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.

A common joke that does the round at medical school is: "What's the difference between God and a medical student?" Answer: "God doesn't think he is a medical student!". In many ways, this sketch reminds me of this joke although here Harry and Paul are capturing godlike properties of consultants along with their strange educated upper middle class foibles which is only really found inside the English class system.

The works of Monty Python are a bit like marmite. You either hate them or love them. I personally enjoy some of the Python movies and one of my favourites was Monty Python and the Holy Grail. There are so many classic scenes from this movie but one of my favourites is when king Arthur receives a lecture on modern constitutional democracy. Probably a lesson that our current PM contenders Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak would do well to learn.

So staying with the two Ronnies for another week this sketch seems strangely appropriate given death is on everyone's mind given the sad passing of the Queen. This sketch also has quite a dark tinge to it now given the dreadful reality of one of Britain's most infamous mass murderers Harold Shipman. It is ironic to think when this sketch was made, he had probably already started murdering the many victims. As I said in my introduction to this collection, we live in a dark world where comedy gives us a powerful respite from the reality of our present existence.

This particular Youtube clip is not embedable so you can only watch it directly on Youtube by clicking here

Well since it is the Christmas period, and as we begin 2023, I thought I would end of the Christmas season with the Morecambe and Wise Christmas show 1978. As a child the highlight of Christmas day was my parents putting on the TV at around 7 pm to watch the Morecambe and Wise Christmas special. Looking at it again all these years later, much of the humour is now very dated (although there are still some clever bits that will make you laugh) which raises the interesting idea of how even our comical taste is culturally influenced.

In many ways this is because the world has changed so completely since the 1970s and perhaps this is one of the most disorientating thing about living in the 21^st century. I often wonder if we could have performed an experiment in the 1970s, where we took humour from the 1930s and replayed it, whether it would look as dated as these sketches do now? I suspect not.

Happy new year!

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.