A Great, Silly Grin: The British Satire Boom Of The 1960s [Paperback]

Humphrey Carpenter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 27, 2003

A Great, Silly Grin opens at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival, where a staggeringly inspired satirical revue called Beyond the Fringe startled a public steeped in the polite, bland banality of the 1950s. From there it is a short trip to the coffee bars of London, where the appearance of a scruffy yellow pamphlet calling itself Private Eye overturned the way Britons looked at their world. The apotheosis of the satire boom, and the progenitor of so many American comedy acts, was the groundbreaking BBC television program "That Was the Week That Was," which combined elements of sketch comedy and evening-news broadcast to produce something essential, hilarious, and, on occasion, scandalous. Humphrey Carpenter's history of this tumultuous and exciting era introduces us not only to the people involved in its creation--Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Michael Frayn, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett, and David Frost--but also their routines and sketches.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

To re-create the anti-establishment era of the 1960s, Carpenter interviewed almost 40 of the top "surviving satirists and their associates," and the result is both authoritative and amusing. Carpenter, best known for his biographies of Dennis Potter, Auden, Pound and Tolkien, sets the scene with the political and cultural backdrop of post-WWII "austere drabness" giving way to subversive antics on radio's Goon Show in 1951. The Edinburgh Festival of music and art began in 1947, and additional entertainments there were known as Festival Fringe. These "intimate revues" of music and comedy underwent an intellectual transformation when Jonathan Miller, Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett teamed for the sharp-edged satire of Beyond the Fringe in 1960. As Miller put it, the quartet "tried to rinse away some of this gaudy sentiment," abandoning the "dum-de-da of conventional revue." It set the tone for what followed: the lampoons of Private Eye magazine, the satirical cabaret known as The Establishment and the BBC's top-rated That Was the Week That Was (aka TW3), laying a foundation for Monty Python and later comedic concepts. The concluding chapter covers how the movement's writers and performers fared in later years. Since Carpenter did extensive research on Dennis Potter, it's surprising to find no rundown of the satirical sketches the team of Potter and David Nathan wrote for TW3. Still, students of comedy history will find this the perfect companion volume to shelve alongside The Compass, Janet Coleman's superb history of satirical, improvisational theater in the U.S. 16 pages of b&w photos.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Review

"Carpenter has pulled off a rare feat, writing serious history with a lot of laughs." -- Philadelphia Inquirer

"Will be the standard work for years to come." -- Washington Times

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Product Details

• Paperback: 408 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press (May 27, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0306812053
• ISBN-13: 978-0306812057
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 6.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,326,286 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The evolution of British satire, June 3, 2002

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Great, Silly Grin: The British Satire Boom of the 1960s (Hardcover)

Humphrey Carpenter's Great, Silly Grin follows contemporary British humor, beginning with the 1960 Edinburgh Festival when a satirical review Beyond the Fringe fostered a new breed of British humor. The evolution of British satire that followed through the 1960s receives close examination in this involving survey.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Grin or Grimace?, July 30, 2002

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Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Great, Silly Grin: The British Satire Boom of the 1960s (Hardcover)

Carpenter examines English cultural values during the years immediately following World War Two and focuses specifically on the 1960's when students from Oxford and Cambridge universities (with others) challenged those values with immensely entertaining satire. Theirs were significant contributions to a tradition of creative ridicule which extends back more than 2,500 years. Of course, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens are among those English authors properly renowned for their comic genius but are not usually thought of primarily as social satirists. Throughout the Age of Victoria and well into the 20th century, the British Empire flourished within a somewhat rigid social order, one which (generally) seemed to lack a sense of humor. By 1960, England had become "a bankrupt, defenseless little country run by a ridiculously elderly prime minister" (Harold Macmillan) when Jonathan Miller, Peter Cooke, Dudley Moore, and Alan Bennett introduced "Beyond the Fringe" at the Edinburgh Festival. Out of that developed Private Eye magazine, The Establishment (a men's cabaret featuring satire), and the BBC's That Was the Week That Was. Carpenter devotes substantial attention to Miller, Cooke, Moore, and Bennett as they and others detonated a "boom" of social satire whose reverberations continued through Second City, Monty Python, and Saturday Night Live. Carpenter duly notes the influence of the Goon Show (Millgan, Sellers, et al) as well as American humorists such as Mort Sahl, Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce, and Tom Lehrer on their English counterparts. Of special interest to me is Carpenter's suggestion that, as England continued its decline among world powers in the 1960s, social satire served as a medication to deaden the pain. At one point, he reminds his reader of Cook's warning that England was then in danger of "sinking giggling into the sea." That has not as yet happened and never will but the image remains vivid nonetheless.

4.0 out of 5 stars As Peter Cook used to say..., August 29, 2003

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B. A Varkentine (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Great, Silly Grin: The British Satire Boom of the 1960s (Hardcover)

Just read A Great Silly Grin: The British Satire Boom of the 1960s, by Humprey Carpenter. This period has long been a subject of interest to me despite the fact that I'm too young (and geographically challenged) to have seen most of the programs in the first place.

Besides being a linked series of show business biographies of key figures of the time (The Beyond the Fringe foursome, etc), the book raises some good discussion.

Just how much does satire really matter, if it does at that? As Peter Cook used to say, the peak of satire was 1930's Berlin--and look how much that did to prevent the rise of Hitler.

But the best part of the text may be the final chapter, which paints an unflattering picture of the state of the art in 2000-era Great Britain--and it's sobering how much of it applies to the US as well.