Month: October 2018

Best Comedy TV (Part 7)

Entertainment

The Young Ones (UK)

Not many people in the U.S. saw this anarchic comedy, I suspect, and theirs is the loss.  Headed by the incomparable Rik Mayall, the ensemble cast of misfits and social failures living in a boarding house somewhere in one of the seedier parts of London managed to savage not only the house itself, but just about every social institution as well.  (The house, despite being partially — and once, completely — destroyed each week, somehow managed to rejuvenate itself by the following episode, much as South Park‘s Kenny was killed each episode and came back to life ditto.)

Trying to explain the plot of The Young Ones in a few lines is akin to doing the same for James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake :  quite impossible, and something I’m sure the late Rik Mayall, one of the principal writers, would have enjoyed to see me try.  But the way the all-male cast played off each other was incredible — the loutish thug Vyvyan, the dreamy hippie Neil, the suave gangster Mike and the hapless homosexual Rick took turns in sabotaging each other’s plans, insulting and /or assaulting each other and doing much worse to the outside world.  Whatever they did, I would cry with astonished laughter pretty much all the way through each episode, before rewinding the VHS tape (yes, that again) to re-watch the show in amazement.

To give you the smallest hint of the insanity, let me just list a few of the bit-part actors who appeared in The Young Ones — and the actors of the time would fight each other to be invited onto the show, such was its cachet.  And the names of some of the guest characters will only hint at the barely-concealed insanity:

Alexei Sayle (the Balowski Family)
Jim Barclay (Policeman in Comic Strip)
Robbie Coltrane (Bouncer)
Ruth Burnett (Goldilocks)
Gareth Hale (Gravedigger)
Dawn French (Easter Bunny)
David Rappaport (Ftumch)
Jennifer Saunders (Helen Mucus)
Alan Freeman (God)
Jonathan Caplan (Knight of the Square Table)
Stephen Fry (Lord Snot)
Hugh Laurie (Lord Monty)
Tony Robinson (Dr. Not the Nine O’Clock News)
Emma Thompson (Miss Money-Sterling)
Damaris Hayman (Woman Pushing Corpse)
…and so on.

There were only twelve episodes of The Young Ones.

There was no regular female part on the show (which kind of added to the fun), so I’m going to feature the ever-silly Dawn French, who appeared in three episodes:

Friday Night Movie

Friday Feature, Movies

I’ve known about Katie Hopkins for many years now, but I was astonished to learn that few people outside the U.K. have any idea who she is.  Whatever you think of her, nobody can deny her courage and guts, and her willingness to say what’s right regardless of whether it’s popular.

Time to rectify all that, so get a cup of coffee or an alcoholic drink or two of your choice, and settle in as she beseeches the U.S. not to become like the U.K.

I have to tell you all, she makes me ashamed that I’ve not been more active and more vocal;  so starting next week you may see a lot more of the Old Kim — more angry, more vocal and more… well, more like the guy who helped start the Nation Of Riflemen and National Ammo Day.

There will be more harsh commentary, more invective, and a LOT more guns.  You have been warned.

Universitas Delenda Est

Seen On Campus, Two-Minute Hate

(I am comfortable using a paraphrased Latin expression for the title of this post, because most of the maggots at whom my ire is aimed are probably illiterate in the Classics and would understand neither the language nor the context of its origin.)

Victor Davis Hanson has written often (and most recently, here) about the death of Western Civilization, but in truth, the death blows are not actually being delivered by the Democrats, but by their philosophical supporters in academia.

Spoiler:  Western Civilization is a load of old racist rubbish, and shouldn’t be taught in today’s tertiary education systems.

From the Renaissance until the 1960s, the humanities, derived from the expression ‘studia humanitatis’ or the study of humanity, made it their purpose to make sense of and understand the world through the great traditions of art, culture and philosophy. There appeared in the 1970s and 1980s however, a range of ‘new humanities’ subjects which rejected this tradition. The new humanities were underpinned by a range of radical post-structuralism and post-modernist theories which had been conjured up in the previous decade by a predominantly French group of philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, as well as the psychiatrist, Jacques Lacan.
The new humanities maintain that for the last 500 years, Western Civilisation has got it wrong when it comes to knowledge, truth and science. These fields tend to claim that both knowledge and truth are not absolute, but are relative. For example, there is no objective truth and truth is dependent on who is speaking it and in what context. Insofar as science is concerned, they claim that scientific theories don’t really provide us with what we could call knowledge but are actually “invented” rather than discovered.
History as a discipline best exemplifies the influence of the postmodernists and their ilk on the humanities. Many historians have enthusiastically embraced the idea that truth is no longer within the historian’s grasp and that it’s impossible to use history to add to knowledge about humankind. This is the kind of thing which would normally signal the death knell for any discipline, but historians have risen from the ashes and have forged for themselves a new purpose—the attainment of social justice.
This is not social justice in the Enlightenment sense, which meant equality before the law and equal rights, but social justice in the activist sense, where the ultimate goal is to achieve perfect equality by destroying ‘oppressive’ institutions and rearranging society. The historians’ new role is to tell the inequality narrative of the oppressed and the oppressor through the lens of class, gender, and race.

Here’s my “modern” take on their attitude:

MFCS Commies… the sooner their whole rotten edifice falls over like the statue of Ozymandias, the better.  (They’re not going to get that reference either, the bolshie bastards.)

I should also point out that the university system per se was a creation of medieval European society (100% White people) and therefore as the university has its roots in racism, academia should probably be abolished in its entirety — just to be logically consistent.  However, logic is also inherently racist, it being an outcome of classical Greek thought, and we all know what racists the Greeks were (“Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes”  was the Turks’ Trojans’ opinion of the Greeks, although the actual expression was coined by a Dead White Man — Vergil — so that should probably be discounted as well).

I could do this all day.  But frankly, I’d rather pay a visit to a liberal arts faculty meeting at an Ivy League university.  Carrying a flame-thrower.  (What the hell:  none of them would be armed, right?)

And in the final irony:  the flamethrower was also an invention of White Europeans.

Actually, No

Culture

From some SJW / Millennial ingenue named Hannah Yasharoff:

National Lampoon’s raunchy frat house comedy “Animal House,” which celebrates its 40th anniversary Saturday, is widely regarded as an all-time great movie.  But four decades later, it feels less like a comedy classic and more like a toxic showcase of racism, homophobia and jokes about sexual assault.

As the title of this post suggests, Animal House actually feels more and more (not less) like a comedy classic precisely because it does make fun of racism and jokes about sexual assault*.  (Remember that Dean Wormer’s the mayor’s 13-year-old daughter is the one who comes to the toga party and gets pass-out drunk — and then much later, only after she finally has sex with Larry Kroger, does she shockingly admit her true age.  That’s what was so goddamn funny, you pearl-clutching asswipe.)

Animal House aimed at so many sacred cows it’s difficult to know where to start.  Now that the Left has created its own sacred cows, however, they’ve decreed somehow that while it’s perfectly okay to make fun of (say) religion or patriotism, heaven forbid that anyone make fun of (say) transgenderism (despite the latter’s self-identified social deviancy).

And duh!  National Lampoon’s entire raison d’être was toxic comedy in that they skewered and made fun of everything.  (The word “lampoon” right up there in the title should be sufficient warning, but clearly our SJW children’s liberal education never got that far in the lexicon.)

Good grief.  I need a gin & tonic.  Oh wait:  my love of booze would make me future SCOTUS Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s spiritual [sic] sidekick.

Excellent.

*I don’t recall any homophobic jokes in Animal House, but I could be wrong.