I got this videocassette last August, so it was atop the second cabinet in the family room, and I’m kinda trying to reduce the overflow so that it only overtops the videogame cabinet and not all of the cabinets that make up our entertainment center and unwatched video library. I’m getting closer to that goal, but I’m always one book sale or garage sale away from buying twenty more videocassettes or DVDs.
At any rate, this is a 1994 collection of skits from his television program which ran from 1955 to 1989. It runs a little under an hour and a half, so to get a bunch in, it jump-cuts between bits. I might have caught a glimpse of it back in the early 1980s–did it run on cable somewhere? I remember my father liked it, as (I am told) did my father-in-law. I mean, it’s a human cartoon, a bit bawdy in places but not exclusively sexual humor, and this collection features only a couple of scantily clad ladies. Hill does a song or two, recites an off-color poem, but most of the bits are topical–a television talk show host having trouble with his guests, a man’s life in under a minute, some workplace humor, and one about the accent of a Chinese visitor to England who encounters–an Indian, I guess–in the customs line (that would definitely not fly today in the West). A lot of the bits use the sped-up or I guess “undercranking” technique to make the action seem cartoonish and jerky. So, I guess if you know who Benny Hill was, you know what you’re getting. But not boobs; this is not Showtime’s take on the short-lived Canadian equivalent Bizarre.
Ya know, some people credit Monty Python’s Flying Circus with bringing down British civilization, but maybe because the Monty Python crew, with their films offering greater exposure to American audiences, via their humor mocking institutions. But here’s Benny Hill, doing it for decades longer than Monty Python’s Flying Circus was on television, and…. No credit. Or maybe it’s because right around the end of the 1960s, the sketch comedy shows stopped focusing on mocking the powerful and instead started mocking one political side over the other. I am sure that dissertations were written along the lines of this argument, but I can’t be arsed to develop the thread more than that. And how would I know? The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour only lasted two seasons and was off the air before I was born, but somehow it made its way into reruns and syndications that I could see them on television.
At any rate, this videocassette was amusing–moreso than Zombieland which was also an action-“comedy”–and, you know what? If I should come across a larger boxed set, which Ebay has shown me exists, I’ll pick them up. But not for $100 on Ebay.
