This is directly relevant to my wife's and my reading of the David Tennant & Olivia Coleman vehicle Broadchurch.
David Tennant's character is notably very bad at his job; that's why he got exiled to a backwater town. He bungled his last case so badly it made national news. In an American police procedural, we would either have some mitigating explanation for his failure, or at least some gritty vice or personal demon that was the real reason he got demoted.
In Broadchurch, Tennant's character just sucks at his job. Every episode of the show conforms to a formula where he gets suspicious of one of the other characters in the show and we spend the episode wasting time while it's finally determined that the suspect of the week is actually innocent. I have to say, it makes for entertaining television. It also resulted in my wife and I chorusing aloud, every episode, "he's SO BAD at his job!!"
(Minor Broadchurch spoilers) At the end when he finally catches the big bad, it's not because of anything he did. A coincidence and some carelessness on the part of the big bad lead to the mystery being solved. Also, every other character on the show had already been ruled out.
Since watching it we've kept a lookout for protagonists who embody the "everyman in way over his head who accomplished virtually nothing himself" archetype. It's fun to know Adams held forth on the very subject.
That movie is a long series of spoofs nicely spliced together to form a story. To the point that it even works in the reverse, you've seen Hot Fuzz and then years later you watch some other movie and suddenly you realize that's where they got it.
A lot of people cite Hot Fuzz as one of the best examples in filmmaking. Almost everything is a setup for a joke or scene that resolves later on in the film.
In the 12th century a Welsh writer named Walter Map wrote the line "no good deed unpunished, no bad one unrewarded". Not quite English but maybe he was already expressing the whimsy of the English kingdom.
This is also the core conceit of Slow Horses, the Gary Oldman AppleTV show. An office filled with MI5 officers who screwed up and so can’t be trusted with anything important.
I haven’t seen Broadchurch, but I have seen Slow Horses and it doesn’t seem like the description applies. Sure, they are “exiled” MI5 officers, but they also save the day every season, and not through luck. They’re not completely incompetent. Take River: he was sent to the Slough House due to a mistake someone else made. Ho was sent there due to character flaws, despite being the most skilled at his job.
Except in Slow Horses, most of them are exceptional at least in some way. Many of them are too difficult to work with, yes, but they do excel at _something_. That is very different from being _all around mediocre_.
Hold on, wasn't the flak he got for the case before the show started actually because he was covering for his wife (who was also working on the case)? She was having an affair and left the evidence in her car where it was stolen. He didn't say anything so their daughter wouldn't know, and took the fall for the case's failure, even though it wasn't his fault at all.
I didn't quite get the same read on the show you did. It seemed like the dynamic was that Olivia Coleman couldn't imagine anyone she knew being the killer, contrasted against Tennant being aggressively willing to suspect anyone, which is how they were able to rule the various suspects out.
It's admittedly been years since I saw it; I don't remember the entire mitigating bit about covering for his wife, but a lot went on in that series finale and I've had covid a few times since.
I like your read on their dynamic as foils to each other; I'll have to give it another watch with your read in mind.
> Every episode of the show conforms to a formula where he gets suspicious of one of the other characters in the show and we spend the episode wasting time while it's finally determined that the suspect of the week is actually innocent.
Something like this applies in the UK Midsomer Murders. Specifically, in the episodes where one of the suspects has a prior criminal record, they always get grief from Inspector Barnaby's current sidekick but are then proven innocent of the current crime. However, if an old police colleague from Barnaby's past offers to help, they are always guilty of something.
This very good description makes it sound like a comedy, which it absolutely isn't, although I note that Olivia Colman got her break in dark comedy Peep Show.
Ah, I should have made that clear, yes. We derived some unintended humor from the mismatch in cultural expectations, but Broadchurch is as serious as a heart attack.
(Didn't stop me and my wife from yelling MELLAR!! at each other across the house for weeks afterward.)*
*(He yells his partner Miller's name a lot in his Scottish accent.)
Today I learned that I would make a terrible detective!
When I watched Broadchurch with my family, I thought he was doing a fine job at getting to the bottom of the case. Goes to show much crime drama I watch.
I see now that Tennant's character's actions are a plot device to reveal the drama amongst the other characters, not the workings of a good detective.
Slow Horses is so equal-opportunity with how it hands out ineptitude. About the only character on the show who isn't inept is Lamb (Gary Oldman), but is such a wretched character, you could actually hardly find a moment to root for him. It's fantastic.
Slough House denizens screw up in blatant, over the top ways. While the Park screw up in ways that leave geopolitical consequences festering for years or decades while being good at covering their own asses.
The plot is generally some evil, corrupt actions the Park took in the past are coming home to roost and only the bumbling losers in Slough House can fix it (kind of, eventually, in a "at least London wasn't blown off the face of the earth" kind of way).
…sort of, but the game does ultimately make clear that for all his faults, the protagonist is (and was, before the amnesia) exceedingly good at what he does.
> Since watching it we've kept a lookout for protagonists who embody the "everyman in way over his head who accomplished virtually nothing himself" archetype.
Department Q is a weird one because it goes with the trope of the acerbic hyper-competent guy, but then… actually, I don’t recall, is he actually incompetent? Or does he just not quite live up to his over-confidence.
Also it is sometimes hard with these detective shows because the screenwriters might want a character to be hyper-competent, but they are people too, limited in their ability to portray super-competent abilities. This can result in characters lucking their way into clues.
My take is quite different. EVERYONE in Broadchurch is at least nearly-criminally incompetent.
"Ooh, I'm an investigative detective in a homicide. I think I'll forget myself and beat up somebody in lockup!"
"What's that, evidence? I think I'll withhold it for minor personal reasons."
"Hey, there's a pedophile investigation going on. I think I'll lie about my 'alone time' with a teenage boy to EVERYONE, just to avoid arousing suspicion..."
Tennant's advantage is that, in season one, he's not emotionally tied up in this completely tangled small town. He's got some professional competencies over Miller, but not many.
I recently watched One Punch man which made me think about heroism, what a hero is and what it means. Saitama, and the top tier famous heroes in the story rarely risks anything. Their immense power just makes their actions an illusion of being heroic, theres rarely anything at stake for them, Saitama especially.
Mumen rider is an example of a true hero to me in that story, his only superpower being that he rides a bicycle, and he stands before certain destruction just to delay the monsters from hurting innocents for a few seconds. Risking everything.
By that definition, most superheroes, like the Avengers just look like power fantasies, does Spider-man or superman ever really risk anything substansial or acts in the face of certain destruction.
These super heroes have very different tones depending on the author, but spider-man usually constantly has to balance his anonymous personal life with his super heroism. In the Raimi trilogy specially, he gets screwed over a lot.
When I was a kid reading Marvel comics, Spiderman seemed like a bad and relatively uninteresting super hero. His problems were trivial personal issues and he rarely left NYC, fighting local crime or villains like Green Goblin who were just broken humans. Meanwhile the Fantastic Four were in regular contact with government institutions, went into space, and fought interstellar aliens. They just seemed better and more important. Not to mention the Avengers.
As an adult, while Marvel isn't my favorite thing anymore, I find Spiderman to their most interesting superhero.
Same with Naruto. Naruto and Sasuke are both essentially nepo babies inheriting these amazing powers and breaking barriers on day one. They fall down, but get up like its a scratch.
Meanwhile, Sakura, born of no remarkable parentage and easily sidelined plays an initial supporting role to these two egomaniacs.
But, she uses what little power she has and finesses it to medical precision.
She still fails, but I care about her battles a lot.
It's really sad that Kishimoto so terrible at writing female characters. I'm not being a hater when I say this, he has even complained about this himself!
In terms of character concepts he's always really great - Naruto is one of the few series I read almost from the start, all the way to the finish. At the beginning of the series the concept for all male and female characters started out really interesting. But the female characters barely got any development compared to the male ones, and it got worse as the series went on. Partially because it ended up focusing more and more on Naruto and Sasuke, partially because the majority of the female character development was reduced to how they relate to the male characters.
I don't think it's intentional or that Kishi has any malice towards women or anything - if that was the case I doubt he would have been able to come up with interesting character concepts for women in the first place. But the fact that they're sidelined like that still sucks, especially since the potential is there.
I'm glad that Sakura got to be a bad-ass in a few of the side-stories after the main series ended at least.
In One Punch man the gag is that while everyone is fighting for their lives, Saitama is usually distracted by other priorities that are often trivial (such as getting some bug spray, or saving some money down the local convenience shop as they have a sale on noodles), he also rarely gets the recognised for saving the day once he does bother so show up.
I especially liked when he described his super hard training to an acolyte. "What do you mean 100 pushups, 100 squats, 100 sitdows and run? It is just a standard training, not even that hard!!!"
I've been rewatching the Alice In Borderland series (much less well known than Squid Games, but with a similar idea) and I think that's a much better portrayal of heroism as the players of the games have no special abilities at all - just their strength, agility, wits and knowledge. Due to the lethal nature of the games, everything is on the line with every game although there's nearly always a "smart" way to get through the game (maybe not the hearts games though - they're just designed to be cruel).
My particular favourite game in AIB is when the character Chishiya (Cheshire Cat) is playing the King of Diamonds and the winners of that game end up being the characters who either risk or sacrifice everything.
A big part of what makes Charlie Brown so endearing is his undying earnestness and optimism in the face of near constant bad luck and disappointment.
He is exactly the lovable loser archetype that this piece says Americans do not dig. Yet the Peanuts comics and cartoons and an American pop cultural institution.
OP here (though I don't claim any special insight, as I said).
It would be interesting to consider the differences between the Charlie Brown and Arthur Dent character archetypes.
One difference seems to me exactly the undying earnestness and optimism you mentioned: in a way, Charlie Brown and other American characters like him are simply not touched by failure (even if bad things happen to them), because of their optimism[1]. This makes them lovable: we appreciate them for this quality that we (most of the audience) do not have.
[1]: (or lack of self-awareness, in some other cases mentioned here like Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin)
Arthur Dent, on the other hand, is not gifted with undying optimism. He's constantly moaning about things, starting with his house and his planet being destroyed. This makes him relatable more than lovable: he's not a “lovable loser” (and for the right audience, does not seem a “loser” at all), he is just us, “my kind of guy” — we feel kinship rather than appreciation. We relate to the moaning (if Arthur Dent were to remain unfailingly optimistic, he'd be… different), whereas if Charlie Brown were to lose his optimism or if Homer were to say "D'oh!" to complain about big things in life rather than hurting his thumb or whatever, they would become less of the endearing American institutions they are IMO.
OP, if you’re still lurking, are you familiar with the Flashman series? I feel like it falls somewhere between the poles here. Either way, would highly recommend it to anyone who likes Adams, history, learning or reprobates.
I would not say that Charlie Brown is untouched by failure. He does descend to the depths of despair. But some how rises from it to try (and fail) again. This trope is seen best with Lucy pulling away the football every time he goes to kick it. Even though he knows he's failed every time, he talks himself into this time being different.
This does not contradict your overriding point, just adding nuance to the claim he is "simply not touched by failure".
> Back in 1977, Schulz insisted that the cartoonist's role was mostly to point out problems rather than trying to solve them, but there was one lesson that people could take from his work. He said: "I suppose one of the solutions is, as Charlie Brown, just to keep on trying. He never gives up. And if anybody should give up, he should."
Yes, that's the part that Americans miss and the previous commenter missed. Charlie Brown is still optimistic.
To dig the English comedy you need to accept that you are or the protagonist is a failure. Your or their life will never significantly improve and they made peace with it. You covet and enjoy small moments of happiness. Happiness is not the winning big but returning home.
Almost all of Pratchett's greatest characters are highly flawed, morally complex and anti-heroic. This is the main point. This premise includes everyone from Cohen the barbarian, through Vimes, Rincewind, Susan, all the witches, Moist Von Lipwig, all the way to DEATH.
That's one of the main reasons that Terry's work comprehensively bridges the genre gap between "children's books" and "modern philosophy".
My favorite part about Pratchett is that the characters who are most competent choose to act in the best interest of the less competent “normies” who will never understand or appreciate what they’re doing on their behalf.
Referencing does not necessarily equate to sentiment though. Similar to seeing Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes peeing on thing decals isn't representative to the admiration to the comic series. The "woop woop woop woop" adult voice is another core element to US culture making fun of authorative figures, but doesn't dismiss them as unneed aspects to life.
Those references are to the recurring gag with Lucy and the football.
There’s a lot more to the character than that so I hope 99% is an exaggeration and people are still reading Peanuts and watching the various animated versions. I’m pretty sure they are.
I'm enjoying the discussion of Charlie Brown, but while Peanuts is indeed an American pop cultural institution, I never really thought of CB as a 'hero', or even really a protagonist.
While there were cartoons where he's the protagonist (I recently watched A Charlie Brown Christmas), his main medium is the comic strips, and Peanuts generally didn't tell a continuous story (if at all), unlike, say, the superhero comic strips. Instead, they're little vignettes of life, and like most serial comic strips, you're meant to relate to them, get a nugget of wisdom or insight, or a chuckle. We mostly read them as kids who were bored and wanted something like a cartoon until Saturday came around (I realize adults read them, too, but today that seems rare, almost unimaginable to me now). So I'm not sure Charlie Brown really counts as a counterexample, here.
Even the cartoons are not so beloved that they're widely rewatched by adults for their storytelling. People have nostalgia for them because they're something they watched as children. This is the main reason I watched A Charlie Brown Christmas recently, and it's kind of a mostly sad story with a weird resolution. Thanksgiving was practically unwatchable. The Garfield cartoons also do not hold up, imo.
> I never really thought of CB as a 'hero', or even really a protagonist.
Yup totally.
As an european I always saw, as a kid, Snoopy as the hero who had lots of humor and who was likable. I'd describe Charlie Brown as "invisible" as I barely remember him.
Only a European, and one who grew up on US stuff, fondly so, charlie brown feels very low on the exposed and perceived American ethos / values. I saw a few strips and refs .. but that's about it.
He has more modern versions in Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin. But most of the failures or misfortunes they experience are quite mild or temporary, all things considered.
From Stephen Fry: "You know that scene in Animal House where there’s a fellow playing folk music on the guitar, and John Belushi picks up the guitar and destroys it. And the cinema loves it. Well, the British comedian would want to play the folk singer. We want to play the failure."
Homer and Peter Griffin are idiots but they smash the guitar. Charlie Brown gets his guitar smashed.
I think this is a distinction between comedy and non-comedy genres.
There are many examples of protags in American comedies who never get their way -- Party Down, Seinfeld, Always Sunny. Part of this is the need for American sitcoms to maintain the status quo over dozens of episodes / several seasons.
You rarely see Hollywood action heroes who are beset with unrelenting disappointment -- they usually go through hell, but by the end of the third act, achieve some sort of triumph.
A notable counterexample is Sicario, but I wouldn't call it a "Hollywood action movie."
In the first Indiana Jones, the hero makes no positive contribution to the outcome in the end. He is just along for the ride.
To be fair, it requires a little bit of thinking to see. The general audience might see it as success because the outcome was "good" even if it had nothing to do with anything Jones did.
I'd say there are more. Courage the Cowardly Dog? Very much in the lovable loser camp. The Eds from Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy also fit, but I suppose you could say that's a Canadian show.
Indeed, also a great example of a failing bumbling lovable loser who is frequently considered a hero to many Americans is Homer Simpson. Homer Simpson is a hero to many people in America, especially among the working class. It's not a pure example, because Homer does inadvertently succeed often, but it's almost always because of some crazy luck, not because of some skill or even perseverance.
I largely agree with Douglas Adams assessment of the cultural differences. I think it's pretty clear that he is on to something in a general sense. But there are definitely exceptions in my opinion. It's just way too diverse and way too complex a formula to ratchet down in such a narrow way.
Not just Charlie Brown. The entire cast of the comic.
* Charlie Brown will never talk to the Red Haired Girl. His kites will always be eaten by a tree. He'll never win a baseball game. He'll never kick the football. He has abominably low self-esteem.
* Lucy's infatuation with Schroder is clearly one-sided; likewise Peppermint Patty / Charlie Brown; also Sally/Linus.
* Snoopy will never get the Red Baron, nor enjoy publishing success
* Linus will never stop believing in The Great Pumpkin and is disappointed every year.
Probably loads more. The comic is about losers, and losing.
I don’t know anything about Charlie Brown, but I’m not sure constant bad luck and disappointment capture the spirit of the British humour being discussed, as that can just as easily be used to describe slapstick humour. Perhaps it’s the existential futility/resignation that’s missing? Charlie Brown is a child, so they perhaps have optimistic naïveté instead (such that their failure be viewed with pity instead of kinship, which is really the distinction here).
