Not quite sure why Merton things he can play such giants as Hancock and Milligan....epic fails on both accounts !! That dustbin dance alone shows how brilliant off the wall Spike was !!...it's Python all over...you can see how much they were influenced by him...he was certainly the God father of alternative comedy !!
Yeah, he came out and rushed the whole newsreader sketch. It's like he was reading off of cue cards, or something. It wouldn't kill him to crack a smile, either. On the other hand it IS Paul Merton....
The one great and essential ingredient that Irish British Spike brought to British comedy has been described variously as absurdism or surrealism. I wouldn't say that neither existed in Spike's work, because that would be untrue. But the fundamental ingredient was silliness. It's also said that he had no opposite number on the other side of the Atlantic. To an extent that's true, his silliness was unique. The only person I can think of who brought some of the same spirit to his work was Ernie Kovacs, who was born within a year of Spike, and who would probably have been on the receiving end of similar tributes had he not been killed in a car accident in 1962. The Pythons were certainly influenced as much by the Goons as they were by Beyond the Fringe. And Terry Gilliam, whose formative years in Minnesota were Goon-less, was just as inspired by Kovacs.
Yeah, my dad used to whistle along to it; he didn't really understand the Goons. I was the Goons freak. Dad would have been pissed off if he'd known it was a German tune.
@Glasnost Alte Kameraden (Old Comrades) is the title of a popular German military march. It was composed around 1889 by the composer of military music Carl Teike in Ulm. Spike must have had a good reason for chosing it, considering what theGermans did to his mind in the war.
@trombonistpete This is from "A Show called Fred" that ran very briefly in 1956, I think. It had only about six showings, either due to low ratings or it was thought to be too 'advanced' for the telly audience of the time.. This is only a segment of the whole thing - hugely funny!
That was then. This is now. We've learned a lot since then. It's not Spike's or Benny's fault but Benny's humour seems so out of tune with the times. Spike's (except when he talks about P...s, doesn't. At his best he's a comedy giant, right up there with Chaplin. Bless the old fella :)
@LazlosPlane Benny Hill never had canned laughter. His shows were all filmed infront of an audience and the outdoor scenes were shown on a screen to them. They are not canned laughter on benny hill, as on quite a few ocasions he had to wait for audience members to stop laughing so hard.
Who cares about if the laughter is canned?? This is a tribute to one of the greatest comics of the 20th century. Without Spike Milligan you would not have the likes of Monty Python (Milligan is in Life Of Brian), Eddie Izzard, The Fast Show, Paul Merton, Dylan Moran, Bill Bailey etc. If you like his particular humour is irrelevent, his influence will be felt for decades to come. I suggest you listen to The Goon Show radio recordings to hear the beginnings of Modern Surrielist comedy.
cleese wasn't in the goon show. he was in university when the "goon show " was on. The show consisted of Michael Bentine (1951-1953),Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, Peter Sellers.
Goon humour is taking a perfectly normal situation and taking it to it's totally illogical conclusion. perhaps the best one is "The jet propelled guided NAAAFI" where an inquiry into the costs involved into an ambassador's residence costs ended up with "the building burned to the ground and a new one built at the proper price".
It was “Spike Milligna, the well-known typing error”, only the surname was ‘in error’. Who is the announcer? He looked to be just a trifle young to be Andrew Timothy, but the voice was similar. Of sound effects, in one televised episode (can't remember detail), I could swear the sound effects man behind a glass-screened wall was Jackie Wright, better known as Benny HIll's sidekick.
Paul Merton proves that the devalued language joke isn't ostensibly all that funny. Maybe the original sketch was so much funnier because of Spike's barely suppressed hilarity.
Where was the Canned Laughter in this? You only really hear that Crap in American Sitcoms and whose incredibly Stupid Idea was it to add canned Laughter tracks to the Fred Flintstones Cartoons?!
and goes arh ha a ha a ha marks brothers i thank u not meny people no what i am talking about just like harry enfield i dont think ya wanted to do that a wacca wacca hmmm muppets fonzy bear???? the list is endlist
the goon show-had john cleese aka monty python-monty phython had faulty towers- every comedy since then has tried to imertate or steer it self away from this comedy bench mark i.e black adder since then aka all recent comedy is due to the goons . Bow and pay homage to your gods dam is this how jesus was born i thank u gets cigar out
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