out-gag each other in that awful false cheery, forced matey male bonding bonhomie fashion yet get them on their own and what a casebook of miserable so & so's.

Obviously there are brilliant funny men, but since the comedic equivalent of punk rock with the 'Comedy Store' we've been inundated by a bunch of careerarist comics who have devoted themselves obsessively to becoming gag-meisters before they've developed a sense of humour. And the 'edgy' ones are the worst because they come on with that awful 'comedy is the new rock n' roll' line & to justify their shallow challenging of convention & pushing the envelope to justify their crappy 'gags'

A plague on them all - especially blxxdy 'mock the week' - what a bunch of smug, self satisfied lazy cynical gag-prats.

Definitely never censor, but accept that jokes don't float around and do their work without personal reactions to them.

That Anne Frank joke made me feel cold inside, and I have a very high threshold for edgy material. Why did it do so? Because it was the sort of joke that Anne Frank's guards in the camp would have told to get a guffaw in the mess hall. I simply couldn't disassociate myself from my memories of having been to her house, which was - for me - a profoundly moving experience.

Callousness has a self-serving purpose: to de-humanise the target and to separate the gag-teller and listeners from their inconvenient feelings. People who have gone over the edge of morality or who are working in extreme jobs will often do this, and that's a fact of life. I don't think David Mitchell or his audience were in either category, so the question we need to ask is what was the reason to tell a joke like that?

as the likes of 'rossy' and his media mafia chums would say 'here's the thing' : so-called alternative comedy was a reaction against the racist/sexist/homophobic stand up circuit of the 70s - yet here we are with a new breed of comic who are themselves reacting against the 'right on' attitudes of 80s and 90s comedians.

Stand up has become the default career option for a whole generation of university educated whoppers who grew up in the 'new lad' era and find themselves on 6digital and BBC2 panel shows. It's obvious that Gervais for example tells 'spaz' jokes because he knows it winds up the (mythical) 'liberal elite' Likewise Sacha Baron Cohen's comic creations were deliberately set up to provoke racist/homophobic reactions. Ali G to my eyes was obviously an 'asian' character pretending to be a black gangbanger (hence his 'what class is a Paki?' line).

Is a middle class jewish comedian allowed to portray an asian pretending to be black, or a generic east european, or an austrian gay man? Yes, because he's funny and puts himself on the line to portray the reality of our culture, not the sanitised version presented in the media. Gervais is often very funny too - his Hitler/Neitzsche routine for example isn't just a cheap 'holocaust' gag but a profound examination of how ideas can be twisted and manipulated to justify evil. Lenny Bruce would've approved as he would have approved of Bill Hicks and Doug Stanhope and Chris Morris and Chris Rock. The truth is always twisted by politicians and 'the establishment' (BBC and newspapers included) and it often takes comedians to communicate what many of us are thinking but daren't say atleast in public.

With all the recent media obsession with 'squaddy fetishism' it takes a brave person to register outrage at the war in afghanistan/iraq and the hypocrisy of economic wars being justified as battles against tyranny. Jimmy Carr's cracks have no underlying political intention, they're just cheap cracks. Hicks on the other hand was driven by an inner rage at the way the media and the politcal system engineered wars to keep rich people rich and the public misinformed. Where is our Hicks today?

This discussion on edgy comedy is interesting - I went to see Ricky Gervais live this week, on his current stand-up tour, and some of the material he was doing was fairly offensive and questionable. Now, that kind of thing isn't really to my taste, though I think a good comic can make a poor taste joke work if it's clever and well-constructed, and not simply an insult (such as the 'Mock the Week' stuff).

Anyway, he made the interesting observation that comics can get away with making outrageous statements because (and I'm paraphrasing here) we all know it's being done for comic effect, and the fact that he tells it - and we laugh at it - is okay because we both know it doesn't reflect our actual view. But here's the problem - you can make that judgement if you're a comic, but you can't say the same for your audience. Because although you might like to think they're all sensible, educated, liberal individuals, it's a dead cert that some aren't, and are missing the joke. It's like all those people who think Charlie Brooker is wonderful because he's angry and aggressive - in fact, one gets the impression he's actually quite insightful and fair-minded a lot of the time, and a world away from the angry caricature of his columns and TV shows.