Charlie Brown is actually pretty big right now- my gen z daughter has her entire classroom decked out in him and he's over Target, etc. He fits in with the cozy subculture part of gen z.
Bro literally everyone I know has watched at least the Great Pumpkin and Charlie Brown Christmas. People my age regularly make memes based on the football gag. It’s a cultural icon.
As a general rule actually, I’d say that Gen Z is more likely than may be expected to know about culture from before our time - the internet, after all, is a back catalogue of the best hits of humanity. That’s why spotify thinks we all have a listening age of 70.
Apple just created a new Charlie Brown series and my 6-year-old daughter has already devoured it. I'm trying to get her to say "good grief!" more often.
Columbo is anything but a failure, though, and the audience knows that. His genius is leveraging humility to convince killers that he's a bumbling idiot, while in reality he's onto them from the first encounter.
_Slow Horses_ came up in another thread. I'd argue that Columbo has more in common with Jackson Lamb than with Charlie Brown.
Most Americans wouldn't consider Charlie Brown the "hero" of his strip, they would consider him a loser who gets what he deserves, and that's the joke. He isn't cool the way Snoopy is cool.
I think the article is correct that Americans don't feel sympathy for the underdog who doesn't overcome and succeed in the end so much as contempt, due to their inborn sense of entitlement and belief that failure is caused by a lack of moral fortitude and excess of laziness rather than systemic injustice and inequality.
Americans are a pretty diverse group, but the most iconic image anyone has of Charlie Brown is perseverance. Lucy sets up a football promising potential success, and despite the fact that she's pulled it away from him at every opportunity, he still tries to kick it anyway.
I think that's a quintessentially American fable. Most people will never achieve great success, but they can experience the thrill of imagining opportunity, and even if they know it's illusory, that moment of faith and effort before failure is the heroic action.
People will do stupid things like bet their life savings on a game or a bad idea, but they feel heroic for having tried regardless, knowing that if enough people keep trying, someone is going to succeed, and they get to experience that success vicariously in some small amount because they tried just as hard as the one who succeeded, experienced the same struggle, and somebody made it, even if it was never going to be them.
Nature itself ensures that life is short, brutal, violent, and punctuated with horrors. Happiness is a transient state that loses its power if it is present more than part of the time, and joy can only exist in a backdrop of disappointment, or it just becomes another day in the life. We are wired for a life of failure, disappointment, trauma, tragedy, and loss.
That we have wrested a comfortable civilization from these dire circumstances is a great testament to the resolve and resourcefulness of men and women.
We have the great privilege and responsibility of living in this elevated plane, with a long (as biologicaly possible) life lived in relative comfort, and even insulated from the horrors of life by the drapery of civil machinery.
Even so, the only justice in this world is the justice we create ourselves.
The universe owes us nothing, and sometimes collects its debt for the entropy we take from it.
When you go out of your way to bash American culture for no reason (with some bonus racism thrown in a few comments down!) it really drags the discussion down. I really wish you wouldn't do that, it's just making the site worse for everyone.
> Most Americans wouldn't consider Charlie Brown the "hero" of his strip, they would consider him a loser who gets what he deserves, and that's the joke.
I don't think you speak for most Americans. That's the cruelest interpretation I've ever heard of Charlie Brown.
His point of high church vs. Protestantism is a good one. We in the US practice a kind of competitive Protestantism designed--at least partly, if not mostly--to make the adherents feel good about themselves. There is a distinct difference between submission and proselytizing.
There is also something to the state of empire as well. The British empire had been in steady decline for a very long time before Adams or Fry started making people laugh, whereas the American empire has been ascending quickly since WWII. This sort of gestalt is hard to ignore and will certainly influence things. For example, would a 'Blackadder' sell as well in 1890? This is around the same time 'King Solomon's Mines' was selling briskly, and Haggard's story is instantly recognizable by any modern Hollywood writer.
On some level Americans are British people time-displaced by a couple of generations.
In Japanese culture the failed hero is also revered, but in a solemn rather than comedic way.
Minamoto no Yoshitsune, Kusunoki Masashige, The Standing Death of Benkei, Saigo Takamori (the last samurai), the Kamikaze pilots, even Yukio Mishima...
What's interesting is that unlike the British fatalism, Japanese failed heroes are driven by duty and honor and tradition above all (even at the cost of themselves). To an outsider they are foolishly stubborn and unwilling to accept an imperfect or changing world. But in Japan that is something to be admired.
I find more modern American humour much easier to relate to, probably because it has veered more in this direction. A show like Always Sunny seems incredibly British-compatible because it's about terrible people getting their comeuppance, yet still being sympathetic despite their failings.
To go full British, you need characters like David Brent, who aren't sympathetic. They have no redeeming heartfelt goodbye. No-one is sad when they're gone, life moves on.
I would also say that the Always Sunny gang really aren't sympathetic either, but it's a para-social trick of having spent so much time "together" with them over so many episodes.
I suspect a new viewer coming to watch the latest series of IASIP would not see them as sympathetic. That's quite different to The Office (US), where a new viewer skipping to later seasons would not have the same opinions as a new viewer watching season 1, where Scott was much closer to a Brent type character, before he was redeemed and made more pitiable than awful over the seasons.
I only watched the first few seasons of IASIP, but I don’t remember them being sympathetic characters at all. The whole concept, and what made it funny, I thought, is that they really are all terrible people who just drag each other down.
Another great example of this is British SF, especially 20th century Doctor Who and Blake's 7, vs American SF such as Star Wars/Trek. The British version can be much bleaker. And of course Red Dwarf, which doesn't translate at all into American. (There was a single pilot episode)
Edit: someone downthread mentioned Limmy's Show and Absolutely, to which I would add Burnistoun. Scottish humor is even more grimly fatalist than English.
I think this one is a miss. TOS is inspired by _british_ naval history. Loss, fear, and failure are central to the show. In this era of TV, leading characters still had large flaws. Kirk is frozen by choice, Spock believes himself superior, Bones is a bigoted luddite. We as viewers get to see the pain this causes and their efforts to improve. It's wholly different than modern US television including all other ST media. Meanwhile, 70s Dr. Who is packed with automatic weapons fire and explosions and the formula has always been the Doctor knows best. (I am a huge fan of all the mentioned shows.)
For a good, modern example we can look at Ghosts (suddenly renamed "Ghosts UK" on my streaming services) and Ghosts US. The adaptation is agonizing. They stripped the important aspects of the story but kept a boy scout, toy soldier, and an interracial marriage. I found that telling.
Red Dwarf was hilarious. Highly recommend the books, as they contain a lot of jokes that wouldn't translate to screen easily and would resonate with anyone who enjoys humour in the vein of Adams.
Tbf, Star Trek TOS was also a sci fi show with an FX budget of two shoelaces and a pack of gum, and had to be carrier by great actors and writing, which it absolutely was. It's still my favourite Star Trek to this day.
I think the problem with how the US makes shows is that once something get successful, it gets a budget, which means the writing needs to appeal to a broader audience, which makes the whole thing blander.
I might be ignorant of US television pop culture, but I think, at least before the 90s, the UK produced much more memorable scifi shows (and even in the 90s, a lot of those US shows were secretly Canadian)
As a Brit, I generally prefer American Humour when it comes to comedy. My favourite films are Happy Gilmore and Tropic Thunder. A lot of British Humour is around that everything is crap, it gets tiresome after a while.
Yes, definitely a culture thing. I had a very difficult time finding most British humor funny when I was younger, but my personality combination of loving humor and comedy and also being incredibly interested in people, drove me to want to understand why British humor was funny when most of the time it just seemed so absurd.
It was a multi-decade path so it's very difficult to identify progression points, but slowly through exposure I began to "get it" and now I adore British comedy and humor. I still adore American comedy and humor as well, but the more exposure to the culture I got, the more I understood it.
Obviously that's just anecdotal, but I personally find it strong evidence that the humor divide is indeed cultural. The more similar cultures are to begin with, the easier the leap is.
To me the most exciting part of this is that it means there are thousands of other cultures on this planet that have humor that I have not unlocked yet. Someday I hope to!
Edit: for a very fascinating example of differences, I love comparing the UK version of the office to the US version of the office. To many Americans, David Brent mostly just came off mean and an asshole, even a poisonous one, whereas Michael Scott comes off as eccentric and clueless and unable to read the room, but overall a mostly good guy. That perception makes David Brent kind of hateable whereas Michael Scott kind of lovable.
Another fascinating point of comparison is the UK version of ghosts, versus the US version of ghosts. I'll leave comparisons and contrasts on those to others as I haven't watched all of the UK version of ghosts yet. I'd be fascinated to hear what others think of that, and the office for that matter.
It's the opposite for me - the 'you can't change anything, the world sucks, the best you can do is endure and be snarky about it' attitude appealed a lot more to me when I was younger.
I watched both versions of Ghosts, and found them to be quite similar honestly. The US version can be a little more slapstick and a little more goofy, but that's about it.
David Brent is poisonous, and indeed hatable. The point of the British version of the show is not that he's more tolerable or likeable to the British. If anything it's more pointed how awful he is this side of the water, given the preponderance of bosses exactly like this. What makes the show work in the UK (and Ireland), is a greater cultural willingness to see the worst aspects of reality reflected in entertainment. Versus the focus on escapism in even the most grim US television - i.e.: Tony Soprano is a monster, but he also has charisma and glamour. Walter White is dying and becoming more and more amoral, but he also goes from being a dork to a badass. Both characters are utter glamorisations of what their real life counterparts would be like. Along with the surrealism there's a genuine existentialism to the darkest of UK comedy - from early Alan Partridge to Nighty Night. An actual interest in examining the nature of cruelty and suffering.
Very interesting! Except I noted that he referred to David Brent from The Office, and we have a direct corollary to that character, of course, in Michael Scott from The Office. They really didn't change the formula for American audiences, he's absolutely still a comedic failure. Starting in the second season, he becomes a bit more of a lovable comedic failure, but the basic point of the character stands. And he is beloved by American audiences!
I also really enjoyed After Life (with Ricky Gervais). I wouldn't call him a hero, but then again maybe I would. So honest, so pissed off, so intelligent.
Sick Note with Rupert Grint, same thing. Brilliant.
I'm currently reading the Bobbiverse series. Sure the guy is sort of a hero. But he is also an antihero forced to do heroic things, while he just wants to geek out and enjoy his coffee while making star trek references.
As an American I'm a huge fan of HHGG and Rowan Atkinson (not just his Bean character). I'm also a huge fan of Conan O'Brien and his Harvard generation's work for The Simpsons. Would be far ahead of Adams' time. Though while I find them _okay_ I never laughed so hard that my face and stomach hurt from laughter when watching Monty Python anything, not even Black Adder. For other American comedy what made me really, really laugh so hard was Kenan & Kel and The Lonely Island's work for SNL.
I've tried to find something as funny as HHGG for so long that I've read P.G. Wodehouse as Adam's main inspiration. Also watched Fry & Laurey. I guess Sacha Cohen as British humour? Since he's Cambridge Highlights alum after all. Found his works extremely hilarious though the parody of racism was disgusting.
The sketch show format has been pretty much entirely killed off by TikTok & Instagram.
It's very hard to do a sketch that hasn't already been done on TikTok with a tiny fraction of the budget.
Absurdist humour still exists everywhere, it's less popular than either Python in the 70's / 80's, or the flash era in the 2000s, but it's still everywhere, but I'd also wager it is not to your taste.
At the risk of offending just about everyone, I would suggest that something like "Skibidi Toilet" is just this generation's badger-badger-mushroom, which in turn was that generations' "Bring me a shrubbery!".
Sketch shows in particular don't work well for TV in this era. Mitchell and Webb tried hard to return with one this year and it just fell flat, the jokes feel telegraphed from a mile-away, taking a minute to get to a punchline in a era when the same jokes are told in a 10 second short.
The downside of the tiktok/insta model, is that the more successful people on Insta end up just re-telling their one good joke over and over. ( Or indeed, re-recording someone else's one good joke. ).
Not that sketch shows didn't also repeat jokes sometimes, but they could at least play around with a punchline in unexpected ways, or have callbacks and nods to earlier sketches in a series. That kind of non-continuity doesn't work when you don't know which tiktoks will go viral, or which order your audience will see them in, as the algorithm dictates all.
As a fellow older American who loves Monty Python, the more modern British shows I've enjoyed the most were Green Wing, League of Gentlemen, Peep Show, and Doc Martin. Of those, League of Gentlemen and Green Wing have the most Python-like absurdity, while Doc Martin has the most subtle humor. Peep Show is hilarious, but the most crass humor of those listed, although League of Gentlemen doesn't shy away from crassness either.
> I find American humour so hard to relate to but I guess it's just a culture thing
These kind of comments always puzzle me. Hollywood makes stuff for the entire world, not just for a domestic audience.
Shows like Friends, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, pretty much any big sitcom you can name is in syndication in most countries around the world, because of how relatable it is.
It's often not sophisticated, and can be quite shallow (See Two and a half men or Big Bang theory), but it being hard to relate to is unlikely to be an issue.
Don't underestimate the power of big media corporations to push a world view. When I was a kid in NZ, British culture was impressed on us via the media. These days, there's more American influence. I don't think that's to do with the inherent quality of those cultures.
The phenomenon Adams is talking about here is largely a post-WW1 phenomenon in UK culture, related to the post-WW1 malaise. His best examples are post-WW1 (Paul Pennyfeather, Tony Last, and the book by Stephen Pile). The others arguably don't really fit (e.g., the core delight in Gulliver is the reader thinking they are smarter than Gulliver; the reader doesn't identify with him). It's not exactly a new observation... one of the motivations both Tolkien and CS Lewis had for strong characters like Aragorn was to present examples falling outside this cultural drift.
Yes. See also Fleming’s James Bond. Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby. *
This phenomenon is post-WWI and post-WWII and losing the greatest empire in history in a single generation trauma being retconned as if were the historical English perspective.
* Removed previously incorrect statement including Edgar Rice Burroughs who is an American although Tarzan is English
I'm not sure I understand the Burroughs example as relevant to the UK, but another good illustration is Thomas Hardy. His books sold well but were never seen as consistent with the UK cultural mainstream, and the reaction to Jude the Obscure in 1895 stopped him from writing novels entirely. Yet post-WWI he came to be seen/adopted as a mainstream cultural icon.
As much as I love American upbeat-ness (I'm American) I think that our hatred of failure and our strained optimism puts a tremendous psychological pressure on us. Sometimes, we fail, and that's okay. Sometimes, we lose, and that's just life. I think that's an essential part of growing up, and our collective denial of that makes me feel like we, as a people, are not quite mature.
I think (we) Americans hate failure only when people give up.
We have a very long tradition of failure leading to success, everything from Edison trying hundreds of lightbulbs to Don Draper in Mad Men reinventing himself after failure.
Our bankruptcy laws are different from other countries in how lenient they are towards the debtor. And, of course, the entire culture of Silicon Valley is about failure after failure followed by success.
And it's not even conventional, economic success that we want. We're happy when someone finds happiness even if not financial success. The rich-person-gives-up-everything-for-love is a familiar American trope.
We don't like failure, but we forgive it, as long as we keep trying.
I think you're over optimistic about the mindset of the majority of Americans. Americans love a winner and hate losers, that's why they elected Donald Trump.
At least for American technologists (if not technologists more broadly, or Americans more broadly) failure is not at all seen as a bad thing: it's seen as a data point that XYZ didn't work, so now we'll pivot to ABC and give that a go.
Edison's quote about not having failed, but rather, discovering 1,000 ways not to do something captures this well.
It’s a good counter point, but I don’t think it mimics the kind of failure embracing that Clark talks about.
It is more a reframing of failure as a success of learning and growing. E.g, while the project failed, you didn’t. You learned lessons and are stronger and better for it. You succeed.
There is also the phenomenon that serial failure Donald Duck is still a very popular character in several European countries, while we don't care about Mickey Mouse at all. Isn't it the other way around in the US?
Mickey always does good and always wins, that's deeply boring. Donald is flawed and relatable.
Interestingly growing up as an American, I watched Duck Tales which while tangentially related to Donald Duck it’s about his ultra rich uncle going on awesome adventures and just being so smart and awesome. Donald shows up every once in awhile but I don’t really remember much about him.
Duck Tales is basically an attempt at doing Carl Barks era adventure style minus Donald, but Scrooge being made more heroic/sympathetic (he's pretty much a lovable jerk at best in the old stories). I think Disney really wanted to tell the Donald stories Europe loved to Americans.
The persistence of Carl Barks and Don Rosa style stories here is surprising even to me. My son, born 2005, seems to know every single Barks story by heart - and I can't say I pushed it that hard.
