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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Here's a popular culture take on the same theme. Jokes and sketch comedy.

"The three Yorkshiremen" monty python sketch. It's actually a sketch that some of the pythons did for another comedy sketch show some years before. As far as I know it's the only one they carried forward.

My parents could recite a 1940s radio comedy sketch about the phonetic alphabet and cockney rhyming slang which would probably make no sense to most people today, they'd carried it with them into the 70s and 80s.

An awful lot of contemporary humour simply fades away and maybe one or two key moment carries on.

Future generations may know Chaplin solely from a clip of modern times in the machine. Or know Lucille Ball treading grapes.

"But, tell that to the youth of today, they won't believe you"

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Chaplin and Keaton (among others, like Lloyd) are still hilarious and their films technically impressive and full of movie-magic spectacle. I’ve watched a fair amount (certainly a ton more than most people) of silent film and IMO the comics are by far the most-accessible of the bunch to a modern audience, requiring minimal “education” on how to understand, appreciate, enjoy, or “read” them. They’re the only ones I’d unreservedly recommend to just about anyone who likes movies.

Very few dramatic silents are even close to as accessible—I’d say the ones that age second-best are those that lean art-film, but those are hindered by that entire genre being obscure and difficult to enjoy for most people, so while they may not be much more challenging to enjoy than a talkie art film and might deliver just as much quality as most of those can, that’s a fairly different bar to clear than enjoying a comedy or ordinary drama.

The comedies do seem to be surviving better, too, even if not as well as they deserve. The dramas survive in the public consciousness as a very-small number of well-known scenes or images (the rocket-in-the-moon’s-eye, the android from Metropolis) but reference most anything else from even those films, let alone other very-well-regarded but barely-watched-today movies, and nobody but a few film nerds will notice.

Some comedy works have endured, like Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome (though it is helped by its huge influence on To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis).

I’m in my 40s and have no idea what either of those things are.

Endured how? No one knows what these are.

> My parents could recite a 1940s radio comedy sketch about the phonetic alphabet and cockney rhyming slang

Was that the "'Ay for 'Orses" thing? I still know most of it, and never knew where it came from

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

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