December 27, 2013
John Cleese
6. THEY LOVE FAGS
While America basks in its homophobia, British people regularly put fags in their mouth and suck them. Sometimes they”ll even eat them.
7. THEY ARE GREAT HOSTS
When you stay at a British person’s house they go all out. No matter how late you stayed out drinking the night before, they are first up in the morning cooking the traditional full breakfast with beans, toast, and fried tomatoes. They don”t just hand you the keys and say, “Mi casa es su casa” before wandering off. They are genuinely concerned about you having fun, and they see your boredom as their failure. This means you owe them when they”re in town, but that’s not a problem because they make great guests, too. They do the dishes, buy toilet paper, and always leave a gift.
8. THEY TAKE STYLE SERIOUSLY
Soccer fans are just sports fans in most of the world, but in Britain they are a people. Before we had the chavs of today dressed head to toe in Burberry, we had the “casuals,” who would go to games in Italy and buy the finest menswear available. From the top 1% to the bricklayers, the British have always been meticulous about their clothes. British grandfathers are the only grandfathers who include shopping for outfits on their touring itinerary. When a friend’s English grandfather was here in New York visiting Ground Zero he carved out some extra time to visit Brooks Brothers across the street. Brits understand that the way you look defines you, and they choose to present themselves as proud members of their tribe. Where we had jocks, nerds, and rockers, growing up they had mods, boot boys, suedeheads, scooter boys, skinheads, and rude boys (to list one small section of one scene). Each tiny subculture had a huge list of particulars ranging from how high your cuff should be to what length of your collar you should wear.
9. THEY KNOW MUSIC
Brits are stuck indoors most of the time because it’s raining out and that means they don”t just listen to records, they are imbued with them. Ask your average Brit about music and he”ll go on forever about bands from your hometown. If you were ever in a band, he’s probably heard it. Listening to John Peel on BBC Radio was like going to Every Band in the World School as he”d jump from The Bhundu Boys to Ofra Haza and then back over to Napalm Death.
Despite having only a fifth of America’s population, they produce about the same number of great bands and they do our music better than we do. When they got ahold of punk it was just avant-garde New York art rock. They”re the ones that made it a global phenomenon. Blues was just an old man on a porch until Led Zeppelin turned it into a hurricane. British music is so nuanced, there are subcultures in subcultures in subcultures, leaving us with anarcho punk dub, African beat poetry, grindcore choir metal, electro hooligan rap and, of course, classical pop.
10. THEY”RE HILARIOUS
Sure, it’s amusing to poke fun at your dad and portray him in a sitcom as a bumbling fool, but are we capable of maybe one other joke? In Britain they don”t just say, “dummies are stupid.” They lampoon smart, successful losers. Basil Fawlty owns his own hotel but he’s obsessed with class and insults his workers so they make an ass of him. Alan Partridge was successful but he isn”t anymore, so let’s make fun of him for not realizing that. As John Cleese once pointed out, “Comedy works best when it is mean-spirited,” and nobody is better at subtle cruelty than the Brits.
