The Benny Hill Show

There was a time on Earth when all of the world stopped to watch The Benny Hill Show. Businesses would close, people stayed home and every tv in the world in every house tuned in to watch this man who just wanted to make us laugh. And laugh we did. The world died when his show stopped, and it cried when he left this mortal realm. Labeled a dirty old man for the content of the material in less than a quarter of his sketches, he was considered a genius by his fans and his peers for the other seventy-five percent. Even Thames Television admitted far too late that cancelling the show was the worst mistake they had ever made. Letting it go was a knife in Benny's side, a heartbreak that led to his death, but what a great legacy of humor !

Benny Hill was an amazing man. He could write some of the greatest comedy in the history of the English language. His work included wit, satire, low brow, and any other kind of humor that comes to mind. I remember watching this show on American TV in NJ, and it was a HUGE hit. I recall that a local Philadelphia station put this show on opposite the 11:00 pm local news, and for a few years it was the highest rated show in its time slot. Amazing. Along with Benny I'd like to point out the great work of Jackie Wright and Henry McGee. My grandfather had been briefly stationed in England during WW II, and he had seen Jackie Wright perform in London. He said that Jackie was the funniest man he had ever seen on a stage. My grandfather loved the episode when Jackie went on a cheap (and dangerous) vacation. Benny generally used Jackie in many ways, but usually as a PROP! Benny would smack Jackie's bald head over and over again. Henry McGee, on the other hand, was a brilliant straight man to Benny's funny side, and McGee excelled whenever he would interview Benny as "Fred Scuttle." This was brilliant humor and Benny deserves to be ranked with Chaplin, Keaton, Bob Hope, and Woody Allen as the 20th century's greatest funny men.

Benny Hill was fair game for people who wanted to take the moral high ground. These people brought the trumped up charge of being degrading to women against him but there were very few complaints about him being degrading to short bald-headed elderly men. British clean-up TV campaigner Mary Whitehouse was always going on at him and I once heard his best-known critic after Mary Whitehouse, Ben Elton, practically accuse him of inciting violence against women. The truth is, Benny only wanted to make people laugh and brighten their lives up and I think he was definitely hurt by the criticism. As I said, you could say he was degrading to short bald headed elderly men like in a very funny sketch where he and the entire cast of his show were performing a musical number. Jackie Wright and Bob Todd are sitting together singing and Benny goes over with two xylophone sticks and plays a wooden xylophone tune on top of their heads! Benny had a knack for making the obvious funny, like in a short sketch where he's looking after his neighbour's cat and his neighbour tells him "don't put yourself out" or when he plays a man going out the door with a four foot high package and his wife tells him "don't forget to post it". He had tremendous international appeal and many celebrities in the states including Burt Reynolds and Walter Cronkite and Greta Garbo was rumoured to be a fan. When Benny took ill and was in hospital Michael Jackson visited him (wonder if Wacko Jacko promised him a trip to Disneyland). One thing Benny did on his show was parodies of TV commercials. He did a parody of the Sunlight Washing Up liquid commercial where he was dressed up as the woman in the commercial and says in response to the rather obvious questions from the voice-over "of course it gets my dishes clean, are you damn stupid or something?". I can remember wishing that the woman in the real commercial would say that. In the early 1970s there was a commercial for Fry's Chocolate Cream which showed a girl reclining on a couch enjoying a bar of the chocolate. Her cat walks along the shelf next to her and knocks a porcelain figurine off the shelf and she catches it. Benny parodied this commercial. He was dressed up as the girl and when the cat knocked the figurine off the shelf he failed to catch it and the figurine shattered on the floor. A guy ran on to the set and shouted "clumsy fool" at Benny. It was predictable but still very funny. One thing his critics chose to overlook was that he nearly always played the character who came off worst in his sketches. The crux of his humour was that he played a lecherous man chasing after young girls who got his come-uppance. He was a guy very good at taking a joke on himself but definitely stung by critics.

I must be the only woman in America who loves this show! Most other women I talk to say they can't stand the sexism of the show. However, I never believed that Mr. Hill was being vicious towards the women whom he made the butt (pardon the pun) of many jokes. It also helped that Mr. Hill looked like a schoolboy who had been caught doing something naughty. Some of the best sketches were the parodies of TV shows, commercials and movies. The songs were surprisingly well done, too.

Ladies and Gentlemen - The Benny Hill Show. You don't need much to be funny - just some jokes that are funny. Benny Hill is just like that. He makes it all look so easy, but is impossible to imitate because he's simply be the funniest man ever to have lived on Earth. Basically Benny has only few jokes that he repeats and makes it all again with little variation. That doesn't mean that he repeats himself, because he rather guarantees a good laugh when the audience exactly knows what is going to happen. And when it happens, they laugh.

The archetype jokes are a mistake, accidental insult and the chase. In a mistake Benny thinks something is something that really isn't it. For example something is heavier than it appears or Benny takes man for a woman. Accidental insult happens when Benny does something that causes harm for someone. For example he touches woman's breast when he's looking for some similar object. The chase is a cliché, but you'll always wait for it. You'll know the chase will soon be on, when the funny 'chase tune' starts to play.

The Show is however much more fun than my diagnosis of it. Go and see it!