So working through the comedians in the comedy picture spread above, Rowen Atkinson's famous comedy creation Mr Bean always brings a laugh to most people. Apparently Bean is popular even without translation in other languages because his humour is so visual. The set of sketches in this video are well worth watching if your day needs a lift with some light slap stick comedy. I particularly enjoy when Bean goes to the theatre to watch a horror movie with his long-suffering girlfriend.

One of the great things about Monty Python was they often captured the strange foibles of our humanity by writing them large in their brilliant comedy movies. "Life Of Brian" was no exception. While this movie was controversial at the time, because a substantial number of people saw it as antichristian, the movie was full of little titbits of humour that mocks the way we all sometimes behave as fallen humans. I particularly enjoy this little sketch as it reminds me of an unhelpful habit, which often seems to plague the more left wing among us, of splitting off from one another. The most painful example of this, at the time of writing this post, is the MP Dianne Abbott publicly announcing that she thinks Keir Starmer (the current leader of the UK labour party as of May 2022) should resign if it is found that his takeout dinner with Hartlepool campaigners broke the law in relation to the lockdown rules that were place in the UK at the time the takeout occurred (April 2021). While I guess her comments are technically fair, given the constant infighting in the labour party between the more left and central wings of the party, it does often feel as though both factions of the party would rather the Tories were in power than the labour party of which they are a part if it is the wrong faction of the party.

So last week I shared a comedy video which was a parody of de Feffel's resignation speech. This week we of course now must be subject to the spectacle of those who supported Johnson's car crash vying to replace him. Given that Johnson created a strong evolutionary selection pressure to reward those who were least likely to present any threat to his leadership into cabinet positions, the choice the country has, in relation to the field of possible Tory replacements, is (as the LBC radio presenter James O'Brien stated) a bit like trying to chose a portaloo toilet at the Glastonbury festival.

Thankfully, probably the worst three in Johnson's cabinet of infamy had enough sense not to run and this of course included Nadine Dorries the minister for culture. Sadly over her tenure, Nadine has sadly demonstrated why she would never, in a million years, get a cabinet position under any other Prime Minister who had even a modicum of public duty in his body. Yet for comical effect, the comedian Sooz Kemper imagines what it would be like if Nadine had decided to run to replace Johnson as PM and what her campaign launch speech might have looked and sounded like. Enjoy.

So here is my crazy take on the British as an Aussie immigrant, hahem, I mean expat living in England. This is my hypothesis that aims to explain everything British. The population is dominated by four phenotypes:

1. The Innovator
2. The Gossip
3. The Bad Manager
4. The Comedian

The innovators are incredible. The level of British genius at the top never ceases to amaze me and explains how the Brits were able to change the world through science and technology. A few favourites of mine are Sanger, Newton, Turing and Penrose. The gossips are those who either read the Daily Mail and take it seriously or write rags like the Daily Mail. They are important at making sure the manager phenotypes retain power.

The Bad managers are those that do real damage to Britain and sadly they don't just occupy councils, parliament and the lords, but they occupy pretty much every large business and organisation in Britain from the NHS to the Universities to the middle management of many MSEs and multinationals in the UK. I could write volumes on this lot but if you live in the UK, you only have to experience the omnishambles of the current Tory party to know what I mean. Yet I will point out two subtle symptoms of this group that some may have missed. If you were an innovator trying to write a three year research grant, the compulsory inclusion of a detailed 3 year Gantt chart, along with building some artificially large research consortium, are symptoms that the manager phenotypes have got control of your discipline.

The second characteristic is excessive accounting based on them projecting their own dishonesty onto the rest of the population. Yes we must make them spend hours filling in detailed financial reports on their grant expenditure every few months because, if we had that money, of course we would syphon it off for our own personal use. Braverman is an ugly specimen of this trait when she talks about cracking down on those at the bottom cheating the tax payer by claiming universal credit while she puts over £100k through on MP expenses.

And now we come to most interesting phenotype of all: the comedians. Britain produces by far the best comedians in the world and it is in times of deep political crisis that their work goes into overdrive. What the Managers don't realise is they owe as much to the comedian phenotype as they do to the gossip class because British comedy gives the suffering populous a safety valve to dissipate their anger and rage. Without the comedy phenotype, I think the Brits would be more like the French with much more violent protest to the current shitshow of manager phenotypes that have infested the Tory party. If you have read this far then you deserve a lovely taste of the British humour that is being generated at this bleak time in British politics.

This compilation of sketches parodies certain modern work environments where everyone competes for patronage from the alpha male that occupies some senior position in their company. As with so many workplaces, there is always the poor Declan who never can find a path into the in crowd no matter what juicy information titbit he brings his boss.

Armstrong and Miller in their comedy series often ran the same sketches for several weeks in a row developing the theme each time as this compilation demonstrates. However, this series of sketches has quite an amusing punchline to it which is the subject of next week's comedy post

So last week I posted a compilation of sketches by Armstrong and Miller which captured the sometimes strange dynamics that occur in "high powered" workplaces full of alpha male (and sometimes female) middle managers and their underlings all vying for patronage from their boss. The Armstrong and Miller show often ran the same sketch each week developing it little by little each time. If you want to see how the striding man character developed during their comedy series then look at last week's post

The sketch below is the final instalment of the Striding Man and I guess the moral of the story is no matter how successful you are inside your workplace, there is always a chance it could all come crashing down in a moment. I guess this even applies to CEOs who can find themselves fired by their boards. Having said that, I think most CEOs know that even if they get fired they will walk away with a gigantic severance payment and into another CEO role in another large company such is the old boys revolving network that seems to exist at that level.

One of my favourite shows on TV in the 80s was Alas Smith and Jones. Thankfully I also had the pleasure of seeing them in concert when they toured Australia. This sketch goes all the way back to when the Channel Tunnel was under construction and is a classic dig at two particular weaknesses in English culture: 1) poor upper management and 2) terrible workmanship. Sadly if you spend any time living in the UK you will experience both. While there are great trades people in the UK they are sadly not in the majority. Rather a sizeable number are absolute cowboys who do terrible work if they ever complete it in the first place.

Likewise the standard of British management in my experience can also be pretty poor. I have now worked in universities and for both small and large companies and for some mysterious reason the more dysfunctional and incompetent a person is the more likely it seems that they will end up rising to a very senior position. I guess this phenomenon is so common that academics have even tried to give it a name. The Peter Principle was first proposed in 1969 in a semi-satirical book by Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull and was actually based on Peter's research into the operations of hierarchical organizations. Yet I think the modified version of this principle, first proposed by the author of the Dilbert cartoons (Scott Adams) is even closer to the truth. The Peter principle states that individuals in an organisation are promoted to the point where they reach a level of incompetence that prevents them from being promoted further while the Dilbert principle goes one step further stating that individuals are promoted because of their incompetence.