A Great, Silly Grin: The British Satire Boom of the 1960s

by Humphrey Carpenter

Book Overview

A Great, Silly Grin opens at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival, where a staggeringly inspired satirical revue called Beyond the Fringe startled a public steeped in the polite, bland banality of the 1950s. From there it is a short trip to the coffee bars of London, where the appearance of a scruffy yellow pamphlet calling itself Private Eye overturned the way Britons looked at their world. The apotheosis of the satire boom, and the progenitor of so...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0306812053
• ISBN13: 9780306812057
• Release Date: May 2003
• Publisher: Da Capo Press
• Length: 408 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.6" x 8.6"

Customer Reviews

As Peter Cook used to say...

Just read A Great Silly Grin: The British Satire Boom of the 1960s, by Humprey Carpenter. This period has long been a subject of interest to me despite the fact that I'm too young (and geographically challenged) to have seen most of the programs in the first place. Besides being a linked series of show business biographies of key figures of the time (The Beyond the Fringe foursome, etc), the book raises some good discussion. Just how much does satire really matter, if it does at that? As Peter Cook used to say, the peak of satire was 1930's Berlin--and look how much that did to prevent the rise of Hitler. But the best part of the text may be the final chapter, which paints an unflattering picture of the state of the art in 2000-era Great Britain--and it's sobering how much of it applies to the US as well.

Grin or Grimace?

Carpenter examines English cultural values during the years immediately following World War Two and focuses specifically on the 1960's when students from Oxford and Cambridge universities (with others) challenged those values with immensely entertaining satire. Theirs were significant contributions to a tradition of creative ridicule which extends back more than 2,500 years. Of course, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dickens are among those English authors properly renowned for their comic genius but are not usually thought of primarily as social satirists. Throughout the Age of Victoria and well into the 20th century, the British Empire flourished within a somewhat rigid social order, one which (generally) seemed to lack a sense of humor. By 1960, England had become "a bankrupt, defenseless little country run by a ridiculously elderly prime minister" (Harold Macmillan) when Jonathan Miller, Peter Cooke, Dudley Moore, and Alan Bennett introduced "Beyond the Fringe" at the Edinburgh Festival. Out of that developed Private Eye magazine, The Establishment (a men's cabaret featuring satire), and the BBC's That Was the Week That Was. Carpenter devotes substantial attention to Miller, Cooke, Moore, and Bennett as they and others detonated a "boom" of social satire whose reverberations continued through Second City, Monty Python, and Saturday Night Live. Carpenter duly notes the influence of the Goon Show (Millgan, Sellers, et al) as well as American humorists such as Mort Sahl, Mel Brooks, Lenny Bruce, and Tom Lehrer on their English counterparts. Of special interest to me is Carpenter's suggestion that, as England continued its decline among world powers in the 1960s, social satire served as a medication to deaden the pain. At one point, he reminds his reader of Cook's warning that England was then in danger of "sinking giggling into the sea." That has not as yet happened and never will but the image remains vivid nonetheless.

The evolution of British satire

Humphrey Carpenter's Great, Silly Grin follows contemporary British humor, beginning with the 1960 Edinburgh Festival when a satirical review Beyond the Fringe fostered a new breed of British humor. The evolution of British satire that followed through the 1960s receives close examination in this involving survey.