It was "time for something completely different," which the success of the Monty Python TV series and subsequent films provided. While the series was only broadly satirical, the Python films have had more force, with Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974), the eminently quotable Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979) and Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983) successfully stronger statements of what is in fact a cheerfully nihilistic world view. Various members of the troupe have had variable careers as well, the most significant being Terry Gilliam's magnificent fantasies (which include the British-made Time Bandits and Brazil) and John Cleese's wildly successful TV series about a surly hotel owner, Fawlty Towers. Cleese also co-scripted the smash screen comedy A Fish Called Wanda and its not-quite-as-successful 1997 follow-up, Fierce Creatures.

Britcoms and Other Televisual Hits

The success of Monty Python on American public television left upscale American audiences hungry for more, a yearning only partially assuaged by the success of what many consider the single greatest sitcom ever produced, Cleese's Fawlty Towers, which produced six episodes in 1975 and six more in 1979. The PBS gates opened for the importation of many more "Britcoms," popular on American small screens ever since and on the whole more literate than their American equivalents, although just as likely to slide into decades of repetitive mediocrity.

Just as American TV in the 1950s produced one great comedian whose talents never found full scope in movies (Ernie Kovacs), British TV had a parallel talent in the brilliant Tony Hancock (best known for the series Hancock's Half Hour in 1956-60). Like Will Hay in the 1930s, a social climber whose ambitions exceeded his grasp, Hancock's screen character set the template for many similarly foiled arrivistes in the future (including Cleese's Basil Fawlty, and Patricia Routledge's aggravating Hyacinth Bucket - pronounced "bouquet" - in Keeping Up Appearances, 1990-95). The greatest Hancock shows were written by the team of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, whose success with Hancock and with their subsequent series Steptoe and Son (1962-74) helps point out a real distinction between the U.K. and the U.S. (Another might be seen in the differences between that series and its American remake, Sanford and Son, if the British series was available for comparison.) Unlike their Hollywood equivalents, British television prominently credits its writers, and all of its major series have been the work of a single writer or a team, who are stars in their own right. Thus, Galton and Simpson, or David Croft (who had two long running hits with his Home Guard comedy Dad's Army, 1968-77, co-written with James Perry, and Are You Being Served?, 1972-85, co-written with Jeremy Lloyd), or Roy Clarke (Keeping Up Appearances). Both Are You Being Served? and Keeping Up Appearances demonstrate the Britcom at its most assured, effortlessly turning out years of variations on simple themes like "the workplace as family," or "social embarrassment."

A new group of edgier comedians, heirs to the Python throne, emerged contemporaneously with the Conservative Margaret Thatcher regime of 1979-90 with the skit program Not the Nine O'Clock News (1979-82), many of whom have worked together on projects since. They were Rowan Atkinson, Mel Smith, Griff Rhys Jones and Pamela Stephenson, the best known of whom is of course Atkinson, who fronted two landmark programs, Blackadder (1983-89) and Mr. Bean (1990-95). Blackadder (picture at right, with Atkinson on left), whose first year was scripted by Atkinson and Richard Curtis, joined by Ben Elton for subsequent series, is a logical successor to Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Life of Brian, different eras in British history unspooling as background for sarcastic stories of bungling and backstabbing. Meanwhile, Atkinson's miming as the childlike Bean (scripted by Atkinson, Curtis, Elton and Robin Driscoll) has made him internationally popular, his half hour escapades equal to any group of short silent slapstick films made in the 1920s. Atkinson's forays into feature length starring roles in films that recycle his old bits have been less creatively fortunate, although both the feature film Bean (1997, scripted by Curtis and Driscoll and directed by Mel Smith) and Johnny English (2003) were fairly popular.

Atkinson has also turned up in small roles in several of Richard Curtis' better-known produced screenplays, which have helped internationalize British romantic comedy into institutional status, along the way making floppy haired Hugh Grant the latest variant of the sexless comic Englishman. These include The Tall Guy (1989, sans Grant but directed by Smith), the hugely successful Four Weddings and a Funeral (1992), Notting Hill (1999) and the Curtis-directed, all-star Love Actually (2003). Curtis has also co-scripted the two films spun off from his close friend Helen Fielding's novels, Bridget Jones' Diary (2001) and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004), which co-star (do you see a trend here?) Grant. A skillful mix of gags, treacle and uplift, Curtis' films have the evident virtue of sincerity and are in many ways the modern face of British comedy.

There are of course other important figures to leave their mark in British comedy over the past few decades. American expatriate Stanley Kubrick's icy irony left its mark on at least one major British cineaste, Peter Greenaway, whose arch art movies (most successfully 1982's The Draughtman's Contract) owe more than a little to Kubrick's freezing black comedy. Bruce Robinson's two comedies Withnail & I (1987) and How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989), very dry comedies richly performed by a different Grant, Richard E., have a rabid cult following.

My Son the Fanatic

Hanif Kureishi's tragicomic scripts for director Stephen Frears, My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid (1987), as well as My Son the Fanatic (Udayan Prasad, 1997), are much better than anything produced by the Britcom-trained school in capturing the multiple voices of the new, multi-ethnic England. Both Ahead in Advertising and Kureishi's films, along with affiliated work like The Ploughman's Lunch (Richard Eyre, 1983), work as merciless satires of Margaret Thatcher's privatized Little England, while Greenaway's snobbish cinema transposes its dog-eat-dog values into postmodernist display. Also of note here is Damien O'Donnell's delightful generation gap satire East is East, about a Pakistani family struggling with life in early 1970s London.

