The Best of British Film Comedy

In the 1996 Oscar-nominated French film Ridicule, one 18th-century Frenchman tries, in vain, to explain British "humor" to a fellow aristocrat. After hearing a sample joke, the befuddled companion asks "is it wit?" "Nooooo," he is told. Hear hear. In this two-part program, we are promised Peter Sellers, Benny Hill (a dubious reward), Eric Idle (of Monty Python fame), Sir Alec Guinness and Marty Feldman, and viewers will indeed see the above named...for approximately 30 seconds each. More often, however, eager Anglophiles will have to suffer through a repetitive series of old comic bits (one guy is shown repeating the tag line "turned out nicely, didn't it?" about a zillion times). Roughly broken into subject areas--drag comedy, school skits, telephone "humor," etc.--the filmmakers add injury to insult by editing several bits into the same sequence; this doesn't actually make the sketches any funnier--they're just longer and more incoherent. If this were truly, as the title suggests, the "best" of British film comedy, than I would heartily recommend that English directors do the world a favor and put the lens cap on their movie cameras. But I didn't see Julie Walters, Rowan Atkinson, Emma Thompson, John Cleese, or many other British comic "wits," so I'll assume that the producers went for the most available-at-low-or-no-cost footage, not the best. Not a necessary purchase. (R. Pitman)