On the verge of the centenary of the English comedian, the most successful English comedy series for almost four decades remains today in limbo between irony and bad taste, but sweeps platforms such as YouTube.
What are the British laughing at? The question is a trick question. We assume that theirs is a phlegmatic humor, a fertile crossroads between verbal aggression, sarcasm and subtlety. That they laugh with the flashes of exquisite irony of the Ealing Studios comedies, with the solemn awkwardness of Mr. Bean, with the corrosive Dadaism of Monty Python or with the tribal wit of Nigel Planer and his The Young Ones.
The reality, as theater critic Charles Isherwood points out, is rather more prosaic: the man who made the UK laugh most (and best) was perhaps Alfred Hawthorne Hill, better known as Benny Hill (1924-1992). Isherwood, an American and Anglophile, acknowledges that he enjoyed the “shameless and procacious” humor of The Benny Hill Show, a television artifact born in the mid-fifties and that, against all odds, survived on the airwaves, barely updated, without sweetening its formula, incompatible with any hint of political correctness, until 1989.
Our everyday humor
Isherwood suspects that Benny Hill’s is genuine working-class British humor, the everyday laughter and accomplice of a country that is happy to wallow in its small miseries, while Monty Python’s is “aspirational comedy”, Sunday clothes. For Isherwood, “Hill was a populist humorist who never lost the connection with his roots”. Hence his product, like almost anything with real roots, was frankly exportable: as many as 140 countries aired the series during its three decades of existence.
The critic praises “its physical, direct and pre-adolescent comedy”, far removed from “the Oxbridge-stamped elitism and nods to the European tradition of the theater of the absurd” that elevated Monty Python to the category of cult phenomenon. Who laughed at Benny Hill’s simplistic, raunchy and incorrect jokes? Almost everyone. If only with one of those guilty chuckles that freezes at the corner of your mouth. Starting with Charles Chaplin and Michael Jackson, two of the first illustrious fans who dared to break the spiral of silence and admit that they laughed with Hill with their jaws agape.
A thoroughbred humorist born in 1924
If Benny Hill were alive, he would have just turned 99 (born January 21, 1924). He died in his apartment in Teddington, outside London, in April 1992. He died alone, victim of a coronary thrombosis suffered in front of the television, after a binge of pizza and fish & chips. At the age of 68, he was a television star on forced leave after his show was cancelled without notice in May 1989.
Months before his death, in the summer of 1991, Hill starred in Marbella in his last television cameo, his swan song, as an exceptional guest in Las noches de tal y tal, the program of that other histrion in low hours who was Jesus Gil. Gil was enthusiastic about the British comedian, whom he considered a great irreverent, a formidable hooligan, like himself, but apparently they met and did not hit it off.
At a dinner in an exclusive restaurant in Puerto Banús attended by Juan Herrera, director of Telecinco, Gil was too cordial with his (almost) namesake Hill and gave him a couple of slaps on the cheek. The Englishman did not understand Gil’s tawdry humor or the liberties he took with his cheeks. From that misunderstanding was born the idea of filming a somewhat puerile sketch: Gil and Hill slapping each other in turn in front of the camera.
The Briton, who had been living in Marbella for the summer since 1969, was supposed to have a regular section in Las noches de tal y tal, but that came to nothing after the protocol exchange of slaps. At the end of the summer, Hill returned to London, locked himself in his apartment in Teddington, suffered a heart attack from which he barely recovered and began to gradually isolate himself from the world.
Somewhat disturbed by Hill’s sudden disappearance, his agent Dennis Kirkland decided to go to his home on April 22, 1992. There, surrounded by dirty dishes, magazines and videotapes, he found the body of the comedian, who had been dead for at least 48 hours.
Posthumous execution
It was later published that Hill, depressed by his recent health problems and work setbacks, had refused to undergo the coronary bypass that doctors recommended and to receive treatment for his kidney failure or his morbid obesity. In Kirkland’s words, “he had opted to hurry his last days by watching TV and gorging on junk food.”