Although I have very little experience with British humor, I find it interesting to compare British fiction I read as a child/teenager that became popular hits in the US (Harry Potter, Alex Rider). From this article's perspective, those protagonists are the epitome of American heroes (autonomy, mastery, purpose). No wonder they garnered such acclaim in the US. Curious if these stories are the exception rather than the rule in British YA fiction? Is the comparison unfair, since these stories were not written with the comedic genre in mind?
What i find in dr who is that, at least at the beginning of every episode he doesn't even attempt to control what's happening even when his life is threatened. He's perfectly happy to let events unfold before stepping in.
And he hates using guns. He walks into danger with zero ability to defend himself besides some weird tool with painful limitations. In a way he's the most un American hero possible.
At least in the case of Harry Potter specifically, there's actually a few things that contributed to its success outside of it having a traditionally successful Real American Hero™.
First off, we need to remember that it was cribbing from a lot of other "kid goes to magic boarding school" books out there. The difference in sales success is down to the fact that JKR got a better US publisher. Scholastic has an unfair advantage in the young adult and graded reader markets called the "Scholastic Book Fair". Basically, it's a travelling bookstore event set up in US schools where they sell kids books. If you wanted to start a YA phenomenon in the US, especially back in the 2000s, that was the perfect way to do it.
For similar reasons, Bone outsold a good chunk of other western comics purely because of the fact that Scholastic was the only company willing to touch it.
Another factor is that its obvious Britishisms come across as fantastical to American audiences. I mean, who in America even knows what a boarding school is? This is the same reason why Naruto did so well in America, even though most of the things that seem unique about its world are just fantastic versions of bog-standard ninja tropes.
[0] This is the same reason why Naruto arguably did better in America than in its native Japan.
The Charlie Brown counterpoint is interesting, but I think the distinction might be about narrative framing rather than outcomes. Charlie Brown fails repeatedly, but the narrative frames this as poignant perseverance. British failure comedy frames it as absurd cosmic joke - you're not meant to root for the character to eventually succeed, you're meant to recognize the futility. Arthur Dent is Adams's own synthesis: British everyman dropped into American-style adventure, surviving galaxy-ending events through baffled persistence rather than heroism.
This made me think about another contrast, Hayao Miyazaki. His characters ("heroes" or "villains"), usually are more morally complex and nuanced than the ones you would find in the works I typically see depicted in Hollywood. They are not just good or evil. You may not agree with their actions, but you understand the logic of it.
Ironically, Ghibli's adaptation of A Wizard of Earthsea (written by Le Guin, an American author) flopped in part because Miyazaki made it much more about heroes versus villains than the original story.
This does not surprise me - and America is a big place, and I'm sure there are areas where Arthur would be seen in a similar light but I've worked in the US and the UK and this type of things reminds me of the phrase 'separated by a common language'. Slightly off topic perhaps but another area where I see a strong divide in sensibilities are the NewYorker cartoons - my wife (born in north America) thinks the are hilarious. I usually don't understand what's funny about them.
I feel like the divide is very evident of each countries version of the show "The Office". Probably a common trope at this point, but not even the dialogue, already the aesthetic tells you a lot about the perspective of the characters. While the UK office is grey, washed out and gloomy, the US office is warm, surprisingly full of life and outside shots are mostly sunny.
IIRC, Ricky Gervais advised the showrunners of the US adaptation to make Michael Scott more optimistic than his UK counterpart. Quite savvy on his part.
What a great response by Adams! I think the acceptance, and even the celebration of failure is present among the “maker” community in the USA to some extent, which has really drawn me to it.
I wonder if there’s the same outlook on failure among other creatives, would be interesting to compare the hobby communities opinions between the USA and UK.
That's a very interesting observation. You see it a lot in "tradesy" videos on YouTube, machinists* and welders and woodworkers and the like. The humor and self deprecation - far more apparent than in most other genres of American media - is really quite close to feeling British. As a transplanted Brit, it's pretty comforting stuff to watch.
*This Old Tony's channel is a particularly good illustration of this point, among many.
And the weird thing is, these are the people who actually make thing.
I think the success (not necessarily financialy, but in the public eye) of the American tech elite can be partly attributed how much more relatable these peole were than the previous ones.
For someone who was used to seeing these corporate types with their perfectly tailored suits who spoke in press releases, I think it was a refreshing change to see Mark Zuckerberg give interviews in his college hoodie in his typically awkward fashion.
I think this created a perception in the eyes of the public that these guys are different, and tech has coasted on this goodwill for quite a while.
Well, there is this stoic British way of looking at the world and preserving the sense of self worth and then there is the ending of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is just pure cosmic despair in the face of the bureaucratic void. It was also true for me that once I saw how pathologically bleak Adams's worldview is I couldn't even really laugh at the jokes any more.
> In England our heroes tend to be characters who either have, or come to realise that they have, no control over their lives whatsoever – Pilgrim, Gulliver, Hamlet, Paul Pennyfeather (from Decline and Fall), Tony Last (from A Handful of Dust). We celebrate our defeats and our withdrawals – the Battle of Hastings, Dunkirk
I'm having rouble reconciling the first sentence with the second. At Dunkirk, the English displayed massive control over their own fate. Yes, I suppose it was a military defeat, but it's so famous and moving because the agency of everyday Englishmen saved the war effort. Perhaps that's the American in me speaking.
> it's so famous and moving because the agency of everyday Englishmen saved the war effort
The day was more saved by lots of French soldiers who fought heroically, quite a few of them to end up stranded and then utterly forgotten in the British collective memory. Had they not held the Germans for so long, there would not have been that many British to send across the channel. The standard British vision of Dunkirk is highly misleading.
100% seen it in business too. My UK colleagues often use self-deprecation while providing their business updates. But my US colleagues present their accomplishments directly with confidence.
It's not just deprecation, it's systemic understatement. It drives non-British people insane because everyone is talking in code.
And some of the meaning is hidden in intonation.
If someone says "Interesting..." that can mean "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard" or "Might be worth a look, but not a priority right now." Or maybe "That's very suspicious."
"That's quite good" usually means "Very good, I like it!"
There is the famous case in the Korean War at the Battle of Imjin River where the British commander of the Gloucestershire regiment reported to an American General, 'Things are a bit sticky, sir'. The American General thought that meant a good thing, like they were holding the line, when in fact they were fighting a heroic last stand outnumbered 25:1!
> "That's quite good" usually means "Very good, I like it!"
This is backwards from the conventional British use of "quite". In American English "quite" is a positive modifier, so that "quite good" is better than "good". In British English, historically, it's a negative modifier so that "quite good" means "not as good as good".
I certainly use the word "exciting" in ways that that might be non-standard, like for instance describing when everything has gone catastrophically wrong.
In business I find Americans oversell their achievements and I constantly have to decode "the absolute best", "knocked it out the park", "most amazing X" and figure out what has been redefined this month for that to be true. They use incredible contortions in language too to mislead and cover up and make themselves look good
Colleagues also managed to have the most amazing coffee or literally — literally — the best taco ever, every week. It's quite something!
We also get self deprecating in front of Americans because they're purposefully intimidating. Big characters, loud voices, huge military they're not afraid to use etc. UK is often bullied by the US Gov. It's deference too
Interesting. The other book this makes me think of is Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. I think Gaiman lives in America now, but he’d only recently moved as of when Neverwhere was published, and it’s a very British novel.
I love the world and plot of Neverwhere, but the protagonist, Richard Mayhew, always pissed me off because he’s such a loser. I never understood why Gaiman chose him to be in charge of the story.
Now I’m wondering if that’s my American sensibility.
Same but with The Graveyard Book. Discovered Gaiman's Scientology history and his continued support with 30K/year and submitting his daughters.Mixed feelings ever since.
I think it could just be that America is a much bigger market with much higher production values in TV and Film, so British people get their fill of competent, triumphant heroes from American media.
America has plenty of beloved sad sacks too. Charlie Brown, Donald Duck, Goofy, George Costanza, Eeyore (originally British but very popular in America and popularized by Disney) to name a few.
British media has carved out a bit of a niche for itself, but British people are also consuming other English language media.
And you also have plenty of British media where the hero is competent, triumphant, masterful, and autonomous with (frequent if not ubiquitous) standard happy endings. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Who.
One big difference between the two cultures, is the British caste system.
It's important for us to Know Our Place. Me mum[0] was British, and I used to see this attitude, all the time.
Climbing is OK, but you need to do it properly. Americans are told "Don't take that shit! Force them to accept you!", while British are told "Tsk. Tsk. You can't do it that way! You need to join their club, before you try going to their level."
> US national fiction is "the US is a classless society"
I wouldn't say that.
It's just that we believe that there's no birthright caste. Mobility is possible between all classes. Sometimes, though, it's really difficult; just not impossible.
And of course you get just as much snobbery from your own class about wanting to climb.
It is possible for a working class person to become Middle class. But you have to be born to the Upper Classes. You can get some way by sending your Children to public school (The perverse name for the most exclusive private schools!). The kids might make it, but you will always be 'new money'.
I'm on board with the feelings of the mentioned classmate about nihilism, but to be honest, reading The Sirens of Titan from Vonnegut, which is considered a comic novel for some reason, has the same impression on me, and that is an all-American classic. Neither are bad books per se, and also I can understand the reasons also why Vonnegut had such a bleak view on affairs, as he had gone through a lot, and was in a hard situation at the time of writing, but it is not a comedy, and not funny.
Note: The interpretation on the difference between American and British view of affairs is almost Eastern-European (/me Hungarian), but you can set up that relation to Britain and Eastern Europe also, so this may be related geographic longitude :)
The exception that immediately sprung to my mind is "the Dude" from The Big Lebowski. Maybe other Coen brothers’ "heroes" also fit the bill, but I’m not so familiar with the rest of their œuvre.
One problem I have with this is that the word Hero has multiple meanings and I'm not sure we are talking of the same thing. Like which of these characters follow the classic Hero's Journey, which are just the leading characters in books, which are heroes to another character, which are labelled as a hero as pretext, which are anti-heros treated as heroes, etc. These are all very different things.
One of my favorite details about Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" is the name he chose for his main character: Hiro Protagonist. It's not just a lovely bit of wordplay, it immediately makes you think about whether the protagonist is a "hero" or not.
This overloaded meaning of the word "hero" is especially pertinent when discussing the differences between the interpretation of "hero" in US culture and other cultures. Outside overt dictatorships, the US is the only country I know of where people are taught that anyone who serves or served in the military is automatically a "hero", regardless of whether they've actually done anything that would normally be considered heroic.
That's something a bit odd about Douglas Adams's reply. Arthur Dent isn't heroic, but he's the hapless protagonist. The protagonist doesn't have to be a hero. I'm not sure in what way he has "non-heroic heroism".
> There was a wonderful book published, oh, about twenty years ago I think, by Stephen Pile called the Book of Heroic Failures. It was staggeringly huge bestseller in England and sank with heroic lack of trace in the U.S.
I have this! Thumbing through it randomly, it includes The Least Successful Pigeon Race, The Fastest Defeat in Chess, The Worst Canal Clearance, The Worst Mishap in a Stage Production, The Least Successful Naval Repairs, The Most Unsuccessful Attempt to Work Through a Lunch Hour ("At ten past one a cow fell through the roof"), and The Worst Hijacker:
'Take me to Detroit', he said.
'We are already going to Detroit', she replied.
'Oh...good,' he said, and sat down again.
The article and the comments herein remind me a conversation a few years ago with an ex RAF pilot who had done a few exchanges with the USAF. Among other things, pilot/personnel evaluations in the two organizations were worlds apart. In the RAF, at least during his time, they were what I would expect, more or less factual: Bloggins is good at X, needs to improve Y, excels at P, shouldn't do Q at all.
Meanwhile, in the USAF, anything that could even be perceived as negative was a career killer, so ratings started at mildly superlative and went up from there: Bloggins is an X top gun, is very good at Y, walks on water doing P, and is good with Q.
YMMV, of course, those are my recollections of beery convos with a former Tornado jockey.
As far as I know, all branches of the US military write up a "fitness report" for each officer once a year. "Above Average" is a certain career killer.
But somebody who was a dean at (I think) Virginia Tech wrote that the British "His work is quite sound, actually" could be higher praise than the American "His work sets the standard we all aspire to."
Exactly! Another, semi-related difference between the cultures: When Alexander chooseEitherOrBothOf(provided instructions, gave orders) during the Sicilian campaign, American generals took them as orders and did them, sometimes to their detriment, while British generals took them as intent/direction, and asked questions.
Eventually, the allies realized they had very different command cultures and learned to work together. It may be that Normandy, et al, would have been far different if they hadn't have figured this out in Sicily.
I forget where, but someone was talking about a similar difference in American vs British comedy looking at The Office (the American one) and Parks and Rec. In both, the format tends to be pre-conflict -> conflict -> resolution, with the episodes almost always ending on an upbeat tone. In contrast, in a British show, it tends to be pre-conflict -> conflict -> kick them while they are down. Things can get worse, the characters can be unredeemed, and the fun is they are inept, unlucky, arseholes that don't get out of the situation with a happy ever after.
Americans like that humor as well (see Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Archer, etc.) but it definitely is less prevalent.
I think the early episodes of Bob's Burgers leaned heavily this way as well - usually, at the end of the episode, the family was no better off and sometimes was worse off.
Someone mentioned Charlie Brown as a counter example, which lead to an insightful discussion.
Similarly I’d like to ask about the Simpson, which in the early 90s was seen as the worst role models on TV for being losers, but still incredibly popular. I guess Bart started out as a proper hero, but Homer being a loser and idiot pretty quickly became the mainstay theme of it all.
Americans don't celebrate the Alamo as a failure, they celebrate it as a catalyst for the Texas revolution afterwards. If that hadn't occurred Americans wouldn't even mention the Alamo in their history books.
Americans don't celebrate Custer's last stand. Indigenous people obviously do, and should, but white people don't consider him a hero.
Americans don't celebrate MacArthur getting chased out of the Philippines, they celebrate his declaration "I will return" and the Allied victory.
Americans only support the underdog when the underdog wins in the end.
Look up Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Perhaps the biggest celebration of the losing side in history. Or the first Rocky movie.
> Americans only support the underdog when the underdog wins in the end.
By that definition the by far most cited example on the British side, Dunkirk, doesn’t count because Britain won in the end.
No one celebrates someone who was defeated if the defeat wasn’t memorable. Usually that was because it was an inspiration to rally a cause that was later successful.
Plenty of white people celebrate Custer. Search for “Custer statue” or drive around out west and see how many paintings of Custer’s last stand you can spot hanging in bars.
On the contrary ... we LOVE the perennial underdog who stays in the fight. Like the British, once you start winning consistently you quickly earn our contempt.
Mirroring this divide, Denmark has a TV-show called "Klovn", which is basically a copy of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" (down to the , except that while the main character in Curb is the cause of a lot of cringe moments, he always ends up getting his redemption and being the hero (at least to the viewer). In "Klovn", the main character ("Frank") causes a lot of cringe moments in the same way, but he is a tragicomic character and is almost always in the wrong.
I wonder if Wodehouse ties together both types of heroes in Bertie and Jeeves! Though it's been decades since I read a Wodehouse book, I'm just uncontrollably laughing now just thinking about it! My grandfather had pretty much the whole collection.
Although the Anglican Church is a hybrid of Reformation era Protestantism and of Catholicism, I think that the US tradition of Protestantism is generally (not always) more positive and less fatalistic.
I believe that the cultures of both nations are heavily derived from their religious traditions; even if you never practice religion in either nation you imbibe its effects from early childhood in the cultural values and norms that it influenced.
For example, one of the key aspects of Protestantism is evangelism, which would not make sense if people thought they could not be successful.
So I think a lot of American culture in particular is based on this tradition that encourages optimism and repeated trying even in the face of failure. Hence the way we select heroes.
The primordial form of American Protestantism is Calvinism. A bit hard to get more fatalistic than that. Calvinists see work as a duty before God, not something you engage in for benefits in this life or even the next—God's elect have already been chosen, arbitrarily, to receive mercy and salvation, and nothing you do or don't do can change this selection. They also favor frugality. Hard work and frugality can lead to abundance, and it was only after generations of applying this ethic that the kernel of the "American dream"—that with perseverance one can achieve success—began to take shape.
In some flavors, Protestantism is quite focused on self-scrutiny and skepticism about human nature, making people suspicious and even actively hostile towards supposed heroes.
Other flavors of Protestantism seem to have completely lost that, though. Evangelical Protestantism somehow inculcates a need for leaders to love and worship and an ability to completely suspend rational judgment about them. Their relationship to charismatic pastors and other leaders is a mystical, ecstatic experience that they have an unlimited appetite for. No matter how many times their leaders are shown to be flawed, and in many cases quite detestable and corrupt human beings, they eagerly look for the next leader to worship.
