Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 120

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Popular Culture Review

public was less inclined to favor social sanctuary for institutions such as home, the
family, corporate enterprise and the like, all of which were being more and more
urgently called into question with each passing decade.
And so it was that as Monty Python’s antics at length began to exhaust not
only audiences, but the members of the troupe itself as well, and the C a n y On
films descended into seemingly obligatory nudity in a desperate attempt to keep
up with changing audience perceptions, a new and even more brutal variety of
British comedy appeared on the horizon. A variety of new British television shows,
notably The C om ic Strip, The Young Ones (both of which briefly ran on MTV in
the United States), A bso lutely Fabulous, The N ew Statesm an and Bottom were
ravenously devoured by entranced viewers in the UK, although their impact in the
US has been relegated to “cult” status. A bso lutely Fabulous, chronicling the ad
ventures of two middle-aged utterly irresponsible and materialistic women, star
ring Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley, managed to make quite a splash on the
Comedy Central cable network, with its running gags of drunkenness, drug use,
wretched excess and capitalistic greed. Saunders, the creator of the series, over
saw a series of episodes that were at once universally accessible and wittily engag
ing to audiences in both the US and the UK, reveling in broad slapstick and cheer
fully vulgar humor.
What Saunders, Lumley and the new generation of British comics (including
Alexei Sayle, Dawn French, Ben Elton and others) grasped was that what was
essential to the revitalization of British comedy was not gratuitous nudity and sexual
single-entendres, but rather sledgehammer violence, increased vulgarity, and a
savage brutality that lampooned every last remaining remnant of the empire’s de
caying colonialist social fabric. And surely no one has embraced this new ap
proach as fervently as Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson, whose Bottom series
became an instant sensation when broadcast by that last bastion of cultural re
spectability, the BBC. (Edmondson, coincidentally, is married to A b s o lu te ly
F a bu lou s ^ Jennifer Saunders. The couple was wed on May 11, 1985, and have
three daughters: Freya, Beattie and Ella.)
Adrian Edmondson and Rik Mayall met at Manchester University as students,
and formed an undergraduate comedy act. The Dangerous Brothers. In essence,
their act consisted of violent slapstick comedy reminiscent of The Three Stooges,
in which two perpetually feuding arrested adolescents, Richie Dangerous (Mayall)
and Sir Adrian Dangerous (Edmondson) attempt to kill each other with various
kitchen implements and other household items, inflicting grievous bodily harm
upon each other, without any real long-term consequences. The duo eventually
brought The Dangerous Brothers to late night British television, until the cheer
fully mordant skits were banned due to “excessive violence and bad taste.” At the
same time, Mayall and Edmondson began making nightclub appearances at vari