Imagine this guy today
All those hilarious sex jokes and hot girls running around. The woke brigades would probably stone him to death.
shareIf they could catch him first! https://youtu.be/Zat9CRfUr-E?t=51
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MovieChat Forums > Benny Hill Discussion > Imagine this guy today
If Handmaiden Barrett doesn't beat them to it!
shareFor every 4 low-brow, ribald sketch misfires on that show, there would be a high quality gag. I got lots of laughs watching it as a kid. The geriatric wheelchair race. The news anchor that can see through the tv. Lots of skits were great. The show was at its worst when he was doing monologues. Maybe I'd feel different if I could understand more than half of what he was saying since they would usually be in a fake accent (on top of an accent by my perspective). Benny was far from the excellence of Monty Python but still had some value.
But even those monologues would sometimes score. In one I loved, he said "I hear that the odds of there being a bomb on a plane are a million to one. The odds of there being two bombs on a plane are a billion to one! So I always bring a bomb with me when I fly."
The parade of scantily clad women was not torture.
He fell out of favour in the UK even in the 80s. TV companies simply stopped making his shows. Times had changed.
His humour is very much of its time. I laughed at it as a child, but it did get old very quickly.
I just could not imagine watching it now.
And its not that I would find it offensive, more childish in a modern context. That sort of stuff just does not work anymore.
Benny Hill and his style of humour owed more to the early music hall/vaudeville type of humour.
THAT.^ NOEMOJI
shareIt sucks living in a humorless age.
shareTo an extent...but some things have a shelf life, certainly for me.
I can still watch a lot of Mel Brooks movies like Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein etc, and the Airplane movies and not be offended and still fine them funny. And many similar movies of the 70s and 80s.
But these days Benny Hill shows just come across as leering and Pervy. The shame is that Hill could be funny, he wrote a lot of funny monologues, poems and witty songs. He came from the British music hall tradition.
But he found the niche of the scantily clad girls, either being chased by him or them chasing him and capitalised on it.
I admit as a child that and the notion of speeded up film was funny to me back then. But you leave that behind and see it in a different light when you get older.
I'll have to watch them again. These days, words like "pervy" and "creepy" just seem to be euphemisms designed to control the libidos of men.
shareHe had a filthy leer. And he was very funny.
There is no "shelf life" on funny.
Laurel and Hardy, Benny Hill, Steve Martin, Charlie Chaplin and others were all funny.
Benny was very funny. That little guy on his show was funny too.
So, you liked Benny Hill before your college Women's Studies class told you to be offended by him.
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