If you’re an ordinary American over the age of 30, you’d probably recognize Jennifer Saunders as Eddie Monsoon on Absolutely Fabulous.1 If you’re particularly well-versed in British TV comedy, you might even know Dawn French as the star of the long-running sitcom The Vicar of Dibley. But the curse of being an American, aside from the growing trend of going out in public wearing clothes with butt flaps, is that you probably don’t that know before, during, and after Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French were those wonderful things, they comprised the even more wonderful comedy team French & Saunders.
Dawn and Jennifer have generated comedy for the BBC for more than 25 years now, including six seasons of their show French & Saunders and over a dozen specials. But their work, like professional soccer and beer with flavor, is one of those phenomena that’s tremendously popular and famous in the UK but with nary an impact over here. That’s really too bad because, with the possible exception of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, French & Saunders created the best television sketch comedy ever.
Certainly no other comedy team has come as close to tracing the Pythons’ equilateral triangle of intelligence, killer writing, and remarkable acting. Actually, let’s toss in in the ability to work silliness like a scalpel and call it a square. French & Saunders bent that into a regular2 pentagon by adding a skill the boys never really learned at Oxbridge: perfect pitch for parody. I’m ashamed of the alliteration in that phrase, but it’s the one that fits.
French & Saunders elevated parody to a level that no one’s come close to matching. Their sketches are Lee Redmond’s fingernails of spoof. These two classmates from the Central School of Speech and Drama developed a perfect formula. Actually it’s more of a recipe, because it’s not some secret slurry of ingredients that can’t be reverse engineered. All the components are right there on the screen, but reproducing the final product is like trying to cook a Le Cirque entree at home — ordinary humans just don’t have the chops to pull it off.
It starts with a quality of acting and dexterity of imitation that’s best illustrated by Dawn French — a five-foot-tall, very round English woman at the age of 38 — doing the world’s greatest impressions of both Björk and Catherine Zeta-Jones. She and Jennifer combine those abilities with a deep understanding of the material they’re spoofing that only comes from the hard work of studying it3 to find the tiny repetitive details that the audience never knows are in it until they see them exploded to populate a sketch.
Mix those ingredients with smart writing and you’ll get comedy good enough to at least obligatorily DVR every week. But French & Saunders whipped their show into something beyond that, something which if I were to continue with this food analogy I might say could only come out of the Wonka factory. They did it by very casually going meta. In their parodies, Dawn and Jennifer play the characters. But at the same time they play the actors playing the characters. And at the same time they play themselves playing the actors playing the characters. Sometimes the actors they’re playing live in the world of the characters. Sometimes the characters they’re playing live in the world of the actors, wandering around the set of the show.4 It all sounds very confusing, but when you watch it all just snaps together and makes perfect sense, and you never even realize that you’re zipping back and forth between three or four levels at once. Sometimes you feel like French & Saunders don’t even realize it. It’s all so perfectly genius that I went ahead and stole the idea to try and make it work in a weekly sitcom format for my pilot Situation Comedy.
I need to point out here that as brainy as their meta-stuff seems and is, it’s also very, very funny. And not the kind of funny that you sit in front of thinking, “This is very funny,” without ever actually smiling or laughing or committing any of the involuntary actions associated with enjoying something. It’s genuinely, hilariously, joyously funny. Face-hurting, out-of-breath funny. French & Saunders are the only comedy team to make me literally fall off my couch laughing.
Anyway, here are a couple of samples that show a little bit of what I’m talking about. First is a Kill Bill parody from 2004′s French & Saunders season six and collected on the DVD French and Saunders: Back With a Vengeance.
And this is a couple of minutes from their parody of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, taken from the 1999 Christmas special French and Saunders: The Phantom Millennium and collected on the DVD French & Saunders: At the Movies.
Get It:
In the US, much of French & Saunders’ best material has been collected on a number of DVDs which are all available from Netflix (but alas not to watch instantly). If you’re looking to give them as a gift (and you should be), skip the individual discs and just go for the French & Saunders Collection boxed set which, as of this writing, is available from Amazon for the remarkable price of $28.99.
- Which I’ve just discovered you can watch some full episodes of on the Logo web site, if you’re in the US. [↩]
- By which I mean having all sides and angles equal, to fit with the geometry metaphor that I shouldn’t have pushed to this point. [↩]
- Or from some congenital comedy scanning input the existence of which is too frightening to contemplate for a sweaty jokeslinger like myself. [↩]
- Or even the set of the parody of the show. [↩]