Two stereotypes that illustrate the extremes of this massive cultural difference in Protestantism are the rich WASPs of the northeast and the poor Southern Baptists of the deep South.
WASPs know that heroes are myths, and are unsurprised when the real people turn out to be real pieces of work. Southern Baptists kind of know this on some level -- I think they're actually a bit attracted when a man has a whiff of charlatanism about him, because it shows he knows what they want -- but when they choose their hero, they give themselves over to complete and sincere belief in him.
The "Losers" framing is a bit American, but tragedy has a long history, illustrating the difficulty of being subject to conflicting forces (typically moral, since societies push their interests as such) as a way for understanding to at least explain the pain, taking away the panic and sometimes the isolation. Suffering with some kind of style shows that one is still free, and thus independent of the forces (think Mark Twain humor). Willa Cather's work is more about realizing the big picture itself makes our personal suffering relatively small.
What brings me back to hacker news are these posts that ask questions yanked unexpectedly directly from my own soul, in words more articulate than I could manage. And then somehow manages to answer those questions. Thank you.
The British do have a difficult or perhaps just different relationship with heroes vs the US IMO. Some study has been made of this in the past. Even in comic books, where writers have traditionally been afforded more freedom (morally, philosophically, martially/violence, sexually even). Even in pure fantasy/sci-fi (take WH40K as an example). There are many fine US creators/studios, and excellent output, but I don't think the satirical and political elements could have come from there.
As divided as the US is right now, there's a bunch of things like this that every American seems to agree on without even realizing that it's not the same in most of the world.
For example, "work ethic". Correct me if I'm wrong, but you could write "worked very hard every day" on someone's tombstone, and almost every American seeing it, regardless of politics, will think "That was a good person". Someone to look up to.
Not "did good work", not "their work helped many people", definitely not "lived well". Even "was very productive" sounds too suspicious - being productive is great and all, but a productive person might be doing 10h worth of work in 5h and then call it a day, and that's just unacceptable, so that's not going on your tombstone either.
Just... work hard. The protestant ideal. Going on vacation and being too sick to work is literally the same thing, because it stops you from working hard.
There's a pretty big generational divide on this point, I think. I don't think many people under the age of 45 or so still see the "never took a sick day" thing as a laudatory statement.
(Also probably a regional divide too. I worry that I'm wrong about this when it comes to some places on the coasts, but I think it's accurate for most places in the country.)
Anecdotally (under 45; American), I agree that "never took a sick day" is indeed not a laudatory statement, but I also strongly believe that working hard is a prime virtue.
This might be a Polish thing but hero has to die. Does not matter if accomplishes a goal, just that hero put it all on the line against incredible odds.
This reminds me of the differences between the US version of The Office and the UK one. I’m actually fond of both but the boss character (as played by Ricky Gervais) in the UK version is absolutely reprehensible. And he’s the main focus of the show. The US version started that way but it just didn’t work at all. By the second season Steve Carrell’s character was a lovable doofus and the show was much better for it.
(I also think some line of thinking like this applies to politicians. British people almost always hate their politicians, even the ones they vote for. By comparison, in my experience, Americans really want to root for their candidate. Be that Obama or Trump, there’s a passion there you rarely see in the UK)
I bumped into this when using the YC cofounder finder a few years ago.
In Australia we share the Poms' attitude to failure and success, and have refined it into "Tall Poppy Syndrome". In Australia, it is bad form to boast of your successes too much. You need to have some humility, some awareness of luck and privilege, give credit to others, and don't come over too egotistical, to succeed here.
Obviously in the USA the opposite is true; any failure must be explained away, talk about as much success as possible, and claim all the credit for yourself.
It resulted in a few very strange conversations. I thought most of the US potential co-founders I met were arrogant, boastful, dickheads [0]. I didn't trust that any of their claimed successes were real, I didn't believe they'd done half the things they said they'd done, and I didn't want to work with them. And I'm sure they thought I was a complete loser, incompetent and unable to succeed at anything I tried.
I occasionally hear US VCs and investors complaining about this when they visit Straya; that people here don't celebrate our success, and we're not ambitious enough. I see this as a culture gap that they're not navigating successfully.
As has been said about the US/British relationship; "two countries divided by a common language"
[0] apologies if you were one of them. I'm sure you're not really!
Reading this, I am immediately reminded of Al Bundy in Married with children, isn't he An American hero quite similar to Arthur Dent? Other than that I always thought of the Show King of Queens as similarly depressing, ... would be curious how that fits into the narrative of American heros
Isn’t the whole point of Hamlet that he does have control over his life? At any moment he could have just stabbed Claudius and taken over. The dramatic tension comes from him being unable to get out of his own head and get down to businessto.
> Could "Mr. Bean" only be created by the Brits, or if not, where is his U.S.-American counterpart?
Pee-wee Herman, perhaps, at least in his original adult-comedy form?
Pee-wee was originally created because Paul Reubens couldn't do jokes in the traditional stand-up comedy sense. So he created a character who told jokes that always miss, but had the mentality of a child and thought his own material was hilarious.
> “Iran can't hit back over Soleimani's killing.¹ Who will we take out? Spider-man or SpongeBob SquarePants? They have no real heroes.”
But, fwiw, I don't think I agree with you. Mr bean is just as fictional as charlie brown, the medium or original intended audience doesn't seem very significant to me at all. Also george costanza is in there and I think 90s-2000s american sitcoms actually have a lot of the kind of character you have in mind.
¹: I don't agree with the quote either. As this article and comment section makes very clear, heroes and the definition of heroism are culturally embedded and not fully legible to outsiders, like probably every culture's heroes.
I feel like these lines are getting increasingly blurred. Eg "The Recruit" is basically "what if Mr Bean (could say entire sentences and was young and handsome and) would get a junior legal gig at the CIA". It's very American, action packed, everybody is steaming hot and there's conspiracies behind every corner, yet it is also all about the humour in failure and the extreme escalation that results from the protagonist's screwups.
An “Americanism” I noticed in the show Heroes first but now I see everywhere is that every hero just wants to be normal. Claire Bennet — who’s only special ability is healing — whines about the burden of this for several seasons! Just shut up already! You have what everybody wants and there’s basically no downside! Just put away the costume and get an office job if you want to be a normie.
Conversely, any metahuman that fully maximises their extra abilities is almost invariably labelled as evil. Magneto is the obvious candidate here, but Wolverine is even better: same powers as Claire Bennet but he leans into them… so he’s got to be an anti-hero type.
Is Arthur Dent the hero? I imbibed him more as a passive vessel to experience the absurdity of Douglas Adams universe. But it’s been a while since I read it.
He's not in the book or miniseries but the film adaptation gave him some arc iirc about doing something heroic on John Malkovich's planet to get the girl (Trillian). That all seems highly intentional based on the OP.
And once again with one sentence Adams is able to all but completely articulate an incredibly nuanced cultural topic:
> Terrible things happen to him, he complains about it a bit quite articulately, so we can really feel it along with him - then calms down and has a cup of tea. My kind of guy!
Some people can communicate on a truly different level.
There's more than one form of English humor. Last year I played through Thank Goodness You're Here!, which I think borrows from a lot of late-20th Century tv including Monty Python. It might be "nihlistic" in the sense that it's absurd but not depressing.
> You don't see this in the pre-WWI authors. Look at Rudyard Kipling (see Mowgli who although Indian is very English). Look at Burroughs and Tarzan. Or even Fleming and James Bond.
Not to detract from your broader point, but Burroughs was an American writing a British character in Tarzan.
Okay, literature aside, I've often discussed this with my SO. I feel like Americans are obsessed with heroes/villains. Every single issue that arises and is discussed online, is always viewed from the angle of "who do we support and/or who do we hate". During COVID it was Fauci and Dolly Parton, now it's Bovino and Good. I feel like Americans often have a need to put a single person on a pedestal as if they yearn for a symbol. A true cult of personality, for better or for worse.
Is Arthur Dent the hero? I imbibed him more as a passive vessel to experience the absurdity of Douglas Adams universe. But it’s been a while since I read it, but from memory all the situations are so absurd that I never felt myself yelling at the hero to make a more logical, or “herioc” decision because there wasn’t really a lot of sense in that sort of thing
I think so. He's more storm-tossed survivor than Moses parting the waves, but he makes the best of the endless shit he's dumped into and preserves his sense of self throughout. I think he responds heroically, far more than he fixes anything external. For example he finds himself marooned on a strange planet and sets up a Perfectly Normal Beast sandwich shop, living very comfortably for a while.
For what is he fighting against? Nothing really, he's just adrift in the universe. There's no antagonist beyond existence itself and his own circumstances. He faces off against both quite effectively.
Ja, storm tossed survivor /accidental stoic who do we have .. Bilbo, yossarian, Rincewind.. Bit of a tossup innit?
From memory so long is a bit of a departure from the rest of the series and felt like adams was giving dent a vacation/term of being the deliberate stoic
I call this take pseudo-intellectual indulgence form, so called, academic intelectuais.
Lord of the Rings is very much English Literature, and the biggest epic form the 20th century and has none of that. Ditto for Harry Poter (I’m not saying Harry Potter is on the same level of literary grandeur as LOTR, but it’s still an important epic series for newer generations).
You can always find examples for one side or the other of the argument. But, of course, only “social” scientists would be tick enough to claim some clear divide here as it suits their argument.
I don't think Adams is talking about how reluctant the hero is but about failure and misfortune.
Frodo definitely doesn't want to be there but he is far from being a failure. He saves Middle-earth, goes home to the Shire and saves that too, and is regarded as such an incredible mortal that he's invited to live in Valinor with the elves (this is a very big deal and I believe has only ever happened for Frodo and his buddies).
The same goes for Harry Potter. He's a loser at the beginning but after going to Hogwarts he's very much a hero that saves the day by being good at everything and exceptionally brave.
Also, I'd say there are plenty of reluctant heroes in American literature and film. Luke Skywalker hesitates to go save Leia in the first film, Spider-man straight up quits being Spider-man multiple times, John McClane just happened to be there when terrorists attack.
There’s absolutely no nihilism about Frodo. Not there isn’t any acceptance of pre determined fate when it comes to save Middle Heart.
LOTR is not empty, nor nihilist. It’s got many heroes, big and small, that fully embrace their part and fight against insurmountable odds with no expectation or any reward other than knowing they did the right thing.
The text is trying to tell us that English heroes are the exact opposite of that description.
It's hard distill entire countries like this (especially based on one guy's comments, told second hand). I understand Adams' quote in the context of Hollywood, but there's more to American culture than Hollywood. These are diverse nations & diversity is good.
Please don't post derogatory comments about nations or perpetuate national stereotypes or engage in political/ideological battle on HN. You've done this more than once. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is directly relevant to my wife's and my reading of the David Tennant & Olivia Coleman vehicle Broadchurch.
David Tennant's character is notably very bad at his job; that's why he got exiled to a backwater town. He bungled his last case so badly it made national news. In an American police procedural, we would either have some mitigating explanation for his failure, or at least some gritty vice or personal demon that was the real reason he got demoted.
In Broadchurch, Tennant's character just sucks at his job. Every episode of the show conforms to a formula where he gets suspicious of one of the other characters in the show and we spend the episode wasting time while it's finally determined that the suspect of the week is actually innocent. I have to say, it makes for entertaining television. It also resulted in my wife and I chorusing aloud, every episode, "he's SO BAD at his job!!"
(Minor Broadchurch spoilers) At the end when he finally catches the big bad, it's not because of anything he did. A coincidence and some carelessness on the part of the big bad lead to the mystery being solved. Also, every other character on the show had already been ruled out.
Since watching it we've kept a lookout for protagonists who embody the "everyman in way over his head who accomplished virtually nothing himself" archetype. It's fun to know Adams held forth on the very subject.
"David Tennant's character is notably very bad at his job; that's why he got exiled to a backwater town."
Worth noting that in Hot Fuzz (also featuring Olivia Coleman!) the main character is exiled to a rural location for being too good at his job.
That movie is a long series of spoofs nicely spliced together to form a story. To the point that it even works in the reverse, you've seen Hot Fuzz and then years later you watch some other movie and suddenly you realize that's where they got it.
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A lot of people cite Hot Fuzz as one of the best examples in filmmaking. Almost everything is a setup for a joke or scene that resolves later on in the film.
In the 12th century a Welsh writer named Walter Map wrote the line "no good deed unpunished, no bad one unrewarded". Not quite English but maybe he was already expressing the whimsy of the English kingdom.
She’s also in Peep Show, which to this day is my favourite British television series.
It’s such a good piece of dark comedy.
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Warms my heart to see fellow Edgar Wright fans here. Felt bad about his recent film results. I waited years for that. :/
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The older I get, the more I suspect the Neighborhood Watch Alliance of being behind all society's problems.
This is also the core conceit of Slow Horses, the Gary Oldman AppleTV show. An office filled with MI5 officers who screwed up and so can’t be trusted with anything important.
I haven’t seen Broadchurch, but I have seen Slow Horses and it doesn’t seem like the description applies. Sure, they are “exiled” MI5 officers, but they also save the day every season, and not through luck. They’re not completely incompetent. Take River: he was sent to the Slough House due to a mistake someone else made. Ho was sent there due to character flaws, despite being the most skilled at his job.
Except in Slow Horses, most of them are exceptional at least in some way. Many of them are too difficult to work with, yes, but they do excel at _something_. That is very different from being _all around mediocre_.
Hold on, wasn't the flak he got for the case before the show started actually because he was covering for his wife (who was also working on the case)? She was having an affair and left the evidence in her car where it was stolen. He didn't say anything so their daughter wouldn't know, and took the fall for the case's failure, even though it wasn't his fault at all.
I didn't quite get the same read on the show you did. It seemed like the dynamic was that Olivia Coleman couldn't imagine anyone she knew being the killer, contrasted against Tennant being aggressively willing to suspect anyone, which is how they were able to rule the various suspects out.
It's admittedly been years since I saw it; I don't remember the entire mitigating bit about covering for his wife, but a lot went on in that series finale and I've had covid a few times since.
I like your read on their dynamic as foils to each other; I'll have to give it another watch with your read in mind.
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> Every episode of the show conforms to a formula where he gets suspicious of one of the other characters in the show and we spend the episode wasting time while it's finally determined that the suspect of the week is actually innocent.
Something like this applies in the UK Midsomer Murders. Specifically, in the episodes where one of the suspects has a prior criminal record, they always get grief from Inspector Barnaby's current sidekick but are then proven innocent of the current crime. However, if an old police colleague from Barnaby's past offers to help, they are always guilty of something.
Did you know there is a American reboot of broadchurch also starring David Tennant? It's called Gracepoint.
I haven't seen it myself, but I wonder if it conforms to your theory: does the detective in that show have mitigating explanations for his failures?
“In an American police procedural, we would either have…”
In the first minutes of the American show “Keen Eddie”, the titular character bungles a project so badly that he is exiled to London.
It unfortunately lasted only one season.
This very good description makes it sound like a comedy, which it absolutely isn't, although I note that Olivia Colman got her break in dark comedy Peep Show.
It's so far from comedy that I couldn't make it through the series. When it comes up in conversation, I tend to describe it as "grief porn."
Ah, I should have made that clear, yes. We derived some unintended humor from the mismatch in cultural expectations, but Broadchurch is as serious as a heart attack.
(Didn't stop me and my wife from yelling MELLAR!! at each other across the house for weeks afterward.)*
*(He yells his partner Miller's name a lot in his Scottish accent.)
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Today I learned that I would make a terrible detective!
When I watched Broadchurch with my family, I thought he was doing a fine job at getting to the bottom of the case. Goes to show much crime drama I watch.
I see now that Tennant's character's actions are a plot device to reveal the drama amongst the other characters, not the workings of a good detective.
That reminds me a lot of slow horses as well.
Slow Horses is so equal-opportunity with how it hands out ineptitude. About the only character on the show who isn't inept is Lamb (Gary Oldman), but is such a wretched character, you could actually hardly find a moment to root for him. It's fantastic.
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Slough House denizens screw up in blatant, over the top ways. While the Park screw up in ways that leave geopolitical consequences festering for years or decades while being good at covering their own asses.
The plot is generally some evil, corrupt actions the Park took in the past are coming home to roost and only the bumbling losers in Slough House can fix it (kind of, eventually, in a "at least London wasn't blown off the face of the earth" kind of way).
God that show is fantastic.
Yes, exactly my first thought as well. Fantastic show!
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The game Disco Elysium is kind of like this. Just know that the game is 99% reading and rolling dice.
