You gotta love Britain.
Home to Big Ben, Buckingham Palace and "God save the Queen!" the English have provided us with a lot of love and laughter over the years. From the Beatles to Princess Di to Jude Law, Americans have long delighted in British imports of all shapes and sizes.
But the biggest British contributions to American pop culture have always come in the entertainment realm, where a quirky brand of comedic acting has added a new dimension to the American repertoire. Sometimes it works ("Monty Python") and sometimes it doesn't ("Coupling"), yet audiences here are always willing to give it a try.
But our patience is wearing thin.
The latest chapter in the saga of the British exchange - one in a disturbingly long string of recent disasters - "The Sketch Show" is an adapted version of the British comedy program of the same name.
Like our own "Saturday Night Live," "The Sketch Show" relies on quick wit and well-timed physical humor. But the substandard level of comedy "The Sketch Show" derives from this classic equation ensures that it will never rival the likes of "SNL" or its British predecessor.
The show's main problem lies in its formatting, a glitch that can normally be overlooked if the humor is good enough, but which in this case actually places severe limitations on the show's potential. "The Sketch Show," in a botched attempt to be "original," limits itself to horrendously short skit lengths.
With literally no transition signaling the shift from one sketch to the next, the overall result is a program that is as choppy and inconsistent as the first 20 minutes of "Saving Private Ryan." But in that movie, U.S. soldiers were storming the impregnable beaches at Normandy under heavy German artillery - what's "The Sketch Show's" excuse?
The humor, too, is a haphazard mess. "The Sketch Show" boasts two distinct brands of comedy, each equally odious in its own right. The first is repetition, the kindergarten notion that a joke will get funnier in the retelling.
In one single half-hour segment, "The Sketch Show" had no less than three skits wherein the main joke involved a character speaking gibberish without others noticing. American audiences may not be as bright as those British chaps, but we don't all have Alzheimer's; if they can't come up with enough original humor to fill one show, it will be interesting to see how "The Sketch Show's" writers plan on sustaining the series over time.
Then there's their other signature humor style: the not-funny kind. During a few skits, audiences will be left laughing more at the corniness of the jokes than at the comedy itself. One pedestrian skit after another made "The Sketch Show" look more like a kid's birthday clown routine, rather than fresh, hip entertainment.
Puns, which have usurped sarcasm as the lowest form of humor, were far too prominent. For instance, one skit opened with a tough female cop swaggering down a lineup of inmates all incarcerated for one mass crime. "All right," she demands, waving her night stick, "who was the ringleader?"
And then, as the audience cringes in disbelieving anticipation, the camera cuts to the end of the line where one prisoner's unmistakable red tailcoat and top hat make him stick out as awkwardly as the joke itself. Apparently, those Brits must think we're senile morons; when you're doing a sketch show, it's better to have the audience laughing with you than at you.
But for all of its many weaknesses, "The Sketch Show" does have a few definitive assets on which to hang its hopes. First off, executive producer and "star" Kelsey Grammer is an established comic genius - though he is severely under-utilized, appearing in only the opening and closing skits - and should be able to recognize the program's shortcomings and rectify them if "The Sketch Show" can stay afloat long enough. Then again, he did let "Frasier" run itself into the ground about four seasons past its prime.
The show's spirit of originality and attempt at breaking new ground in the world of sketch comedy is a noble effort, even if its execution has been lackluster up to this point. "The Sketch Show" ails from the same malady that afflicts many comedy casualties. Its intentions are good, the spark of creativity is there, but when it comes down to it, you can do all the fancy things you want, and nothing will change the fact that you have to be funny first; all of the cutesy quirks are just icing.
In the end, it looks like "The Sketch Show's" chances of recovering from its initial mistakes are just too slim to be realistic. Its British creators can only hope that last month's success of the other mid-season English adaptation, NBC's "The Office," will buoy "The Sketch Show." Perhaps America is finally ready to forget the recent past and go back to accepting British imports with open arms.
But then again, that's what the East India Tea Company thought, and look what happened to them!
