And yet, and yet, you have not even touched upon
the soul's depth charge, the light brigade of truth, then inevitable iterations of the mindless hordes taking a toilet plunger to our ears.

Well done. Well done. And I say again, well done.

Jane

Utterly wonderful.

My hovercraft is full of eels.

I had seen that bit before, though I'd forgotten it. It's a good question he raises: would Hitlerian rhetoric have been effective in English? and some kind of answer might be interesting.

Hello, we're talking about old boots.

Back when Olbermann was first firing up his strident denunciations of Bush, the Australian alt-journalism newsletter Crikey (much recommended) published a link to one such rant in which they praised his delivery and composition of rabble-rousing speech-making. Then they followed up with "Of course such a thing could never work here. The techniques that resonate so well in American would sound in our accent like a complete wanker."

Gee, thanks, Patrick. I was going to try to get some work done tonight. Instead I'm tumbling down a Fry and Laurie rabbit-hole of YouTubery.

Thanks.

They both make appearances in Blackadder as well.

But thank you for showing it to me again and enabling me to recover these thoughts from oblivion.

As for the "English Hitler" thing, there's a lot of examples for succesful English-language demagogery. Usually not in RP, but how many people speak that anyway?

The tendency for self-depreciating humour and introspection that Fry's character mentions might be a better safeguard- it means that a) many Brits are likely to talk a lot about how deep down inside, they're the most fascist country in the world, and b) they're unlikely to be right about that.

The whole thing is loaded with humour for different sorts of audience. There's the TV Presenter out of his depth, and the sense of meaningless intellectual gabble from Fry, which is all that many would find to laugh at. Their loss. If there wasn't more we wouldn't be wondering, with Fry, about the chances of an English Hitler., and about the ability of language to modulate thinking.

(Which is not quite the same as the Saphir-Whorff hypothesis (ObSF: Babel-17).)

Tony and Control, lie detector

It's frequently a very cerebral and wordy sort of humour but it would fall flat without the excellent performances. I'd like to see them take on Jack Bauer and win though :D

Agreed, though neither is bad at either. Fry's performance in Wilde was excellent and Laurie's novel The Gun Seller was several different kinds of fun all piled up together.

Laurie is the better musician though.

On German-language and fascism - between 1930 and 1935, if you add together all of the votes cast for fascist and far right parties in Europe - 96.9% were cast by German speakers. And this, apparently, ignoring the German elections after 1932 due to ballot box intimidation. Fascist dictatorship in non-German speaking countries came about either because of coup or royal appointment.

So with Hitler, the German language may have been very important.

I don't watch House but my roommate does, so I have caught bits of it on occasion. I've had a wonderful time contrasting Bertie Wooster with Gregory House. Similarly, I was very amused when I watched Gosford Park and got Fry as the somewhat incompent Inspector, rather than the uber-confident Jeeves. And hurray for avoiding typecasting.

Mr Laurie is a very fine musician indeed, but there is evidence that Fry is no slouch himself.

I think Mr Fry is right to hide his light under a bushel - if he were to let it be more widely known that as well as being so intelligent, so talented and so funny, he was also a musician, he'd be at even more risk of being lynched for being Far Too Clever.

Laurie, on the other hand, has carefully cultivated an image of being Not As Smart As Steven, and can get away with such virtuoso displays.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tbsad51e-eM

Fry as an actor: every so often he puts in an appearance on Bones, and it's as if a great light shone down on the program and all are lifted and ennobled*. This is no small thing in the current season, in which the show seems to have been murdered so that some quack script doctor could resurrect the corpse and claim a victory in ratings.

* By which I mean that he's so damn good at that somewhat understated brand of gentle humor that he makes everyone else seem a little better.

I haven't watched House yet because it started a while after I mostly stopped watching TV, but I remember how weird I found it when I was checking some Livejournals I read once in a while and discovered that the actor who had played Lt. George had apparently become a sex symbol on American TV.

Laurie's performance in that piece could also have been faked. We did see one angle where hands that were certainly his were in contact with the piano, but sound can be edited in afterward. However, we know from his numerous performances elsewhere that Mr Laurie plays piano and guitar quite well. Alas, I don't recall seeing Mr Fry play any instrument in any way that did not appear to be edited to hide the fact that is wasn't actually him playing. I would be happy to be proven wrong and will probably soon begin rewatching all of Fry & Laurie's Bits in the hope that I am.

He does play the piano a bit in this sketch but it doesn't prove a lot.

For another pair of comedians, try the Australian team of Clarke and Dawe:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-QNAwUdHUQ&feature=related

But here is further evidence of Fry's bushel-hiding tendancies: "There's a piano in my house, and I play when no one's around - but as soon as anyone listens, my confidence goes and I lose my sense of rhythm." From _Moab is my washpot_ IIRC.

As to whether that was him in the Jeeves and Wooster clip, I still suspect it was, British Television budgets of the 90s being what they were, but he'd have to have been good and liquored (or coked) up, as he often was in those days in an attempt to overcome his social anxiety.

His piece on farnarkling remains the definitive work on the ancient sport - here's a taste:

"The word Farnarkeling is Icelandic in structure, Urdu in metre and Celtic in the intimacy of its relationship between meaning and tone."

More here: http://www.mrjohnclarke.com/.

"There is no butter in Hell,"is one of those family favorites pulled out with fervor on many an occasion.

Gone now. Thanks for the heads up heads-up.