Apropos of nothing besides the mention of Disco Elysium, I present to you the best item in a CRPG: https://discoelysium.fandom.com/wiki/Volumetric_Shit_Compres...
…sort of, but the game does ultimately make clear that for all his faults, the protagonist is (and was, before the amnesia) exceedingly good at what he does.
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> Since watching it we've kept a lookout for protagonists who embody the "everyman in way over his head who accomplished virtually nothing himself" archetype.
You might enjoy Joyce Porter’s Dover series.
That sounds awfully similar to our own reading of Department Q. I'll watch it too.
Department Q is a weird one because it goes with the trope of the acerbic hyper-competent guy, but then… actually, I don’t recall, is he actually incompetent? Or does he just not quite live up to his over-confidence.
Also it is sometimes hard with these detective shows because the screenwriters might want a character to be hyper-competent, but they are people too, limited in their ability to portray super-competent abilities. This can result in characters lucking their way into clues.
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Well, he was good at not quitting.
My take is quite different. EVERYONE in Broadchurch is at least nearly-criminally incompetent.
"Ooh, I'm an investigative detective in a homicide. I think I'll forget myself and beat up somebody in lockup!"
"What's that, evidence? I think I'll withhold it for minor personal reasons."
"Hey, there's a pedophile investigation going on. I think I'll lie about my 'alone time' with a teenage boy to EVERYONE, just to avoid arousing suspicion..."
Tennant's advantage is that, in season one, he's not emotionally tied up in this completely tangled small town. He's got some professional competencies over Miller, but not many.
Sounds like a much-more-fleshed-out version of Inspector Gadget!
I recently watched One Punch man which made me think about heroism, what a hero is and what it means. Saitama, and the top tier famous heroes in the story rarely risks anything. Their immense power just makes their actions an illusion of being heroic, theres rarely anything at stake for them, Saitama especially.
Mumen rider is an example of a true hero to me in that story, his only superpower being that he rides a bicycle, and he stands before certain destruction just to delay the monsters from hurting innocents for a few seconds. Risking everything.
By that definition, most superheroes, like the Avengers just look like power fantasies, does Spider-man or superman ever really risk anything substansial or acts in the face of certain destruction.
These super heroes have very different tones depending on the author, but spider-man usually constantly has to balance his anonymous personal life with his super heroism. In the Raimi trilogy specially, he gets screwed over a lot.
When I was a kid reading Marvel comics, Spiderman seemed like a bad and relatively uninteresting super hero. His problems were trivial personal issues and he rarely left NYC, fighting local crime or villains like Green Goblin who were just broken humans. Meanwhile the Fantastic Four were in regular contact with government institutions, went into space, and fought interstellar aliens. They just seemed better and more important. Not to mention the Avengers.
As an adult, while Marvel isn't my favorite thing anymore, I find Spiderman to their most interesting superhero.
Same with Naruto. Naruto and Sasuke are both essentially nepo babies inheriting these amazing powers and breaking barriers on day one. They fall down, but get up like its a scratch.
Meanwhile, Sakura, born of no remarkable parentage and easily sidelined plays an initial supporting role to these two egomaniacs.
But, she uses what little power she has and finesses it to medical precision.
She still fails, but I care about her battles a lot.
It's really sad that Kishimoto so terrible at writing female characters. I'm not being a hater when I say this, he has even complained about this himself!
In terms of character concepts he's always really great - Naruto is one of the few series I read almost from the start, all the way to the finish. At the beginning of the series the concept for all male and female characters started out really interesting. But the female characters barely got any development compared to the male ones, and it got worse as the series went on. Partially because it ended up focusing more and more on Naruto and Sasuke, partially because the majority of the female character development was reduced to how they relate to the male characters.
I don't think it's intentional or that Kishi has any malice towards women or anything - if that was the case I doubt he would have been able to come up with interesting character concepts for women in the first place. But the fact that they're sidelined like that still sucks, especially since the potential is there.
I'm glad that Sakura got to be a bad-ass in a few of the side-stories after the main series ended at least.
And then you end up with contrived plot points like kryptonite.
Or the alternative: plot armor so thick people even get brought back from the dead regularly.
In One Punch man the gag is that while everyone is fighting for their lives, Saitama is usually distracted by other priorities that are often trivial (such as getting some bug spray, or saving some money down the local convenience shop as they have a sale on noodles), he also rarely gets the recognised for saving the day once he does bother so show up.
I especially liked when he described his super hard training to an acolyte. "What do you mean 100 pushups, 100 squats, 100 sitdows and run? It is just a standard training, not even that hard!!!"
Scene (wit subs): https://youtu.be/tIGeJEehzys?t=134
Good point.
I've been rewatching the Alice In Borderland series (much less well known than Squid Games, but with a similar idea) and I think that's a much better portrayal of heroism as the players of the games have no special abilities at all - just their strength, agility, wits and knowledge. Due to the lethal nature of the games, everything is on the line with every game although there's nearly always a "smart" way to get through the game (maybe not the hearts games though - they're just designed to be cruel).
My particular favourite game in AIB is when the character Chishiya (Cheshire Cat) is playing the King of Diamonds and the winners of that game end up being the characters who either risk or sacrifice everything.
Counterpoint: Charlie Brown
A big part of what makes Charlie Brown so endearing is his undying earnestness and optimism in the face of near constant bad luck and disappointment.
He is exactly the lovable loser archetype that this piece says Americans do not dig. Yet the Peanuts comics and cartoons and an American pop cultural institution.
OP here (though I don't claim any special insight, as I said).
It would be interesting to consider the differences between the Charlie Brown and Arthur Dent character archetypes.
One difference seems to me exactly the undying earnestness and optimism you mentioned: in a way, Charlie Brown and other American characters like him are simply not touched by failure (even if bad things happen to them), because of their optimism[1]. This makes them lovable: we appreciate them for this quality that we (most of the audience) do not have.
[1]: (or lack of self-awareness, in some other cases mentioned here like Homer Simpson or Peter Griffin)
Arthur Dent, on the other hand, is not gifted with undying optimism. He's constantly moaning about things, starting with his house and his planet being destroyed. This makes him relatable more than lovable: he's not a “lovable loser” (and for the right audience, does not seem a “loser” at all), he is just us, “my kind of guy” — we feel kinship rather than appreciation. We relate to the moaning (if Arthur Dent were to remain unfailingly optimistic, he'd be… different), whereas if Charlie Brown were to lose his optimism or if Homer were to say "D'oh!" to complain about big things in life rather than hurting his thumb or whatever, they would become less of the endearing American institutions they are IMO.
OP, if you’re still lurking, are you familiar with the Flashman series? I feel like it falls somewhere between the poles here. Either way, would highly recommend it to anyone who likes Adams, history, learning or reprobates.
I would not say that Charlie Brown is untouched by failure. He does descend to the depths of despair. But some how rises from it to try (and fail) again. This trope is seen best with Lucy pulling away the football every time he goes to kick it. Even though he knows he's failed every time, he talks himself into this time being different.
This does not contradict your overriding point, just adding nuance to the claim he is "simply not touched by failure".
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/culture/article/20241205-how-charles-m...
> Back in 1977, Schulz insisted that the cartoonist's role was mostly to point out problems rather than trying to solve them, but there was one lesson that people could take from his work. He said: "I suppose one of the solutions is, as Charlie Brown, just to keep on trying. He never gives up. And if anybody should give up, he should."
In American storytelling, being optimistic overcomes being a failure. In fact, you haven't failed if you still have hope.
Homer Simpson is an idiot, but he doesn't give up. That's endearing enough to hold the protagonist roll.
Yes, that's the part that Americans miss and the previous commenter missed. Charlie Brown is still optimistic.
To dig the English comedy you need to accept that you are or the protagonist is a failure. Your or their life will never significantly improve and they made peace with it. You covet and enjoy small moments of happiness. Happiness is not the winning big but returning home.
He's also frequently mean. I don't get the love for him.
That is another aspect of humor that Brits and Americans share, but also do very differently.
I wonder if Candide is the prototype of this.
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Also a counterpoint, but from the other side (from British Speculative fiction): Terry Pratchett's Discworld series
These books, written by a British author, are full of characters with strong wants who are roused into situation-defying action.
These books are also best-sellers on _both_ sides of the pond, and often share shelves with Adams.
Almost all of Pratchett's greatest characters are highly flawed, morally complex and anti-heroic. This is the main point. This premise includes everyone from Cohen the barbarian, through Vimes, Rincewind, Susan, all the witches, Moist Von Lipwig, all the way to DEATH.
That's one of the main reasons that Terry's work comprehensively bridges the genre gap between "children's books" and "modern philosophy".
My favorite part about Pratchett is that the characters who are most competent choose to act in the best interest of the less competent “normies” who will never understand or appreciate what they’re doing on their behalf.
Pratchett did start the series with a loser protagonist, Rincewind, before pivoting to mostly competent main characters.
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99% of references I see to Charlie Brown in the U.S. are as a sucker who never learns.
Referencing does not necessarily equate to sentiment though. Similar to seeing Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes peeing on thing decals isn't representative to the admiration to the comic series. The "woop woop woop woop" adult voice is another core element to US culture making fun of authorative figures, but doesn't dismiss them as unneed aspects to life.
Those references are to the recurring gag with Lucy and the football.
There’s a lot more to the character than that so I hope 99% is an exaggeration and people are still reading Peanuts and watching the various animated versions. I’m pretty sure they are.
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I'm enjoying the discussion of Charlie Brown, but while Peanuts is indeed an American pop cultural institution, I never really thought of CB as a 'hero', or even really a protagonist.
While there were cartoons where he's the protagonist (I recently watched A Charlie Brown Christmas), his main medium is the comic strips, and Peanuts generally didn't tell a continuous story (if at all), unlike, say, the superhero comic strips. Instead, they're little vignettes of life, and like most serial comic strips, you're meant to relate to them, get a nugget of wisdom or insight, or a chuckle. We mostly read them as kids who were bored and wanted something like a cartoon until Saturday came around (I realize adults read them, too, but today that seems rare, almost unimaginable to me now). So I'm not sure Charlie Brown really counts as a counterexample, here.
Even the cartoons are not so beloved that they're widely rewatched by adults for their storytelling. People have nostalgia for them because they're something they watched as children. This is the main reason I watched A Charlie Brown Christmas recently, and it's kind of a mostly sad story with a weird resolution. Thanksgiving was practically unwatchable. The Garfield cartoons also do not hold up, imo.
Wouldn't Snoopy be the hero ?
CB could be called a "midtagonist", but apparently that would be someone who really likes a particular type of fly-fishing lure.
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> I never really thought of CB as a 'hero', or even really a protagonist.
Yup totally.
As an european I always saw, as a kid, Snoopy as the hero who had lots of humor and who was likable. I'd describe Charlie Brown as "invisible" as I barely remember him.
Only a European, and one who grew up on US stuff, fondly so, charlie brown feels very low on the exposed and perceived American ethos / values. I saw a few strips and refs .. but that's about it.
It’s practically institutionalized at school. Major holidays are marked by watching Charlie Brown in class at a young age.
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Charlie Brown does feel more like a symbol of a bygone era rather than an embodiment of the 21st century American psyche
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He has more modern versions in Homer Simpson and Peter Griffin. But most of the failures or misfortunes they experience are quite mild or temporary, all things considered.
From Stephen Fry: "You know that scene in Animal House where there’s a fellow playing folk music on the guitar, and John Belushi picks up the guitar and destroys it. And the cinema loves it. Well, the British comedian would want to play the folk singer. We want to play the failure."
Homer and Peter Griffin are idiots but they smash the guitar. Charlie Brown gets his guitar smashed.
I think this is a distinction between comedy and non-comedy genres.
There are many examples of protags in American comedies who never get their way -- Party Down, Seinfeld, Always Sunny. Part of this is the need for American sitcoms to maintain the status quo over dozens of episodes / several seasons.
You rarely see Hollywood action heroes who are beset with unrelenting disappointment -- they usually go through hell, but by the end of the third act, achieve some sort of triumph.
A notable counterexample is Sicario, but I wouldn't call it a "Hollywood action movie."
In the first Indiana Jones, the hero makes no positive contribution to the outcome in the end. He is just along for the ride.
To be fair, it requires a little bit of thinking to see. The general audience might see it as success because the outcome was "good" even if it had nothing to do with anything Jones did.
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I'd say there are more. Courage the Cowardly Dog? Very much in the lovable loser camp. The Eds from Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy also fit, but I suppose you could say that's a Canadian show.
Indeed, also a great example of a failing bumbling lovable loser who is frequently considered a hero to many Americans is Homer Simpson. Homer Simpson is a hero to many people in America, especially among the working class. It's not a pure example, because Homer does inadvertently succeed often, but it's almost always because of some crazy luck, not because of some skill or even perseverance.
I largely agree with Douglas Adams assessment of the cultural differences. I think it's pretty clear that he is on to something in a general sense. But there are definitely exceptions in my opinion. It's just way too diverse and way too complex a formula to ratchet down in such a narrow way.
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Courage always overcomes the challenge by being brave even though he is scared.
Those shows are also on purpose far out and weird in their style and story telling.
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Not just Charlie Brown. The entire cast of the comic.
* Charlie Brown will never talk to the Red Haired Girl. His kites will always be eaten by a tree. He'll never win a baseball game. He'll never kick the football. He has abominably low self-esteem.
* Lucy's infatuation with Schroder is clearly one-sided; likewise Peppermint Patty / Charlie Brown; also Sally/Linus.
* Snoopy will never get the Red Baron, nor enjoy publishing success
* Linus will never stop believing in The Great Pumpkin and is disappointed every year.
Probably loads more. The comic is about losers, and losing.
He did eventually win a baseball game. https://www.sportingnews.com/us/mlb/news/march-30-1993-after...
I don’t know anything about Charlie Brown, but I’m not sure constant bad luck and disappointment capture the spirit of the British humour being discussed, as that can just as easily be used to describe slapstick humour. Perhaps it’s the existential futility/resignation that’s missing? Charlie Brown is a child, so they perhaps have optimistic naïveté instead (such that their failure be viewed with pity instead of kinship, which is really the distinction here).
Charlie Brown is dying in America. Gen Z doesn't know who he is.
Charlie Brown is actually pretty big right now- my gen z daughter has her entire classroom decked out in him and he's over Target, etc. He fits in with the cozy subculture part of gen z.
.....Snoopy is literally making a huge comeback with that generation
Bro literally everyone I know has watched at least the Great Pumpkin and Charlie Brown Christmas. People my age regularly make memes based on the football gag. It’s a cultural icon.
As a general rule actually, I’d say that Gen Z is more likely than may be expected to know about culture from before our time - the internet, after all, is a back catalogue of the best hits of humanity. That’s why spotify thinks we all have a listening age of 70.
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Apple just created a new Charlie Brown series and my 6-year-old daughter has already devoured it. I'm trying to get her to say "good grief!" more often.
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Another counterpoint: Columbo
Columbo is anything but a failure, though, and the audience knows that. His genius is leveraging humility to convince killers that he's a bumbling idiot, while in reality he's onto them from the first encounter.
_Slow Horses_ came up in another thread. I'd argue that Columbo has more in common with Jackson Lamb than with Charlie Brown.
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Most Americans wouldn't consider Charlie Brown the "hero" of his strip, they would consider him a loser who gets what he deserves, and that's the joke. He isn't cool the way Snoopy is cool.
I think the article is correct that Americans don't feel sympathy for the underdog who doesn't overcome and succeed in the end so much as contempt, due to their inborn sense of entitlement and belief that failure is caused by a lack of moral fortitude and excess of laziness rather than systemic injustice and inequality.
Americans are a pretty diverse group, but the most iconic image anyone has of Charlie Brown is perseverance. Lucy sets up a football promising potential success, and despite the fact that she's pulled it away from him at every opportunity, he still tries to kick it anyway.
I think that's a quintessentially American fable. Most people will never achieve great success, but they can experience the thrill of imagining opportunity, and even if they know it's illusory, that moment of faith and effort before failure is the heroic action.
People will do stupid things like bet their life savings on a game or a bad idea, but they feel heroic for having tried regardless, knowing that if enough people keep trying, someone is going to succeed, and they get to experience that success vicariously in some small amount because they tried just as hard as the one who succeeded, experienced the same struggle, and somebody made it, even if it was never going to be them.
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Charlie Brown is more like Peter Parker.
He always does the right thing. In spite of always being punished for it.
Systemic? It goes way beyond that.
Nature itself ensures that life is short, brutal, violent, and punctuated with horrors. Happiness is a transient state that loses its power if it is present more than part of the time, and joy can only exist in a backdrop of disappointment, or it just becomes another day in the life. We are wired for a life of failure, disappointment, trauma, tragedy, and loss.
