Beloved British comic is making waves in America
Though the phrase itself is often attributed to English A-lister Stephen Fry many subjects of the U.K. joke that “Americans don’t understand irony.” What makes this perception ironic in a horrible migraine-inducing meta-irony kind of way is the second (third?) British invasion that American popular culture is currently weathering. Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz introduced the Edgar Wright clique to our side of the Atlantic the success of The Office (both versions) and Extras has caused Ricky Gervais’s American cachet to spike sharply and even long-dead non-comedy series like Cracker and The Singing Detective have had a renaissance on our side of the pond probably due to their influence on contemporary American genre television.
“I think creative people and people in the media [in the U.S.] do understand irony and they use irony a lot in comedy so I don’t think that’s true” says Steve Coogan a popular comic actor in the U.K. and star of the upcoming Hamlet 2 . “But one thing that is true is that you don’t see strangers in America being ironic with one another. People in the street do not indulge in irony and people in Britain do. Bill Brighton pointed this out in one of his books. He said he was at a train station in Britain and he asked how much for a ticket but the guard at the train station said the ticket’s free but the receipt is $30. If the guard had said the same thing in America or to an American person they would say ‘what kind of system is that? The ticket’s free but $30 for a receipt?’ But that’s only in the normal social interaction. Polite conversation tends to contain more enthusiasm for witty banter but I don’t think that it’s lost on Americans at all.”
Hamlet 2 represents an amalgam of the two approaches to comedy in a number of ways. On one hand it was co-written by Pam Brady one of the terrible minds behind South Park : Bigger Longer and Uncut as well as Team America: World Police. On the other it stars Coogan who made a name for himself in the U.K. playing the oblivious sports journalist-cum-talk show host-cum-sitcom star-cum-radio show host Alan Partridge. Though he hasn’t been on the Red Coat vanguard Coogan has been slowly insinuating himself into American popular culture with small roles in projects like Hot Fuzz and Curb Your Enthusiasm and a prominent role in Ben Stiller’s upcoming Tropic Thunder.
“In Britain I’m quite successful and I’m very well established in a certain kind of comedy” says Coogan. “I’m identified mostly with the Alan Partridge character. In a way I’m slightly typecast. Whereas in America I get offered quite disparate varied work. In Britain either I don’t get offered work or it’s playing a character who’s the same as Alan Partridge.”
Adding yet another layer of irony to the awful multiple-entendre layer cake this article is building Coogan’s Hamlet 2 character Dana Marschz is arguably the most Alan Partridge-like character that he’s ever portrayed in an American film. If Hamlet 2 were to take off at the box office or even gather a sizable cult following Coogan runs the risk of transporting the inexorable association with Partridge to a new continent. Despite this he says he isn’t worried.
“The Alan Partridge things you see in Dana I wouldn’t say they’re Alan Partridge things at all — they’re things about me” he says. “Though they remind you of Alan Partridge they’re just things that I do myself. If you socialized with me you would say; ‘oh I see bits of you in Dana and I see the same bits of you in Alan Partridge.’ So the aspects shared between he and Dana are the things that I do as a human being. You’d probably be able to find that pattern in all things I do.”
On a deeper level the comedy in Hamlet 2 also straddles two styles one of which has a much wryer darker tone. Though the film was never meant to illustrate the recurrent elements in English and American approaches to humour (it was written by two Americans) it’s telling that the overall success of its comedy hinges on something as universal as the development of a compelling realistic character.
“It’s something you don’t typically see in comedies like Hamlet 2 but I like that” says Coogan. “It’s a satire on inspirational teacher films and yet it is an inspirational teacher film. It’s both of those things there’s that duality. I think if it was just a teacher putting on a stupid wacky play with no emotional core I don’t think people would give a damn whether [Dana] succeeds or fails at the end of the film. People who have seen the film have said to me that they really felt as though something real was at stake because of the scenes from Dana’s personal life — it’s not just an idiot running around doing stupid things.”
Coogan says that the most important difficult thing director Andrew Fleming asked of him while filming Hamlet 2 was that he maintain the emotional honesty of the Dana character. Though it’s a somewhat unusual request for the director of a comedy Fleming’s decision to present Dana as a real person rather than a caricature (which would have been very easy to do) speaks more significantly to the question of why we laugh than any amount of long-winded discussion of specific devices could ever hope to. Ultimately it really doesn’t matter whether you understand irony or not.
“There are different kinds of funny” says Coogan. “I like very broad traditional comedy and also I like esoteric comedy. I like surreal stuff that makes you laugh for reasons that you can’t explain. So I don’t really have a specific kind of humour that I like but I love good comedy. Even if the comedy is bland and stupid and safe I still like it because I like to laugh.”