Two other important creative figures, by no means associated with the Britcom, emerged from British television. Dennis Potter's several miniseries (the best known of which are Pennies from Heaven, 1978, and The Singing Detective, 1986 - both of which have been shoehorned into so-so American films) are lashed with humor, along with raw emotion and Potter's trademark use of ancient popular music. There are few funnier sequences ever broadcast than Michael Gambon's attempt not to sexually climax as nurse Joanne Whalley massages his psoriasus-ravaged body in The Singing Detective.

Mike Leigh

Another important talent to emerge from television was Mike Leigh, who after a debut theatrical feature (1971's Bleak Moments) turned to TV films in 1973-87 before resurfacing in motion pictures. Leigh's unique style of working out his scripts with a talented stock company of performers (who include Alison Steadman, Timothy Spall and Jim Broadbent) gives his films a great deal of psychological truth; to that end Leigh usually takes the credit "devised and directed" rather than "written and directed." Leigh's earlier films tend to be full of satirical pokes at social-climbers and 1960s refugees, while his more recent films, beginning with 1995's Naked, have been essentially dramas, but there is no hard and fast line between the two categories. 1990's amusing Life is Sweet has a subplot about a character's sexual abuse-induced neuroses. His most successful comedies include Nuts in May (1976), about a vegetarian camping trip, Home Sweet Home (1982), about the private lives of postal workers, Abigail's Party, and Life is Sweet, wherein Spall tries to open a gourmet restaurant stocked with truly dreadful dishes while Broadbent and chums try to get a burger wagon up and running.

The post-industrial slagheap of post-Thatcher Britain has been the site for a number of pointed comedies, many of them playing on laddish stereotypes, notably The Full Monty (Peter Cattaneo, 1997) - later a successful Broadway play. A wide vein of black humor runs through the Blair era's ongoing gangster cycle (in particular Guy Ritchie's Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, 1998, and Snatch, 2000, and Jonathan Glazer's menacing Sexy Beast, 2000).

Many of the greatest British comedies are rooted in the humor of its lower classes, be it transformed into music hall turns (Chaplin, Laurel, Hay, Atkinson's Mr. Bean) or rooted in sympathetic observation (Charles Dickens, Mike Leigh). There's a vigorous tradition as well of slashing, take-no-prisoners intellectual humor, originating in such university-trained comics as Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and John Cleese, traceable back to Lewis Carroll, and on through Atkinson's Blackadder. These two traditions jostle down to the present day and between them will most likely produce films and TV shows of the richest humor for many years to come.

Click back to Part One.

Gregg Rickman is the editor of The Film Comedy Reader (2001) and The Science Fiction Film Reader (2004) as well as the co-editor of The Western Reader (1999). In the 1980s he published two books of interviews and a biography of the late Philip K. Dick. He's also the author of our Silent Film Comedy and Screwball Comedy primers. Rickman teaches film at San Francisco and Sonoma State Universities and lives with his wife, dog and cat in Berkeley, California.

1. Pygmalion (1938). Gabriel Pascal's graceful film of Bernard Shaw's play of social transformation mutates the Cinderella legend into social commentary, with great playing from Leslie Howard as the fairy godfather professor, and Wendy Hiller as his gutter-born protégé.
2. Kind Hearts and Coronets (1948). Robert Hamer's merciless satire of a social-climbing sociopath you never lose sympathy for, in Dennis Price's unique performance.

3. The Man in the White Suit (1951). Alec Guinness is a naïve scientist betrayed by his own idealism in Alexander Mackendrick's still-pertinent parable of technological innovation. Silicon Valley take heed!
4. The Importance of Being Earnest (1952). A peerless cast, including Michael Redgrave, Margaret Rutherford and Joan Greenwood, act out Oscar Wilde's classic of switched identities.
5. The Ladykillers (1955). Alec Guinness and his criminal gang are thwarted by a sweet little old lady in Alexander Mackendrick's intricately constructed comedy (pointlessly remade in 2004 by the Coen Brothers).
6. Dr. Strangelove (1964). Expatriate American Stanley Kubrick displays a very British dry humor as Peter Sellers (in three roles) helps demolish the intellectual underpinnings of the Cold War. An apocalyptic comedy.
7. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974). The Python gang, here directed by Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam, look back o'er British history and find this rose in its mire.
8. Brazil (1985). Terry Gilliam's dystopian fable, set "somewhere in the Twentieth Century," is applicable as black comedy; fantasy doesn't conquer all in an Orwellian state closely modeled on postwar England.

9. Sense and Sensibility (1995). The best of many, many Jane Austen adaptations, thanks in large part to Ang Lee's sensitive direction of Emma Thompson's intelligent (and Oscar-winning) screenplay. All of Austen's rich social comedy comes through, as do the underlying fears.
10. My Son the Fanatic (1997). Udayan Prasad and Hanif Kureishi's comedy-drama excels in its demolition of religious hypocrisy in England's Pakistani community.

• Help! (1965). Richard Lester's running, jumping and never standing still Beatles musical is full of the off-ball sight gags he crammed into all of his films, even the bad ones. Great score, too.
• Bedazzled (1967). Peter Cook and Dudley Moore unleash the Seven Deadly Sins in this genuinely religious comedy, filled with sight gags (and Raquel Welch as Lillian Lust). Blowing raspberries in the nunnery – funniest scene ever. Directed by another expat, Stanley Donen.
• Life is Sweet (1990). Perhaps the best of Mike Leigh's social comedies, with a great cast including Timothy Spall as the world's worst gourmet cook.

Thoughts? Questions? Suggestions? Discuss!