That we have wrested a comfortable civilization from these dire circumstances is a great testament to the resolve and resourcefulness of men and women.
We have the great privilege and responsibility of living in this elevated plane, with a long (as biologicaly possible) life lived in relative comfort, and even insulated from the horrors of life by the drapery of civil machinery.
Even so, the only justice in this world is the justice we create ourselves.
The universe owes us nothing, and sometimes collects its debt for the entropy we take from it.
I think the fact that most Americans call it "Charlie Brown" when the name of it is actually "Peanuts" proves you wrong.
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When you go out of your way to bash American culture for no reason (with some bonus racism thrown in a few comments down!) it really drags the discussion down. I really wish you wouldn't do that, it's just making the site worse for everyone.
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> they would consider him a loser
What about Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes?
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> Most Americans wouldn't consider Charlie Brown the "hero" of his strip, they would consider him a loser who gets what he deserves, and that's the joke.
I don't think you speak for most Americans. That's the cruelest interpretation I've ever heard of Charlie Brown.
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As with everything else, sweeping generalizations about "culture" rarely hold up in the modern world.
Stephen Fry made the same remarks in a Q&A session some years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k2AbqTBxao
As a Brit I can't agree more with both, I find American humour so hard to relate to but I guess it's just a culture thing
His point of high church vs. Protestantism is a good one. We in the US practice a kind of competitive Protestantism designed--at least partly, if not mostly--to make the adherents feel good about themselves. There is a distinct difference between submission and proselytizing.
There is also something to the state of empire as well. The British empire had been in steady decline for a very long time before Adams or Fry started making people laugh, whereas the American empire has been ascending quickly since WWII. This sort of gestalt is hard to ignore and will certainly influence things. For example, would a 'Blackadder' sell as well in 1890? This is around the same time 'King Solomon's Mines' was selling briskly, and Haggard's story is instantly recognizable by any modern Hollywood writer.
On some level Americans are British people time-displaced by a couple of generations.
"On some level Americans are British people time-displaced by a couple of generations."
At a certain level I don't think the UK ever recovered from WW1.
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In Japanese culture the failed hero is also revered, but in a solemn rather than comedic way.
Minamoto no Yoshitsune, Kusunoki Masashige, The Standing Death of Benkei, Saigo Takamori (the last samurai), the Kamikaze pilots, even Yukio Mishima...
What's interesting is that unlike the British fatalism, Japanese failed heroes are driven by duty and honor and tradition above all (even at the cost of themselves). To an outsider they are foolishly stubborn and unwilling to accept an imperfect or changing world. But in Japan that is something to be admired.
I find more modern American humour much easier to relate to, probably because it has veered more in this direction. A show like Always Sunny seems incredibly British-compatible because it's about terrible people getting their comeuppance, yet still being sympathetic despite their failings.
To go full British, you need characters like David Brent, who aren't sympathetic. They have no redeeming heartfelt goodbye. No-one is sad when they're gone, life moves on.
I would also say that the Always Sunny gang really aren't sympathetic either, but it's a para-social trick of having spent so much time "together" with them over so many episodes.
I suspect a new viewer coming to watch the latest series of IASIP would not see them as sympathetic. That's quite different to The Office (US), where a new viewer skipping to later seasons would not have the same opinions as a new viewer watching season 1, where Scott was much closer to a Brent type character, before he was redeemed and made more pitiable than awful over the seasons.
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I only watched the first few seasons of IASIP, but I don’t remember them being sympathetic characters at all. The whole concept, and what made it funny, I thought, is that they really are all terrible people who just drag each other down.
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Yeah this does seem right. Maybe as our own empire has been collapsing, our culture has been edging toward the brits'.
Another great example of this is British SF, especially 20th century Doctor Who and Blake's 7, vs American SF such as Star Wars/Trek. The British version can be much bleaker. And of course Red Dwarf, which doesn't translate at all into American. (There was a single pilot episode)
Edit: someone downthread mentioned Limmy's Show and Absolutely, to which I would add Burnistoun. Scottish humor is even more grimly fatalist than English.
> And of course Red Dwarf, which doesn't translate at all into American.
The American version is Futurama (agreeing with your point and with the cultural differences discussed throughout this thread.)
> The British version can be much bleaker.
I think this one is a miss. TOS is inspired by _british_ naval history. Loss, fear, and failure are central to the show. In this era of TV, leading characters still had large flaws. Kirk is frozen by choice, Spock believes himself superior, Bones is a bigoted luddite. We as viewers get to see the pain this causes and their efforts to improve. It's wholly different than modern US television including all other ST media. Meanwhile, 70s Dr. Who is packed with automatic weapons fire and explosions and the formula has always been the Doctor knows best. (I am a huge fan of all the mentioned shows.)
For a good, modern example we can look at Ghosts (suddenly renamed "Ghosts UK" on my streaming services) and Ghosts US. The adaptation is agonizing. They stripped the important aspects of the story but kept a boy scout, toy soldier, and an interracial marriage. I found that telling.
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"Greetings"
The ending to Blake's 7 doesn't get any bleaker.
Red Dwarf was hilarious. Highly recommend the books, as they contain a lot of jokes that wouldn't translate to screen easily and would resonate with anyone who enjoys humour in the vein of Adams.
> Scottish humor is even more grimly fatalist than English.
Typified by Rab C Nesbitt. "An alcoholic Glaswegian who seeks unemployment as a lifestyle choice".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rab_C._Nesbitt
Tbf, Star Trek TOS was also a sci fi show with an FX budget of two shoelaces and a pack of gum, and had to be carrier by great actors and writing, which it absolutely was. It's still my favourite Star Trek to this day.
I think the problem with how the US makes shows is that once something get successful, it gets a budget, which means the writing needs to appeal to a broader audience, which makes the whole thing blander.
I might be ignorant of US television pop culture, but I think, at least before the 90s, the UK produced much more memorable scifi shows (and even in the 90s, a lot of those US shows were secretly Canadian)
Does the Office have heroes? It turned out to translate very well into American.
That Red Dwarf pilot was actually fine except for the bizarre choice of making Lister a hunk. Rimmer was fine, Holly was great.
I think there is a divide, but it isn't the Atlantic ocean.
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Also mustn't forget Derry Girls. Uncle Colm is a classic.
“So I says to the taller fella, I says… although there weren’t more than an inch between ‘em…”
Star Wars is not scifi. Star Trek has nothing to do with SW.
As a Brit, I generally prefer American Humour when it comes to comedy. My favourite films are Happy Gilmore and Tropic Thunder. A lot of British Humour is around that everything is crap, it gets tiresome after a while.
Yes, definitely a culture thing. I had a very difficult time finding most British humor funny when I was younger, but my personality combination of loving humor and comedy and also being incredibly interested in people, drove me to want to understand why British humor was funny when most of the time it just seemed so absurd.
It was a multi-decade path so it's very difficult to identify progression points, but slowly through exposure I began to "get it" and now I adore British comedy and humor. I still adore American comedy and humor as well, but the more exposure to the culture I got, the more I understood it.
Obviously that's just anecdotal, but I personally find it strong evidence that the humor divide is indeed cultural. The more similar cultures are to begin with, the easier the leap is.
To me the most exciting part of this is that it means there are thousands of other cultures on this planet that have humor that I have not unlocked yet. Someday I hope to!
Edit: for a very fascinating example of differences, I love comparing the UK version of the office to the US version of the office. To many Americans, David Brent mostly just came off mean and an asshole, even a poisonous one, whereas Michael Scott comes off as eccentric and clueless and unable to read the room, but overall a mostly good guy. That perception makes David Brent kind of hateable whereas Michael Scott kind of lovable.
Another fascinating point of comparison is the UK version of ghosts, versus the US version of ghosts. I'll leave comparisons and contrasts on those to others as I haven't watched all of the UK version of ghosts yet. I'd be fascinated to hear what others think of that, and the office for that matter.
It's the opposite for me - the 'you can't change anything, the world sucks, the best you can do is endure and be snarky about it' attitude appealed a lot more to me when I was younger.
I watched both versions of Ghosts, and found them to be quite similar honestly. The US version can be a little more slapstick and a little more goofy, but that's about it.
David Brent is poisonous, and indeed hatable. The point of the British version of the show is not that he's more tolerable or likeable to the British. If anything it's more pointed how awful he is this side of the water, given the preponderance of bosses exactly like this. What makes the show work in the UK (and Ireland), is a greater cultural willingness to see the worst aspects of reality reflected in entertainment. Versus the focus on escapism in even the most grim US television - i.e.: Tony Soprano is a monster, but he also has charisma and glamour. Walter White is dying and becoming more and more amoral, but he also goes from being a dork to a badass. Both characters are utter glamorisations of what their real life counterparts would be like. Along with the surrealism there's a genuine existentialism to the darkest of UK comedy - from early Alan Partridge to Nighty Night. An actual interest in examining the nature of cruelty and suffering.
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Very interesting! Except I noted that he referred to David Brent from The Office, and we have a direct corollary to that character, of course, in Michael Scott from The Office. They really didn't change the formula for American audiences, he's absolutely still a comedic failure. Starting in the second season, he becomes a bit more of a lovable comedic failure, but the basic point of the character stands. And he is beloved by American audiences!
So the exact opposite of David Brent. As the show goes on you don't discover a single thing to make you like him.
I also really enjoyed After Life (with Ricky Gervais). I wouldn't call him a hero, but then again maybe I would. So honest, so pissed off, so intelligent.
Sick Note with Rupert Grint, same thing. Brilliant.
I'm currently reading the Bobbiverse series. Sure the guy is sort of a hero. But he is also an antihero forced to do heroic things, while he just wants to geek out and enjoy his coffee while making star trek references.
I'm not British btw.
As an American I'm a huge fan of HHGG and Rowan Atkinson (not just his Bean character). I'm also a huge fan of Conan O'Brien and his Harvard generation's work for The Simpsons. Would be far ahead of Adams' time. Though while I find them _okay_ I never laughed so hard that my face and stomach hurt from laughter when watching Monty Python anything, not even Black Adder. For other American comedy what made me really, really laugh so hard was Kenan & Kel and The Lonely Island's work for SNL.
I've tried to find something as funny as HHGG for so long that I've read P.G. Wodehouse as Adam's main inspiration. Also watched Fry & Laurey. I guess Sacha Cohen as British humour? Since he's Cambridge Highlights alum after all. Found his works extremely hilarious though the parody of racism was disgusting.
Here is Conan's best (natural) performance roasting the Google CEO and gOogLers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7TwqpWiY5s
As an older American, I’ve always found British humor of the Monty Python type hilarious.
Unfortunately, I haven’t found a lot of newer material of this type. I may have to look harder.
What do you mean by "this type"?
The sketch show format has been pretty much entirely killed off by TikTok & Instagram.
It's very hard to do a sketch that hasn't already been done on TikTok with a tiny fraction of the budget.
Absurdist humour still exists everywhere, it's less popular than either Python in the 70's / 80's, or the flash era in the 2000s, but it's still everywhere, but I'd also wager it is not to your taste.
At the risk of offending just about everyone, I would suggest that something like "Skibidi Toilet" is just this generation's badger-badger-mushroom, which in turn was that generations' "Bring me a shrubbery!".
Sketch shows in particular don't work well for TV in this era. Mitchell and Webb tried hard to return with one this year and it just fell flat, the jokes feel telegraphed from a mile-away, taking a minute to get to a punchline in a era when the same jokes are told in a 10 second short.
The downside of the tiktok/insta model, is that the more successful people on Insta end up just re-telling their one good joke over and over. ( Or indeed, re-recording someone else's one good joke. ).
Not that sketch shows didn't also repeat jokes sometimes, but they could at least play around with a punchline in unexpected ways, or have callbacks and nods to earlier sketches in a series. That kind of non-continuity doesn't work when you don't know which tiktoks will go viral, or which order your audience will see them in, as the algorithm dictates all.
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As in surreal British sketch comedy? You'd like
- The Goon Show (it's this 1950s radio serial that inspired the Pythons... it's surprising how many tropes the Pythons borrowed from it)
- The Goodies
- The Kenny Everett Television Show
- Absolutely!
- The Mighty Boosh / Unnatural Acts / Noel Fielding's Luxury Comedy
- Vic Reeves' Big Night Out / The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer / Bang Bang, It's Reeves and Mortimer
- Big Train
- The League of Gentlemen
- On the Hour / The Day Today / Brass Eye
- Jam / Blue Jam
- The Armando Iannucci Shows
- Limmy's Show
Also, to throw in a US programme, I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson was pretty good
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As a fellow older American who loves Monty Python, the more modern British shows I've enjoyed the most were Green Wing, League of Gentlemen, Peep Show, and Doc Martin. Of those, League of Gentlemen and Green Wing have the most Python-like absurdity, while Doc Martin has the most subtle humor. Peep Show is hilarious, but the most crass humor of those listed, although League of Gentlemen doesn't shy away from crassness either.
If you're a gamer, pick up Thank Goodness You're Here!
> I find American humour so hard to relate to but I guess it's just a culture thing
These kind of comments always puzzle me. Hollywood makes stuff for the entire world, not just for a domestic audience.
Shows like Friends, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, pretty much any big sitcom you can name is in syndication in most countries around the world, because of how relatable it is.
It's often not sophisticated, and can be quite shallow (See Two and a half men or Big Bang theory), but it being hard to relate to is unlikely to be an issue.
Don't underestimate the power of big media corporations to push a world view. When I was a kid in NZ, British culture was impressed on us via the media. These days, there's more American influence. I don't think that's to do with the inherent quality of those cultures.
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The phenomenon Adams is talking about here is largely a post-WW1 phenomenon in UK culture, related to the post-WW1 malaise. His best examples are post-WW1 (Paul Pennyfeather, Tony Last, and the book by Stephen Pile). The others arguably don't really fit (e.g., the core delight in Gulliver is the reader thinking they are smarter than Gulliver; the reader doesn't identify with him). It's not exactly a new observation... one of the motivations both Tolkien and CS Lewis had for strong characters like Aragorn was to present examples falling outside this cultural drift.
Yes. See also Fleming’s James Bond. Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby. *
This phenomenon is post-WWI and post-WWII and losing the greatest empire in history in a single generation trauma being retconned as if were the historical English perspective.
* Removed previously incorrect statement including Edgar Rice Burroughs who is an American although Tarzan is English
Edgar Rice Burroughs lived his entire life in the USA, right?
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I'm not sure I understand the Burroughs example as relevant to the UK, but another good illustration is Thomas Hardy. His books sold well but were never seen as consistent with the UK cultural mainstream, and the reaction to Jude the Obscure in 1895 stopped him from writing novels entirely. Yet post-WWI he came to be seen/adopted as a mainstream cultural icon.
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As much as I love American upbeat-ness (I'm American) I think that our hatred of failure and our strained optimism puts a tremendous psychological pressure on us. Sometimes, we fail, and that's okay. Sometimes, we lose, and that's just life. I think that's an essential part of growing up, and our collective denial of that makes me feel like we, as a people, are not quite mature.
I think (we) Americans hate failure only when people give up.
We have a very long tradition of failure leading to success, everything from Edison trying hundreds of lightbulbs to Don Draper in Mad Men reinventing himself after failure.
Our bankruptcy laws are different from other countries in how lenient they are towards the debtor. And, of course, the entire culture of Silicon Valley is about failure after failure followed by success.
And it's not even conventional, economic success that we want. We're happy when someone finds happiness even if not financial success. The rich-person-gives-up-everything-for-love is a familiar American trope.
We don't like failure, but we forgive it, as long as we keep trying.
I think you're over optimistic about the mindset of the majority of Americans. Americans love a winner and hate losers, that's why they elected Donald Trump.
At least for American technologists (if not technologists more broadly, or Americans more broadly) failure is not at all seen as a bad thing: it's seen as a data point that XYZ didn't work, so now we'll pivot to ABC and give that a go.
Edison's quote about not having failed, but rather, discovering 1,000 ways not to do something captures this well.
It’s a good counter point, but I don’t think it mimics the kind of failure embracing that Clark talks about.
It is more a reframing of failure as a success of learning and growing. E.g, while the project failed, you didn’t. You learned lessons and are stronger and better for it. You succeed.
"In the US you cannot make jokes about failure"
There is also the phenomenon that serial failure Donald Duck is still a very popular character in several European countries, while we don't care about Mickey Mouse at all. Isn't it the other way around in the US?
Mickey always does good and always wins, that's deeply boring. Donald is flawed and relatable.
Interestingly growing up as an American, I watched Duck Tales which while tangentially related to Donald Duck it’s about his ultra rich uncle going on awesome adventures and just being so smart and awesome. Donald shows up every once in awhile but I don’t really remember much about him.
