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Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

One of my school friends did PPE at Oxford (where else?). I don't like him or the world that he is in. It goes beyond 'sense of entitlement'.

The other 'OxBridge' university - Cambridge - also has something to offer public life. The 'Cambridge Footlights':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Footlights

So every funny comedian on the BBC graduated from Cambridge going via this am-dram society.

You have to choose one's parents quite carefully. Mine were not pushing me to do PPE at Oxford, my friend's parent's knew exactly what they were doing, they had their son lined up for an upper middle class wealthy life from the start.

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That is really eye-opening. You look at the list of people who came and went through Footlights, and it's like reading a Who's Who of modern British comedy.

On one hand, clearly Cambridge is doing something right, since British comedy has been the world's gold standard for decades. But on the other hand you can't help but wonder how much latent national talent went untapped, simply because the people holding it weren't "Oxbridge material."

I'm not sure that's as true as it used to be. A lot of great modern British comedians weren't members (though may have been Oxbridge): Chris Morris, Stewart Lee, Charlie Brooker, Armando Iannucci, Bill Bailey, Simon Pegg, Steve Coogan, Sacha Baron Cohen, Ricky Gervais. There is an argument that Footlights continues to dominate a particular strain of "awkward Englishness" style comedy, i.e. Fry & Webb, Hugh Laurie, and to a lesser extent Richard Ayoade. But I don't see these as the defining characters of British comedy at the moment.

I don't know if it's as true or not now, but the entertainers have become much posher recently: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/12170357/...

When actors and pop stars come from such elevated heights, I always get the impression that they are slick and professional - but much blander. For instance, the music of the 60s and 70s - when classes were mixing more - had more dynamism.

Pop used to be one of the few ways creative and intelligent working class kids could become millionaires.

> clearly Cambridge is doing something right

I suspect one factor (there are probably many, not least the network effects of recommendation) is the number of large scale events with numerous student performers (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Ball ).

I'm currently reading John Cleese's autobiography (So Anyway...), which talks a lot about how he and Graham Chapman - two of the members of Monty Python - got their start in comedy in the Footlights at Cambridge. (Cleese was preparing for a career in law and Chapman was going into medicine.)

If you're in Cambridge at Christmastime, the Footlights Panto is not to be missed - but book very early.

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