Those jokes about Belgium belong in the knackers yard, as does Have I Got News For You. Our well payed entertainers and their writers should be able to do a lot better.
Having said that, jokes about other nationalities can be funny. My wife is Dutch - the Belgians and the Dutch make stereotypical jokes about each other. They can be funny or they can be as awful as the one you described.

I liked Ken Wilson's article on this topic:

http://kenwilsonelt.wordpress.com/2009/11/18/my-next-blog-post-10-reason...

and... oh, I see. Sorry.

First, it's the name - plucked from the same toffee jar as "bilge" and "bulge". (Some names just lend themselves more than others to comedy. Imagine Monty Python's parrot as a "Swedish blue" - not as funny, is it?)

Second, it's Belgium's status as a me-too country - a fate it shares with Ireland, Austria, Portugal and Canada, among others, resulting in an image that is "just like France, Britain, Germany, Spain or America, but more crap." This is exacerbated by its - to outsiders - apparent inability to decide which specific neighbour's language it wants to speak. It's a halfway house, a Franco-Dutch buffer zone, widely perceived as lacking any cultural substance of its own. (And it doesn't help for the name of its capital city to have become synonymous with the greyest and least streamlined of faceless bureaucracies.)

Third, it's the lie of the land and monuments. Belgium drew the short straw when all the azure Aegean coastlines, Matterhorns and Alhambras were handed out. A rust-eaten sculpture of a big molecule and a garden ornament of a little lad having a slash just don't cut it somehow, do they?

with the same formula and the same gags. The Bruce Forsyth episode was the pits. The best bits have been when Paul Merton has made a daft remark, the audience has cheered and then Merton rounds on them for laughing at something daft - which is beginning to sum up the whole shebang.

... in Glasgow called Caledonia Books. For about a decade they had a book on the shelf entitled "The Sorrows Of Belgium" by Hugo Claus.

I got quite obsessed by this. Not enough to actually buy and read it but it lived in my mind. What kind of person would ever read a book called The Sorrows Of Belgium? Even a Belgian filled with sorrow would think twice surely? Everytime I visited this shop I would check it was there and I swear it sat on that shelf for a decade.

Sadly I visited the shop about four weeks ago and there was no sign of The Sorrows Of Belgium. Either someone bought the thing finally or the owners chucked it out, but I will confess to a vague sadness that it wasn't there.

...so that when I am wandering through the astounding Beginhof in Leuven, or sat outside a café listening to the Carillon in Ghent's main square with a fantastic Trappist beer, it'll be nice and quiet.

This is the country whose slim contribution to rock and roll includes the legendary Plastic Bertrand

... that it might look like I was slagging off Jacques Brel up there ^^^^. Let me make it clear that I think he's brilliant.

*slopes off vowing to be a bit clearer in the future...*

the Ghent bell tower, Trappist beer, Jacques Brel, the saxophone, gob-smacking architectural skylines, Plastic Bertrand, the Ardennes, Magritte, Captain Haddock, rust-free big molecules and a fetching garden ornament having a slash, what have the Belgians ever done for us?

They sing in Dutch & French and did the most moving version of Brel's "Marieke" I've ever heard. Couldn't find it on YouTube so have this instead.

of HIGNFY was very hit and miss. The Prescott one was really shooting apples in a barrel. The show only works if there is a genuine spark of spontaneity about it but that requires the right kind of host and neither Prescott nor Brucie qualify so, yes, lazy programming that allowed the format to suffer for the sake of egos. Martin Clunes presenting was a good episode because he was able to switch between presenter and participant whereas those presenters who are glued to the auto-cue rely on telegraphing where the laughs are rather than allowing the humour to materialise from the subject matter or the banter. A good presenter knows when to interject and when to shut up. A good presenter also needs to be able coax Merton as Hislop will always have something to say that is funny from the news story-lines whereas Merton has something funny to say from the stuff between the lines. If Merton's interest isn't piqued the show suffers.

I know the relative merits of panel-shows has been debated elsewhere, but HIGNFY looks knackered to me. The object of satire is surely for those who have little or no power to take the piss out of those in a lofty position of authority, but that idea buggered off years ago.

It's a long way from Beyond The Fringe; very well-paid TV stars mocking anyone and everyone isn't satire. I once heard David Mitchell describe himself as a satirist - no, you just take the piss out of everything. Surely there's a difference.

Maybe a section of Prime Minister's Questions should be devoted to laughing at how Paul Merton hasn't said anything of wit in a decade, or how Private Eye is mostly redundant in an age of media saturation.

I was making about media saturation is that, inherent in modern politics, there's a sense of it being almost beyond satire. As most people's default position is that of cynicism towards politicians and politics in general, it's hard to satirise something that already seems to have retired its will to power.

I used to read Private Eye and, yes, I agree that some of the articles were great. However, I found it becoming increasingly hollow in its echoing of what most people were already thinking. We're all in on the joke now, so a lot of it's stopped being funny ( However, I'd still defend it over, as you say, genuine investigative articles).

When Beyond the Fringe satirised politics, it was effective directly because it was running against the grain of the mainstream opinion of politicians. Is satire meant to be cuddly and mainstream? How can you satirise the mainstream if you yourself are innately mainstream and are on BBC1 primetime?

