Harry Hill

[BootyO]

Did anyone see Harry Hill’s Alien Fun Capsule this week? (ITVplayer to catchup)

He had an all-woman panel (of different ages and ethnicities) and later in the show he brought the fact up and they did a funny little bit with the women standing up for the gender pay gap etc. Funny but not taking the piss out of women on any level. I thought it was great.

Then Carol Vorderman says a line about how one day there will be a channel with just women on it but that men will somehow find a way to muscle in on it.

Harry then shows an amusing clip of a bunch of women singing “Who Will Buy” in a shopping centre in the 80s. They play around with it for a bit and then the panel of women get up and start marching around the studio singing the song with other women dressed like the ones in the 80s shopping centre clip.

But the final punchline is that Harry comes along dressed like one of these women and he, with other men dressed as women, start trying to take over and push the women out.

It’s the most blatant metaphor for TRAs I’d ever seen.

(On another comedy-show-does-feminism note, did anyone see the latest Taskmaster? There was a task where the BRILLIANT and hilarious Liza Tarbuck figured out the answer and was saying it and the two blokes (Tim and Asim) totally ignore her. She then went onto complete the taskmaster they had no clue what was going on.

There was banter about it and Greg Davies said it was the perfect metaphor for what it’s like to be a woman around men.)

I saw a clip of that. I love Harry Hill. And he was a Dr so you'd hope he'd have his head screwed on about this.

I thought it was very funny, and smiled at the idea of the men dressed as women pushing the women out!

Love Harry Hill, such a dry sense of humour.

I thought it was very funny.

As an aside, we have all been singing that bloody song ever since.

Didn't see it but I love:

Harry Hill

Who Will Buy

80s shopping centres

So I'll tune in on the catch up 😄

That's all well and good but while they're dancing about whose preparing the badgers for the badger parade?

Don't worry about the badgers! The poor alien had a throat infection!

DP and I saw this and we were hoping it was a TRA piss-take metaphor, but weren't sure - it was kind of too good to be true. I don't normally like Vorderman tbh - but this was all right

Hi Booty, I watched that episode of Alien Fun Capsule and was a bit torn, tbh. I did laugh (quite a lot) but I'm uncomfortable with the idea that men dressing up as women is inherently funny. I feel the same about drag - it's as though being a woman is something to laugh at - but only if you can take the costume off at the end of the night.

I was fascinated that this was on mainstream tv as something we're allowed to laugh at, yet if anyone dares to snigger at an obviously male TIM, then they'd be TERFed out of existence. It strikes me that the majority of peeople have no idea of the TRA agenda and the accompanying assault on women's rights.

PS I just love Liza Tarbuck. She is a woman who takes not one iota of shit.

Haven't seen much Harry Hill stuff, though I used to love TV Burp. :)

But I noticed him on the Last Leg last year... The first thing he did was say "On the week of internationsal women's day, can I just say what a great line-up you've got?" and gestured to the all-male panel and guests.

but it was necessary.

Hah, @MissMoneyPlant. Hill gave good burn!

Comedians are supposed to hold a mirror up for society so it's good to see there's at least one who hasn't been scared off from doing so. (Helps when you're very, very funny of course).

Reminds me of the Graun's Czar of Comedy (Brian someone) writing about various Dave Chappelle jokes he wasn't happy with as they were deemed to be transgressing various boundaries.

This is the Dave Chappelle who was paid $20m for his six part Netflix series. Rather suggests he doesn't need the Commissar to tell him what to do. (Oh, and he's very, very funny too).

HH had his pregnant man episode of TV burp reported to offcom years after it was aired, following a rerun on Dave. I would say that as a dr he obviously has a fair clue about sexual dimorphism, but then on the other side we have a fair few down the rabbit hole tv doctors... (naming no names)

I remember the “pregnant man” episode of TV Burp. He showed the news footage of the person in question, bearded and heavily pregnant, and said “It’s a woman with a beard!” Exactly in the same way he normally takes the piss out of any trashy TV shows which oversell their stories to make them more sensational. At the time not a particularly controversial thing to say - nowadays of course a hate crime.

Good stuff re: Harry Hill and Liza Tarbuck (who is AMAZING).

But as for Dave Chappelle - Freespeecher, did you see his Netflix shows? The first one was an hour long defence of Bill Cosby, tortuously attempting to justify his behaviour using an analogy that made absolutely no sense.

I can appreciate that Chappelle struggles with the truth about his hero, but he needs to get a grip. The act involved a nasty belittling of white women too, implying that black women are totally okay with the whole Cosby thing, because race.

Hi Rhalb, I haven't actually seen it (which makes one of those 'I haven't seen it/read it/ watched it BUT!' people. Damn it!)

I seem to recall Bim Adewunmi writing about when it was 'ok to like him' - before he had told a few trans jokes which apparently put him beyond the pale.

So yep, haven't seen his Cosby stuff but happy to accept it was iffy.

Overall, I much prefer the likes of Chappelle, Silverman and even Jimmy Carr treading the good taste tightrope and risking the occasional misstep to comedy that it excessively safe and, worse, increasingly didactic.

I have no problem with comedy that is in bad taste and crosses lines, and Dave Chappelle is / was brilliant.

But that show was beyond the pale. It wasn’t just a 5 minute “bit”, the entire show was framed like this:

Chappelle begins by describing some awful Hollywood party he was at, full of producer types, who he got into a conversation about movie ideas with. Off the top of his head, he came up with what he describes as a spur-of-the-moment, terrible pitch for a movie. A man who discovers he has superhero powers like that of Superman. He can save thousands of lives, but the powers can only be enabled if he rapes women. So he has this ethical dilemma - should he save all these lives at the expense of a few raped women?

Chappelle plays this as if he’s well aware of what a terrible idea this is, then the routine moves on to other areas, including how let down he is by Cosby, since Cosby changed his - and many other black people’s - life for the better. I was really enjoying the routine - there’s some excellent stuff in it.

Then at the very end of the routine he comes back to the superhero Rapeboy thing, and reveals that it was actually a metaphor for Cosby.

Except it’s not is it? Cosby could have done everything he did without raping anyone.

Chappelle is a rape apologist. Weirdly, all the negative reviews I’ve seen focus on the couple of throwaway trans jokes, rather than the hour-long rape apology thing. But then, that’s only offensive to women I s’pose.

I suppose it could be seen as a take on 'Crime and Punishment' but it's a stretch, and a stretch beyond breaking point - the crime in Dostoyevsky's classic was a murder to fund the protagonist's medical career, enabling him to save lives in the future. Hard to see how rapes can be argued in the same way.

Exactly, it was weak. And there was really no need for it at all - chappelle could still have talked about the great things Cosby did without implying that rape was some sort of collateral damage.

I haven's seen his new show.
I was not surprised when I read about why he gave up on his earlier comedy show. It was brilliant. Sad but not surprised.
I was never a fan because of the misogyny.