Duck Tales is basically an attempt at doing Carl Barks era adventure style minus Donald, but Scrooge being made more heroic/sympathetic (he's pretty much a lovable jerk at best in the old stories). I think Disney really wanted to tell the Donald stories Europe loved to Americans.
The persistence of Carl Barks and Don Rosa style stories here is surprising even to me. My son, born 2005, seems to know every single Barks story by heart - and I can't say I pushed it that hard.
I don't think many people care about Mickey as a character. They like the image but that's about it.
Although I have very little experience with British humor, I find it interesting to compare British fiction I read as a child/teenager that became popular hits in the US (Harry Potter, Alex Rider). From this article's perspective, those protagonists are the epitome of American heroes (autonomy, mastery, purpose). No wonder they garnered such acclaim in the US. Curious if these stories are the exception rather than the rule in British YA fiction? Is the comparison unfair, since these stories were not written with the comedic genre in mind?
> Curious if these stories are the exception rather than the rule in British YA fiction?
I feel like for Harry Potter it's more that it leans into the "fantasy" genre hero arc trope?
Roald Dahl, perhaps? Humorous, popular, all characters terrible.
Some good examples there, also Doctor Who
Of which Adams was one of the writers.
What i find in dr who is that, at least at the beginning of every episode he doesn't even attempt to control what's happening even when his life is threatened. He's perfectly happy to let events unfold before stepping in.
And he hates using guns. He walks into danger with zero ability to defend himself besides some weird tool with painful limitations. In a way he's the most un American hero possible.
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At least in the case of Harry Potter specifically, there's actually a few things that contributed to its success outside of it having a traditionally successful Real American Hero™.
First off, we need to remember that it was cribbing from a lot of other "kid goes to magic boarding school" books out there. The difference in sales success is down to the fact that JKR got a better US publisher. Scholastic has an unfair advantage in the young adult and graded reader markets called the "Scholastic Book Fair". Basically, it's a travelling bookstore event set up in US schools where they sell kids books. If you wanted to start a YA phenomenon in the US, especially back in the 2000s, that was the perfect way to do it.
For similar reasons, Bone outsold a good chunk of other western comics purely because of the fact that Scholastic was the only company willing to touch it.
Another factor is that its obvious Britishisms come across as fantastical to American audiences. I mean, who in America even knows what a boarding school is? This is the same reason why Naruto did so well in America, even though most of the things that seem unique about its world are just fantastic versions of bog-standard ninja tropes.
[0] This is the same reason why Naruto arguably did better in America than in its native Japan.
The Charlie Brown counterpoint is interesting, but I think the distinction might be about narrative framing rather than outcomes. Charlie Brown fails repeatedly, but the narrative frames this as poignant perseverance. British failure comedy frames it as absurd cosmic joke - you're not meant to root for the character to eventually succeed, you're meant to recognize the futility. Arthur Dent is Adams's own synthesis: British everyman dropped into American-style adventure, surviving galaxy-ending events through baffled persistence rather than heroism.
This made me think about another contrast, Hayao Miyazaki. His characters ("heroes" or "villains"), usually are more morally complex and nuanced than the ones you would find in the works I typically see depicted in Hollywood. They are not just good or evil. You may not agree with their actions, but you understand the logic of it.
Ironically, Ghibli's adaptation of A Wizard of Earthsea (written by Le Guin, an American author) flopped in part because Miyazaki made it much more about heroes versus villains than the original story.
That’s because the adaptation is by Gorō Miyazaki and not Hayao Miyazaki.
This does not surprise me - and America is a big place, and I'm sure there are areas where Arthur would be seen in a similar light but I've worked in the US and the UK and this type of things reminds me of the phrase 'separated by a common language'. Slightly off topic perhaps but another area where I see a strong divide in sensibilities are the NewYorker cartoons - my wife (born in north America) thinks the are hilarious. I usually don't understand what's funny about them.
I feel like the divide is very evident of each countries version of the show "The Office". Probably a common trope at this point, but not even the dialogue, already the aesthetic tells you a lot about the perspective of the characters. While the UK office is grey, washed out and gloomy, the US office is warm, surprisingly full of life and outside shots are mostly sunny.
US Office is set in Scranton, PA but filmed in LA. So the outside shots inevitably became quite sunny.
IIRC, Ricky Gervais advised the showrunners of the US adaptation to make Michael Scott more optimistic than his UK counterpart. Quite savvy on his part.
What a great response by Adams! I think the acceptance, and even the celebration of failure is present among the “maker” community in the USA to some extent, which has really drawn me to it.
I wonder if there’s the same outlook on failure among other creatives, would be interesting to compare the hobby communities opinions between the USA and UK.
That's a very interesting observation. You see it a lot in "tradesy" videos on YouTube, machinists* and welders and woodworkers and the like. The humor and self deprecation - far more apparent than in most other genres of American media - is really quite close to feeling British. As a transplanted Brit, it's pretty comforting stuff to watch.
*This Old Tony's channel is a particularly good illustration of this point, among many.
And the weird thing is, these are the people who actually make thing.
I think the success (not necessarily financialy, but in the public eye) of the American tech elite can be partly attributed how much more relatable these peole were than the previous ones.
For someone who was used to seeing these corporate types with their perfectly tailored suits who spoke in press releases, I think it was a refreshing change to see Mark Zuckerberg give interviews in his college hoodie in his typically awkward fashion.
I think this created a perception in the eyes of the public that these guys are different, and tech has coasted on this goodwill for quite a while.
Inheritance Machining is like that - a lot of self deprecation.
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Well, there is this stoic British way of looking at the world and preserving the sense of self worth and then there is the ending of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is just pure cosmic despair in the face of the bureaucratic void. It was also true for me that once I saw how pathologically bleak Adams's worldview is I couldn't even really laugh at the jokes any more.
> In England our heroes tend to be characters who either have, or come to realise that they have, no control over their lives whatsoever – Pilgrim, Gulliver, Hamlet, Paul Pennyfeather (from Decline and Fall), Tony Last (from A Handful of Dust). We celebrate our defeats and our withdrawals – the Battle of Hastings, Dunkirk
I'm having rouble reconciling the first sentence with the second. At Dunkirk, the English displayed massive control over their own fate. Yes, I suppose it was a military defeat, but it's so famous and moving because the agency of everyday Englishmen saved the war effort. Perhaps that's the American in me speaking.
A better example is perhaps the Charge of the Light Brigade, our most famous war poem is about an cavalry charge in the wrong direction.
> it's so famous and moving because the agency of everyday Englishmen saved the war effort
The day was more saved by lots of French soldiers who fought heroically, quite a few of them to end up stranded and then utterly forgotten in the British collective memory. Had they not held the Germans for so long, there would not have been that many British to send across the channel. The standard British vision of Dunkirk is highly misleading.
100% seen it in business too. My UK colleagues often use self-deprecation while providing their business updates. But my US colleagues present their accomplishments directly with confidence.
It's not just deprecation, it's systemic understatement. It drives non-British people insane because everyone is talking in code.
And some of the meaning is hidden in intonation.
If someone says "Interesting..." that can mean "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard" or "Might be worth a look, but not a priority right now." Or maybe "That's very suspicious."
"That's quite good" usually means "Very good, I like it!"
There is the famous case in the Korean War at the Battle of Imjin River where the British commander of the Gloucestershire regiment reported to an American General, 'Things are a bit sticky, sir'. The American General thought that meant a good thing, like they were holding the line, when in fact they were fighting a heroic last stand outnumbered 25:1!
https://www.warhistoryonline.com/korean-war/battle-of-imjin-...
> "That's quite good" usually means "Very good, I like it!"
This is backwards from the conventional British use of "quite". In American English "quite" is a positive modifier, so that "quite good" is better than "good". In British English, historically, it's a negative modifier so that "quite good" means "not as good as good".
Also starting anything with "With the greatest respect..."
I certainly use the word "exciting" in ways that that might be non-standard, like for instance describing when everything has gone catastrophically wrong.
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> "That's quite good"
Ummmm...... I'll say it is "not bad".
For me to say something is "quite good" it would have to make me cream myself.
> If someone says "Interesting..." that can mean ...
Same in German.
'Interesting' => 'you're stark raving mad but you're in the room with me so I'm going to be polite to you until I'm out of striking range'.
Conversely what does an American mean when they say "wow that's absolutely amazing" for everything ...
In business I find Americans oversell their achievements and I constantly have to decode "the absolute best", "knocked it out the park", "most amazing X" and figure out what has been redefined this month for that to be true. They use incredible contortions in language too to mislead and cover up and make themselves look good
Colleagues also managed to have the most amazing coffee or literally — literally — the best taco ever, every week. It's quite something!
We also get self deprecating in front of Americans because they're purposefully intimidating. Big characters, loud voices, huge military they're not afraid to use etc. UK is often bullied by the US Gov. It's deference too
Interesting. The other book this makes me think of is Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. I think Gaiman lives in America now, but he’d only recently moved as of when Neverwhere was published, and it’s a very British novel.
I love the world and plot of Neverwhere, but the protagonist, Richard Mayhew, always pissed me off because he’s such a loser. I never understood why Gaiman chose him to be in charge of the story.
Now I’m wondering if that’s my American sensibility.
> Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Mixed feelings.
It's one of those books where you wonder where the author gets his ideas and then you try to find out and it ruins the book for you.
Same but with The Graveyard Book. Discovered Gaiman's Scientology history and his continued support with 30K/year and submitting his daughters.Mixed feelings ever since.
I think it could just be that America is a much bigger market with much higher production values in TV and Film, so British people get their fill of competent, triumphant heroes from American media.
America has plenty of beloved sad sacks too. Charlie Brown, Donald Duck, Goofy, George Costanza, Eeyore (originally British but very popular in America and popularized by Disney) to name a few.
British media has carved out a bit of a niche for itself, but British people are also consuming other English language media.
And you also have plenty of British media where the hero is competent, triumphant, masterful, and autonomous with (frequent if not ubiquitous) standard happy endings. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Who.
> so British people get their fill of competent, triumphant heroes from American media
Conversely, American culture has historically included all the best of the British.
In addition to those mentioned above, Hitchhikers Guide, Monty Python, Watership Down, The Young Ones, etc.
Isn't Eeyore part of the Poohniverse?
Yes but the Disney version is much more well known than the original books and the character is very popular in America.
One big difference between the two cultures, is the British caste system.
It's important for us to Know Our Place. Me mum[0] was British, and I used to see this attitude, all the time.
Climbing is OK, but you need to do it properly. Americans are told "Don't take that shit! Force them to accept you!", while British are told "Tsk. Tsk. You can't do it that way! You need to join their club, before you try going to their level."
Heroes are often those that accept their lot.
[0] https://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/SheilaMarshall.htm
Caste system, as in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XmB59Ax4cE ?
Along the lines of https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel... , I'd maintain the US national fiction is "the US is a classless society".
lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPPpjU1UeAo vs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TQmo5TvZQY vs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__HPfmvaWRw
Not sure what the latter videos are about, but that Orwell Foundation link is packed with some serious ham. Thanks for sharing.
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> US national fiction is "the US is a classless society"
I wouldn't say that.
It's just that we believe that there's no birthright caste. Mobility is possible between all classes. Sometimes, though, it's really difficult; just not impossible.
Big difference, in mindset.
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And of course you get just as much snobbery from your own class about wanting to climb.
It is possible for a working class person to become Middle class. But you have to be born to the Upper Classes. You can get some way by sending your Children to public school (The perverse name for the most exclusive private schools!). The kids might make it, but you will always be 'new money'.
I'm on board with the feelings of the mentioned classmate about nihilism, but to be honest, reading The Sirens of Titan from Vonnegut, which is considered a comic novel for some reason, has the same impression on me, and that is an all-American classic. Neither are bad books per se, and also I can understand the reasons also why Vonnegut had such a bleak view on affairs, as he had gone through a lot, and was in a hard situation at the time of writing, but it is not a comedy, and not funny.
Note: The interpretation on the difference between American and British view of affairs is almost Eastern-European (/me Hungarian), but you can set up that relation to Britain and Eastern Europe also, so this may be related geographic longitude :)
The exception that immediately sprung to my mind is "the Dude" from The Big Lebowski. Maybe other Coen brothers’ "heroes" also fit the bill, but I’m not so familiar with the rest of their œuvre.
One problem I have with this is that the word Hero has multiple meanings and I'm not sure we are talking of the same thing. Like which of these characters follow the classic Hero's Journey, which are just the leading characters in books, which are heroes to another character, which are labelled as a hero as pretext, which are anti-heros treated as heroes, etc. These are all very different things.
One of my favorite details about Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" is the name he chose for his main character: Hiro Protagonist. It's not just a lovely bit of wordplay, it immediately makes you think about whether the protagonist is a "hero" or not.
This overloaded meaning of the word "hero" is especially pertinent when discussing the differences between the interpretation of "hero" in US culture and other cultures. Outside overt dictatorships, the US is the only country I know of where people are taught that anyone who serves or served in the military is automatically a "hero", regardless of whether they've actually done anything that would normally be considered heroic.
That's something a bit odd about Douglas Adams's reply. Arthur Dent isn't heroic, but he's the hapless protagonist. The protagonist doesn't have to be a hero. I'm not sure in what way he has "non-heroic heroism".
> There was a wonderful book published, oh, about twenty years ago I think, by Stephen Pile called the Book of Heroic Failures. It was staggeringly huge bestseller in England and sank with heroic lack of trace in the U.S.
I have this! Thumbing through it randomly, it includes The Least Successful Pigeon Race, The Fastest Defeat in Chess, The Worst Canal Clearance, The Worst Mishap in a Stage Production, The Least Successful Naval Repairs, The Most Unsuccessful Attempt to Work Through a Lunch Hour ("At ten past one a cow fell through the roof"), and The Worst Hijacker:
Love it. That hijacker one is one of the excerpts in the linked post: https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/the-book-of-hero... :)
The article and the comments herein remind me a conversation a few years ago with an ex RAF pilot who had done a few exchanges with the USAF. Among other things, pilot/personnel evaluations in the two organizations were worlds apart. In the RAF, at least during his time, they were what I would expect, more or less factual: Bloggins is good at X, needs to improve Y, excels at P, shouldn't do Q at all.
Meanwhile, in the USAF, anything that could even be perceived as negative was a career killer, so ratings started at mildly superlative and went up from there: Bloggins is an X top gun, is very good at Y, walks on water doing P, and is good with Q.
YMMV, of course, those are my recollections of beery convos with a former Tornado jockey.
As far as I know, all branches of the US military write up a "fitness report" for each officer once a year. "Above Average" is a certain career killer.
But somebody who was a dean at (I think) Virginia Tech wrote that the British "His work is quite sound, actually" could be higher praise than the American "His work sets the standard we all aspire to."
Exactly! Another, semi-related difference between the cultures: When Alexander chooseEitherOrBothOf(provided instructions, gave orders) during the Sicilian campaign, American generals took them as orders and did them, sometimes to their detriment, while British generals took them as intent/direction, and asked questions.
Eventually, the allies realized they had very different command cultures and learned to work together. It may be that Normandy, et al, would have been far different if they hadn't have figured this out in Sicily.
I forget where, but someone was talking about a similar difference in American vs British comedy looking at The Office (the American one) and Parks and Rec. In both, the format tends to be pre-conflict -> conflict -> resolution, with the episodes almost always ending on an upbeat tone. In contrast, in a British show, it tends to be pre-conflict -> conflict -> kick them while they are down. Things can get worse, the characters can be unredeemed, and the fun is they are inept, unlucky, arseholes that don't get out of the situation with a happy ever after.
Americans like that humor as well (see Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Archer, etc.) but it definitely is less prevalent.
I think the early episodes of Bob's Burgers leaned heavily this way as well - usually, at the end of the episode, the family was no better off and sometimes was worse off.
DA quote from the linked Slashdot page:
> any model which fundamentally prevents people getting something they want is going to fail
I want to crossstitch this quote and hang it up on a wall where I would frequently see it.
Someone mentioned Charlie Brown as a counter example, which lead to an insightful discussion.
Similarly I’d like to ask about the Simpson, which in the early 90s was seen as the worst role models on TV for being losers, but still incredibly popular. I guess Bart started out as a proper hero, but Homer being a loser and idiot pretty quickly became the mainstay theme of it all.
Americans don't celebrate failure?
Well, there's the Alamo. There's Custer's Last Stand. There's Douglas MacArthur getting a Medal of Honor for being chased out of Luzon.
And I urge American HNers to walk or drive around, and see how long it takes to see a Stars and Bars.
The post is primarily about humour though - do Americans really make jokes about those things? Maybe it's not failure they are celebrating, but war?
