In celebration of Benny Hill

For those of you not old enough to remember, Benny Hill was an incredibly popular English TV comedian with his own eponymous show which ran from the 1960s and into the late 80s before his brand of comedy became unfashionable and the show was cancelled. When I say it became unfashionable, it was not unfashionable with his audience and was still one of the most watched shows on British TV – and American. In fact, it is still broadcast and very popular in the United States, Spain, Italy and many South American countries. It became unfashionable with those who are arrogant enough to dictate to others what they believe is tasteful. It is a modern form of puritanism and assumes an ignorance and stupidity in those whom they would dictate to.

Much of Benny Hill’s comedy was crude but that can be said of a great deal of comedy, apart, of course, from Laurel & Hardy. Am impure thought, I am sure, never entered the head of Stan and Ollie’s characters. Think of the Marx Brothers, with Groucho’s leering, Harpo chasing after screaming chamber-maids, and Chico with a woman locked in a cupboard. Chaplin too (a fan of Benny Hill), in real life and in his films, had a preference for what would now be considered suspiciously young girls/women. In England, the Carry On films had comedy far cruder than anything Benny Hill portrayed, and the history of such humour is long in Britain. Take one of Max Miller’s jokes for instance:

‘I went on holiday to the mountains. I was walking across a very narrow path when I saw this beautiful young women coming towards me. Well… I didn’t know whether to block her passage or toss myself off!’

And that was in the 1940s.

And then there’s George Formby with his Little Stick of Blackpool Rock. ‘It may be sticky but I never complain, it's nice to have a nibble at it now and again.’

Hill was very much of the music hall tradition and his comedy was definitely crude but some of it was genius. One sketch in particular would not be out of place in the pantheon of great visual comedy moments. Benny Hill, as his clown character on a darkened stage, begins to do a striptease. The gloves come off, the clothes come off… and, after the clothes, the skin comes off until all that is left is a skeleton shaking its bones in time to David Rose’s The Stripper… then the bones fly away. The striptease is taken to its logical absurdist conclusion. If Dali and Bunuel had included the scene in L’Age d’Or academics would have been ecstatic over it. But it was only Benny Hill. Watch it for yourself.  

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xgoi9t