Mainstream media is narrow in the sense that the same smug faces (Mitchell, Merton, etc.) keep appearing, in order to reiterate what most of us already comprehend; their points are devoid of nuance or reasoned debate.

Django Reinhardt

We gave up several weeks ago, due the insufferable oiky twattishness that seems to have overcome Hislop recently, and the bored cash-for-zaniness going-through-the-motions attitude of the otherwise wonderful Mr. Merton.

Hisplop seems to have grown into a boorish little Tory twat in the last 12 months; he may have been one before, but he kept it in check. His gloating glee over GB's removal from Number 10 has however, been too much for his self control, and now his gurning peevishness makes me want to smack him one.

I've been there more times than anywhere outside the UK. There's an understated class about the people and places.

Here's Tom Robinson, Steve Knightly and Martyn Joseph singing the only song I think in existence about Belgium.

Going to stay with friends. Can't wait. Wonderful place.

Two years ago on a family holiday in China my then 9 year old daughter engaged in conversation with a Chinese boy of a similar age in a cafe in Yangshuo near Guilin. I think he wanted to practise his English which was actually very good. Seems he came from a wealthy family who could afford private tutoring. I was sitting at the table listening to their chatter and, as implausible as it now seems, the subject of Belgium came into the conversation. Ever the smartarse, I asked them both if they could name a famous person who came from Belgium. My daughter was blank but the little Chinese boy said 'I can - Tin Tin'
I was seriously impressed with both his knowledge and the migration of popular culture.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Tall-Man-Low-Land-Belgians/dp/0349112061/ref=sr_...

Really enjoyed reading this book, don't remember it being particularly xenophobic, however I left it on the train in around 2001 so unable to check.

Any country practical enough to allow the king to abdicate for 24 hours is ok with me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baudouin_of_Belgium

(to deliberately misread the title of the original post) was surely Georges Simenon. Author of over 200 novels and many other books, and a keen admirer of les femmes, I believe.

called 'Tall Man In A Low Land' .......... Mostly a long essay in praise of Belgium and very enjoyable. Has Belgian-bashing become fashionable because it's no longer considered de rigeur to poke fun at the frogs?

and I've been over there twice to see two of the more musical among them perform.
I really like the place, the people are friendly, the architecture is great, the beer's outstanding and I never went hungry.
I'm on a mailing list for one of the venues in Leuven, they keep me up to date with releases and gigs but tagged onto the bottom of today's missive was the following:

random facts

Food & Drinks in Belgium

# There are over 800 kinds of beers made in Belgium.
# Belgians consume in average 150 liters of beer per person per year.
# The world's first beer academy opened in Herk-de-Stad, in the Belgian province of Limburg, in 1999.
# Jean Neuhaus invented the pralines chocolate in Brussels in 1912.
# Belgium produces 220,000 tonnes of chocolate per year. This amounts to 22 kg of chocolate per inhabitant annually, i.e. 61 grammes per day in average.
# The world's biggest chocolate selling point is Brussels National Airport.
# Belgians claim to have invented chips (French fries), and indeed about all towns and villages have their own friterie/frituur (chips seller).
# There are 3 main sorts of Belgian waffles : Liege waffles (the most common), Brussels waffles (bigger, lighter, rectangular, and eaten with toppings such as strawberries or ice cream), and galettes (thinner, softer, and typically eaten for breakfast, sometimes with jam - nothing to do with French galettes from Little Brittany, which are a kind of pancake).
# Belgium is renowned for its bakeries. Local specialities include cramique (bread cooked with egg yolks and raisins), cougnou (a speciality from Wallonia eaten mostly in winter), gozettes (turnovers) and tarts. The most typical tarts are cherry tart, plum tart, apple tart, sugar tart, and especially rice tart (originally from Verviers, near Liege).
# Belgium has one of the lowest proportion of McDonald's restaurants per inhabitant in the developed world, with only 0.062 per 10,000 people, or 7x less than the USA, 4x less than Japan, and twice less than France or Germany.
# The Foire de Libramont is the largest agricultural, forestry and agri-food fair in Europe.

seemed appropriate to pass it on

I can tell you a thing or two about this kind of stuff.

Firstly, national newspapers think nothing of writing something like "fush and chups" in a headline referring to the NZ accent, but if they wrote "Chinese man allested for shoprifting" they'd be (rightly) crucified and hauled up before the courts under the racial vilification laws.

Secondly, Australians think it's HILARIOUS to make remarks about our supposed propensity for rooting sheep, thinking that we've never actually heard one of these so called "jokes" before.

Mind you, when I first arrived in this country nearly 30 years ago, I heard this one which still gets a laugh.

Q. How do you spot the Kiwi in a shoe shop?
A. He's the one with the hard-on next to the ugg boots.

St Peter sees God hard at work and asks him what he's doing.
"Building a new country, Pete. It will be 75% surrounded by water, whereupon the natives will reap the bounty of the sea. It will have arable lands, lush countryside and rolling verdant hills. They will have a plant called barley from which they will distill a golden alcoholic beverage, which will forever bear their name. They will be a nation of inventors and visionaries who will make their mark in history. Finally, they will also be a fierce fighting nation, that will never ever be conquered by any invading enemy... the only country in this World that will have this claim. I am calling it Scotland".
Ah, sez St Peter, "Don't you think you are spoiling them somewhat?"
"No", sez God, "Wait till you see who I am giving them as neighbours".