Americans don't celebrate the Alamo as a failure, they celebrate it as a catalyst for the Texas revolution afterwards. If that hadn't occurred Americans wouldn't even mention the Alamo in their history books.
Americans don't celebrate Custer's last stand. Indigenous people obviously do, and should, but white people don't consider him a hero.
Americans don't celebrate MacArthur getting chased out of the Philippines, they celebrate his declaration "I will return" and the Allied victory.
Americans only support the underdog when the underdog wins in the end.
Look up Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Perhaps the biggest celebration of the losing side in history. Or the first Rocky movie.
> Americans only support the underdog when the underdog wins in the end.
By that definition the by far most cited example on the British side, Dunkirk, doesn’t count because Britain won in the end.
No one celebrates someone who was defeated if the defeat wasn’t memorable. Usually that was because it was an inspiration to rally a cause that was later successful.
Plenty of white people celebrate Custer. Search for “Custer statue” or drive around out west and see how many paintings of Custer’s last stand you can spot hanging in bars.
On the contrary ... we LOVE the perennial underdog who stays in the fight. Like the British, once you start winning consistently you quickly earn our contempt.
American football is packed with great examples.
Mirroring this divide, Denmark has a TV-show called "Klovn", which is basically a copy of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" (down to the , except that while the main character in Curb is the cause of a lot of cringe moments, he always ends up getting his redemption and being the hero (at least to the viewer). In "Klovn", the main character ("Frank") causes a lot of cringe moments in the same way, but he is a tragicomic character and is almost always in the wrong.
I wonder if Wodehouse ties together both types of heroes in Bertie and Jeeves! Though it's been decades since I read a Wodehouse book, I'm just uncontrollably laughing now just thinking about it! My grandfather had pretty much the whole collection.
Although the Anglican Church is a hybrid of Reformation era Protestantism and of Catholicism, I think that the US tradition of Protestantism is generally (not always) more positive and less fatalistic.
I believe that the cultures of both nations are heavily derived from their religious traditions; even if you never practice religion in either nation you imbibe its effects from early childhood in the cultural values and norms that it influenced.
For example, one of the key aspects of Protestantism is evangelism, which would not make sense if people thought they could not be successful.
So I think a lot of American culture in particular is based on this tradition that encourages optimism and repeated trying even in the face of failure. Hence the way we select heroes.
"repeated trying even in the face of failure"
That's pretty much the motto of one of Scotland's greatest heroes - Robert the Bruce:
"If at First You Don't Succeed, Try Again"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_the_Bruce
The primordial form of American Protestantism is Calvinism. A bit hard to get more fatalistic than that. Calvinists see work as a duty before God, not something you engage in for benefits in this life or even the next—God's elect have already been chosen, arbitrarily, to receive mercy and salvation, and nothing you do or don't do can change this selection. They also favor frugality. Hard work and frugality can lead to abundance, and it was only after generations of applying this ethic that the kernel of the "American dream"—that with perseverance one can achieve success—began to take shape.
In some flavors, Protestantism is quite focused on self-scrutiny and skepticism about human nature, making people suspicious and even actively hostile towards supposed heroes.
Other flavors of Protestantism seem to have completely lost that, though. Evangelical Protestantism somehow inculcates a need for leaders to love and worship and an ability to completely suspend rational judgment about them. Their relationship to charismatic pastors and other leaders is a mystical, ecstatic experience that they have an unlimited appetite for. No matter how many times their leaders are shown to be flawed, and in many cases quite detestable and corrupt human beings, they eagerly look for the next leader to worship.
Two stereotypes that illustrate the extremes of this massive cultural difference in Protestantism are the rich WASPs of the northeast and the poor Southern Baptists of the deep South.
WASPs know that heroes are myths, and are unsurprised when the real people turn out to be real pieces of work. Southern Baptists kind of know this on some level -- I think they're actually a bit attracted when a man has a whiff of charlatanism about him, because it shows he knows what they want -- but when they choose their hero, they give themselves over to complete and sincere belief in him.
The "Losers" framing is a bit American, but tragedy has a long history, illustrating the difficulty of being subject to conflicting forces (typically moral, since societies push their interests as such) as a way for understanding to at least explain the pain, taking away the panic and sometimes the isolation. Suffering with some kind of style shows that one is still free, and thus independent of the forces (think Mark Twain humor). Willa Cather's work is more about realizing the big picture itself makes our personal suffering relatively small.
What brings me back to hacker news are these posts that ask questions yanked unexpectedly directly from my own soul, in words more articulate than I could manage. And then somehow manages to answer those questions. Thank you.
Different foundations of the worldview, thus different values, thus different reprenestations of these values shown through heroes.
We don't realize what are foundations of our worldview as they aren't appearing in a contrast-enough setup.
The British do have a difficult or perhaps just different relationship with heroes vs the US IMO. Some study has been made of this in the past. Even in comic books, where writers have traditionally been afforded more freedom (morally, philosophically, martially/violence, sexually even). Even in pure fantasy/sci-fi (take WH40K as an example). There are many fine US creators/studios, and excellent output, but I don't think the satirical and political elements could have come from there.
Don’t forget “Eddie the Eagle”. Quintessentially British.
Exactly who I immediately had to think of.
As divided as the US is right now, there's a bunch of things like this that every American seems to agree on without even realizing that it's not the same in most of the world.
For example, "work ethic". Correct me if I'm wrong, but you could write "worked very hard every day" on someone's tombstone, and almost every American seeing it, regardless of politics, will think "That was a good person". Someone to look up to.
Not "did good work", not "their work helped many people", definitely not "lived well". Even "was very productive" sounds too suspicious - being productive is great and all, but a productive person might be doing 10h worth of work in 5h and then call it a day, and that's just unacceptable, so that's not going on your tombstone either.
Just... work hard. The protestant ideal. Going on vacation and being too sick to work is literally the same thing, because it stops you from working hard.
There's a pretty big generational divide on this point, I think. I don't think many people under the age of 45 or so still see the "never took a sick day" thing as a laudatory statement.
(Also probably a regional divide too. I worry that I'm wrong about this when it comes to some places on the coasts, but I think it's accurate for most places in the country.)
Anecdotally (under 45; American), I agree that "never took a sick day" is indeed not a laudatory statement, but I also strongly believe that working hard is a prime virtue.
That's good news. Hope the kids fight for some basic worker's rights.
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This might be a Polish thing but hero has to die. Does not matter if accomplishes a goal, just that hero put it all on the line against incredible odds.
"Keep Calm and Carry On" is very much the British way, even though us Antipodeans refer to them as whinging Poms.
Keep a stiff upper lip chaps.
This reminds me of the differences between the US version of The Office and the UK one. I’m actually fond of both but the boss character (as played by Ricky Gervais) in the UK version is absolutely reprehensible. And he’s the main focus of the show. The US version started that way but it just didn’t work at all. By the second season Steve Carrell’s character was a lovable doofus and the show was much better for it.
(I also think some line of thinking like this applies to politicians. British people almost always hate their politicians, even the ones they vote for. By comparison, in my experience, Americans really want to root for their candidate. Be that Obama or Trump, there’s a passion there you rarely see in the UK)
>you rarely see in the UK
And when you do, the establishment resorts to skullduggery and smears them.
"The life-long anti-racism campaigner is somehow a racist because he didn't act on the report we deliberately hid from him!"
Bill Bailey in Part Troll said "I'm British and thus crave disappointment."
I bumped into this when using the YC cofounder finder a few years ago.
In Australia we share the Poms' attitude to failure and success, and have refined it into "Tall Poppy Syndrome". In Australia, it is bad form to boast of your successes too much. You need to have some humility, some awareness of luck and privilege, give credit to others, and don't come over too egotistical, to succeed here.
Obviously in the USA the opposite is true; any failure must be explained away, talk about as much success as possible, and claim all the credit for yourself.
It resulted in a few very strange conversations. I thought most of the US potential co-founders I met were arrogant, boastful, dickheads [0]. I didn't trust that any of their claimed successes were real, I didn't believe they'd done half the things they said they'd done, and I didn't want to work with them. And I'm sure they thought I was a complete loser, incompetent and unable to succeed at anything I tried.
I occasionally hear US VCs and investors complaining about this when they visit Straya; that people here don't celebrate our success, and we're not ambitious enough. I see this as a culture gap that they're not navigating successfully.
As has been said about the US/British relationship; "two countries divided by a common language"
[0] apologies if you were one of them. I'm sure you're not really!
Reading this, I am immediately reminded of Al Bundy in Married with children, isn't he An American hero quite similar to Arthur Dent? Other than that I always thought of the Show King of Queens as similarly depressing, ... would be curious how that fits into the narrative of American heros
Isn’t the whole point of Hamlet that he does have control over his life? At any moment he could have just stabbed Claudius and taken over. The dramatic tension comes from him being unable to get out of his own head and get down to businessto.
> Charlie Brown, Donald Duck, Goofy, George Costanza, Eeyore to name a few.
What about real people (not animation characters for children)?
Could "Mr. Bean" only be created by the Brits, or if not, where is his U.S.-American counterpart?
> Could "Mr. Bean" only be created by the Brits, or if not, where is his U.S.-American counterpart?
Pee-wee Herman, perhaps, at least in his original adult-comedy form?
Pee-wee was originally created because Paul Reubens couldn't do jokes in the traditional stand-up comedy sense. So he created a character who told jokes that always miss, but had the mentality of a child and thought his own material was hilarious.
> “Iran can't hit back over Soleimani's killing.¹ Who will we take out? Spider-man or SpongeBob SquarePants? They have no real heroes.”
But, fwiw, I don't think I agree with you. Mr bean is just as fictional as charlie brown, the medium or original intended audience doesn't seem very significant to me at all. Also george costanza is in there and I think 90s-2000s american sitcoms actually have a lot of the kind of character you have in mind.
¹: I don't agree with the quote either. As this article and comment section makes very clear, heroes and the definition of heroism are culturally embedded and not fully legible to outsiders, like probably every culture's heroes.
I think it's fantastic that Douglas Adams was on Slashdot.
He was a technophile and was very involved in the Mac community. I am not that surprised. Nowadays he’d be on HN and Reddit.
He was the first person in Europe to buy a Mac.
Stephen Fry was the second.
I assume it was an "ask me anything" type of event.
Brits are self-deprecating to a fault.
You can be successful, but you have to attribute it to luck. It's not the done thing to try too hard.
Tall poppy syndrome is also alive and well.
Do English tech interviews emphasize heroic gusto or post-mortems?
Explains why Sir Keir Starmer is so relatable.
Don't think he is a Sir (yet) but a Right Honorable.
A quick google would have saved you a comment. He is Sir Keir Starmer.
He has been a KCB since 2014:
https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/60728/supplement/3...
He was head of the crown prosecution service and knighted in 2014.
I feel like these lines are getting increasingly blurred. Eg "The Recruit" is basically "what if Mr Bean (could say entire sentences and was young and handsome and) would get a junior legal gig at the CIA". It's very American, action packed, everybody is steaming hot and there's conspiracies behind every corner, yet it is also all about the humour in failure and the extreme escalation that results from the protagonist's screwups.
An “Americanism” I noticed in the show Heroes first but now I see everywhere is that every hero just wants to be normal. Claire Bennet — who’s only special ability is healing — whines about the burden of this for several seasons! Just shut up already! You have what everybody wants and there’s basically no downside! Just put away the costume and get an office job if you want to be a normie.
Conversely, any metahuman that fully maximises their extra abilities is almost invariably labelled as evil. Magneto is the obvious candidate here, but Wolverine is even better: same powers as Claire Bennet but he leans into them… so he’s got to be an anti-hero type.
Is Arthur Dent the hero? I imbibed him more as a passive vessel to experience the absurdity of Douglas Adams universe. But it’s been a while since I read it.
He's not in the book or miniseries but the film adaptation gave him some arc iirc about doing something heroic on John Malkovich's planet to get the girl (Trillian). That all seems highly intentional based on the OP.
Some of the best US standup comedians I know don't fit this narrative.
> We celebrate our defeats and our withdrawals
Polish people say the exact same thing about themselves while thinking this is endemic to Poland.
Poland is a victim of geography (between Germany and Russia).
And once again with one sentence Adams is able to all but completely articulate an incredibly nuanced cultural topic:
> Terrible things happen to him, he complains about it a bit quite articulately, so we can really feel it along with him - then calms down and has a cup of tea. My kind of guy!
Some people can communicate on a truly different level.
There's more than one form of English humor. Last year I played through Thank Goodness You're Here!, which I think borrows from a lot of late-20th Century tv including Monty Python. It might be "nihlistic" in the sense that it's absurd but not depressing.
I think this supposed English "heroes" is more post-WWI and post-WWII trauma and coping than the actual historic English culture.
Basically it is cope for losing history's greatest empire in a generation.
You don't see this in the pre-WWI authors. Look at Rudyard Kipling (see Mowgli who although Indian is very English). Look at Fleming and James Bond. *
See also Dickens and some of his heroes such as Nicholas Nickleby.
What is being passed as English culture is just fairly recent retconning due to WWI and WWII and the crisis in English thought it produced.
* Removed previously incorrect statement including Edgar Rice Burroughs who is an American although Tarzan is English
> You don't see this in the pre-WWI authors. Look at Rudyard Kipling (see Mowgli who although Indian is very English). Look at Burroughs and Tarzan. Or even Fleming and James Bond.
Not to detract from your broader point, but Burroughs was an American writing a British character in Tarzan.
You are correct. My embarrassing mistake.
Okay, literature aside, I've often discussed this with my SO. I feel like Americans are obsessed with heroes/villains. Every single issue that arises and is discussed online, is always viewed from the angle of "who do we support and/or who do we hate". During COVID it was Fauci and Dolly Parton, now it's Bovino and Good. I feel like Americans often have a need to put a single person on a pedestal as if they yearn for a symbol. A true cult of personality, for better or for worse.
Is Arthur Dent the hero? I imbibed him more as a passive vessel to experience the absurdity of Douglas Adams universe. But it’s been a while since I read it, but from memory all the situations are so absurd that I never felt myself yelling at the hero to make a more logical, or “herioc” decision because there wasn’t really a lot of sense in that sort of thing
I think so. He's more storm-tossed survivor than Moses parting the waves, but he makes the best of the endless shit he's dumped into and preserves his sense of self throughout. I think he responds heroically, far more than he fixes anything external. For example he finds himself marooned on a strange planet and sets up a Perfectly Normal Beast sandwich shop, living very comfortably for a while.
For what is he fighting against? Nothing really, he's just adrift in the universe. There's no antagonist beyond existence itself and his own circumstances. He faces off against both quite effectively.
One of the characters that has some Arthur Dent in him from the US side is - I think - Forrest Gump.
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Ja, storm tossed survivor /accidental stoic who do we have .. Bilbo, yossarian, Rincewind.. Bit of a tossup innit?
From memory so long is a bit of a departure from the rest of the series and felt like adams was giving dent a vacation/term of being the deliberate stoic
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I call this take pseudo-intellectual indulgence form, so called, academic intelectuais.
Lord of the Rings is very much English Literature, and the biggest epic form the 20th century and has none of that. Ditto for Harry Poter (I’m not saying Harry Potter is on the same level of literary grandeur as LOTR, but it’s still an important epic series for newer generations).
You can always find examples for one side or the other of the argument. But, of course, only “social” scientists would be tick enough to claim some clear divide here as it suits their argument.
What are you talking about? Frodo is exactly the kind of reluctant hero that Adams is talking about here.
I don't think Adams is talking about how reluctant the hero is but about failure and misfortune.
Frodo definitely doesn't want to be there but he is far from being a failure. He saves Middle-earth, goes home to the Shire and saves that too, and is regarded as such an incredible mortal that he's invited to live in Valinor with the elves (this is a very big deal and I believe has only ever happened for Frodo and his buddies).
The same goes for Harry Potter. He's a loser at the beginning but after going to Hogwarts he's very much a hero that saves the day by being good at everything and exceptionally brave.
Also, I'd say there are plenty of reluctant heroes in American literature and film. Luke Skywalker hesitates to go save Leia in the first film, Spider-man straight up quits being Spider-man multiple times, John McClane just happened to be there when terrorists attack.
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There’s absolutely no nihilism about Frodo. Not there isn’t any acceptance of pre determined fate when it comes to save Middle Heart.
LOTR is not empty, nor nihilist. It’s got many heroes, big and small, that fully embrace their part and fight against insurmountable odds with no expectation or any reward other than knowing they did the right thing.
The text is trying to tell us that English heroes are the exact opposite of that description.
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It's hard distill entire countries like this (especially based on one guy's comments, told second hand). I understand Adams' quote in the context of Hollywood, but there's more to American culture than Hollywood. These are diverse nations & diversity is good.
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