Have not examined thread as closely as possible but think, surprisingly, no offering of long-standing Anne Frank (or Anne Frank-related) joke which could serve to show (a) slight lack of originality of D Mitchell remark and (b) more material on question of how distanced a joke should be (for some people) from its dark subject matter:

The actress Pia Zadora - sorry, something elemental prevents me from writing “actor” though, according to many critics, actress perhaps ought to be in inverted commas too – was appearing in a play about Anne Frank, in the title role. Qualifying more through her lack of height than her acting ability it was said she was not making much of a job of the part and the audience grew increaingly restive at what was clearly a crass piece of mis-casting. The point was reached in Act 3 where the Gestapo made a dramatic entrance stage right and as they did so a man at the rear of the audience suddenly stood and called out “She’s in the attic!”.

Now to those offended by the Mitchell joke, is the above less offensive or not and if it is less offensive is it because the reality of Anne Frank is slightly more distanced?

I can’t pass up the opportunity to mention an actual conversation I had when working in Germany. I was based in Munich and a colleague was telling me about her sister who had moved down from Dusseldorf because her daughter was asthmatic and the air in Bavaria was so much cleaner and beneficial. “So where in the Munich area is she living now?” I asked. The reply: “Oh, Dachau.” Couldn’t avoid a sense of macabre amusement (which I kept to myself). It used to be said that sarcasm was the lowest form of humour but for the British now perhaps it’s irony.

...but I think this bloke might have the last word on the subject -

in The Herald yesterday with Al Murray on this subject.

http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents/more-arts-entertainment-news/doe...

To my mind, he does some nice straw-manning, by talking about ‘censorship’. This particular part is very clever, I thought:

Stephen Fry says, in his usual witty, pithy way: ‘Oh dear I’ve offended you have I? F**k off. Too bad.’ And there is something to be said about that point of view. You can find me not funny, but amping it up to be outraged is having your cake and eating it.”

To use the ‘having your cake and eating it’ line against the audience showed an amazing brass neck, as this is exactly what all comedians of his ilk are making a very nice living out of right now.

And the use of the Stephen Fry quote was quite disingenuous. I’m sure Fry would have meant this in the Mary Whitehouse / Daily Mail context. I somehow doubt he’d be willing to look, for example, the parents of a disabled child in the eye and say ‘Oh dear I’ve offended you have I? F**k off. Too bad’.

But really, as with the ‘what first attracted you to the multi-millionaire Paul Daniels’ line, all we need to know about these people is this:

At this stage of his career, Murray can afford not to give a jot about the naysayers. In addition to his ongoing British tour, he is about to release the DVD of his triumphant gig earlier this year at London’s O2 Arena which was witnessed by 15,000 punters, many of whom waved their mini Union Jacks as the Pub Landlord strode on stage to call opening time on his latest assault on the French, the Germans, his front row and, most pertinently of all, broken Britain.

It’s not about censorship. It’s about them not wanting to feel bad about themselves.

I saw Stewart Lee last night. He's no stranger to controversy himself but he had a dig about Frankie Boyle and rape jokes'.

... you know you're spending too much time on this site when driving around the Borders (St Andrews Day weekend, free entry to medieval abbey ruins, yay), you suddenly think, "Oh hey, edgy comedy, I have a view..."

Sorry but Miranda (ibid) is awful ... and it's nothing to do with lack of edginess ... I thought back to Victoria Wood's Dinner Ladies sitcom (middle aged, female minimum wage earners - what could be less hip?) and i thought, "but the writing and performances were sterling, much better than that drivel Miranda" ... this may have been prompted by driving through a place called Clintmains which - in turn - prompted a memory of an explosive line from Dinner Ladies where a distraught mother came to the queue and shouted "Where's my Clint?" at the aproned masses ... (Clint was her son or something) ... with genuinely hilarious consequences ...

Also Outnumbered is bloody excellent although far from 'edgy' ...

So funny is not necessarily edgy ... and vice versa ... quality comes from writers and performers who can lead you places you didn't expect irrespective of swear words or rape jokes ... for example, Bill Bailey at his best can be symphonic without being offensive; Victoria Wood is a great writer and laconic performer; the memory of Eric saying "He'll never sell ice cream going that speed" still creases me up, ditto some of Peter Sellers' performances in the early Pink Panther movies; The League of Gentlemen was funny but fekkin scary at the same time; Vic and Bob still seem able to subvert their own medium in prime time although Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders mithered off into pointlessness quite quickly (ensemble pieces like Ab Fab and Vic of Dib notwithstanding) and...

er, well, i'm off to check if Top Gear has definitively jumped the shark; i fear it has