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Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

The is one thing I really appreciate about Just For Laughs Gags. No words or languages to understand, just silly harmless situations and pranks. AFAICT it's mostly done somewhere in French Canada, but there's a few from Singapore I believe.

Here's an example I remember that made me laugh, a good example - it's all about facial expressions and reactions rather than words -

https://youtu.be/2Zs6mi5bvic

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Yup they do a great job. I guess human emotions are the same across the board. I think the reactions...of confusion, surprise, anger, fear etc seems to be what gets the laugh. The more unexpected it is the bigger the laugh. For me atleast.

Another interesting thing about pranks is how quickly the brain resets from excited state back to normal as soon as some one says 'there's the camera'. It should probably be used more to stop wars and stuff.

Good points. I think comedy boils down to absurdity, personally. So seeing absurd situations makes people act and feel weird until they realize it's only for show and they're not going crazy.

It also explains why people have different tastes. Some people don't like British comedy because their absurdity may be different than an American's. For example a lot I watched in the 90s was a man dressed as a woman or some such, which may not be absurd to us today.

I've always liked how harmless their pranks are. When the recipient laughs along, you know you have a good prank.

Benny Hill, similarly.

Not so sure about Benny Hill. As an American, I couldn't see what the Brits found so funny about him. The keystone cop sequences of naked women chasing him, etc. and the silly situations he concocted (which required spoken language). Whereas Mr. Bean was truly universal situations and effectively no spoken words.

Not sure if you'll find many Brits under the age of 60 trying to defend Benny Hill or make a case for his comedy. I'm in my 40s and I don't remember a time when he wasn't seen as naff, and from some distant time before comedy got clever...

Sad fact: Benny Hill died penniless in a shabby council flat, his body wasn't found until two weeks after he died. Naff or otherwise, no-one should go like that. :(

According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_Hill, he died alone, which is indeed terribly sad. (But not penniless, far from it.)

To appreciate Benny Hill, you have to recognize both time and space. It's not 1965 anymore.

However… put the music on and I expect to see a fiasco play out.

There were amazing scenes just the other day when someone blasted Yakety Sax outside of Parliament as the government was collapsing. Made for some wonderful TV - and apparently was due to a suggestion by Hugh Grant, no less.

https://mobile.twitter.com/nickfthilton/status/1544992559692...

I was going to say something snarky about Hugh Grant and Pierce Brosnan and other charming Englishmen in suits getting to embrace the full national experience with Benny Hill, except evidently Pierce Brosnan is actually from Ireland. Today I learned.

Yakety Sax[1] :) but everybody knows it as the Benny Hill theme song.

Benny Hill helped popularize it but it was there earlier, and itself inspired by Yakety Yak (which is a name of Ubuntu release 16.10 - now we're full circle :))

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakety_Sax

I would expect a similar result if someone had a record of the "The Price Is Right" theme music.

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