After his death, the British tabloids drew with a certain gloating caricature of a twilight Benny Hill, a poor, eccentric, mean, petty and lonely man. According to this posthumous portrait drawn with a somewhat thick brush, Hill had accumulated a personal wealth in excess of 10 million pounds, but lived as a kind of vocational beggar.
Part of this image was finally pieced together in later years by gleaning details from Funny and Peculiar, the somewhat mischievous biography of the comedian published by Mark Lewisohn in 2003. It states that the archetypal character he played in the comedy, that of a roguish, unattractive and sexually frustrated middle-aged man, was not far from the real Benny Hill, of whom no dalliances with his actresses even transcended.
Lewisohn claims that in his youth he had the occasional “romantic friendship” that was not entirely reciprocated and that he made marriage proposals to at least two women. In 1983, in an interview with The Daily Mirror, the comedian acknowledged that he had not been “lucky” in his romantic relationships, although he attributed this to his obsession with work and his lack of interest in the actresses and models around him: “The most interesting girls are those who work in offices, stores and factories. That’s where the beautiful, sensible women are, and that’s where I want to go looking for them.”
Vacation at sea
To this depressing portrait we should oppose the concerns and moments of plenitude of a man who spent his summers with his belly soaking and drinking sangria on the Costa del Sol (the journalist Lucas Martín describes him as “a giant squirrel, a barge dancing gracefully along the avenue, a beach ball”), and he takes pleasure “in the mischievous smile and the thick hands in the shape of a pincer” when he describes his walks in the heat of the summer in Puerto Banús), or that he traveled frequently to Marseilles (France), his favorite city after London, to get away from the world and devise new gags, which he wrote down on the napkins of the port’s cafeterias.
Hill consciously cultivated his image as an eternal adolescent, and we will always remember him chasing half-naked women at full speed and with a satyr’s smile. But he was apparently a polite, reasonably cultured, and level-headed businessman, capable of managing with a masterful hand for decades the multinational show business that his show had become. The blow from which he never recovered was the untimely withdrawal of his program at the moment when the comedian was most willing to enrich and rejuvenate the old formula. A BBC manager, John Howard Davies, met with him in the spring of 1989 and told him that they were not going to renew his contract because “they saw him as tired, jaded with his character and lacking the energy to try something different”.
He also cited a loss of ratings for the show that was true, but not alarming. The real reason, in Mark Lewisohn’s words, was that the BBC “had had enough of defending Benny Hill from increasingly frequent accusations of vulgarity and misogyny.”
Humor out of context
Years later, in 2007, the BBC’s U.S. branch decided to take a posthumous stab at his legacy by scrapping reruns of The Benny Hill Show. In the opinion of the network’s marketing director, Amy Mulcair, the program had become a relic of “the most old-fashioned and backward England, and that is not the England we want to show our viewers. He did not at all claim that that England does not exist or did not exist. He only said that they didn’t want to show it.
The fact is that Benny Hill had the rare privilege of being cancelled before the so-called cancellation culture became a substantial part of the contemporary landscape. Nerea Pérez de las Heras, journalist, author of Feminismo para torpes and half of the podcast Saldremos mejores, is encouraged, despite everything, to break a lance in favor of the old Benny, with whom she acknowledges having laughed in her childhood: “Humor depends on the context,” she argues, “and it is true that now everything is overanalyzed, something that can also be positive, because it leads us to reflections that are enriching and invite us to review ourselves”.
In his opinion, Benny Hill “laughed at the typical rowdy English gentleman in the same way that Family Guy did decades later with the average white heterosexual American gentleman or The Simpsons with the concept of the nuclear family”. To assess his contribution to the world of comedy, Pérez de las Heras points out that “you have to understand irony”. But even without understanding it, his crude and crude humor “can be seen and enjoyed. After all, it is not necessary “to distill a moral lesson from all cultural products; what is necessary is to be concerned about the social, political and cultural context in which this type of humor can be normalized”.
But perhaps the best defense of Benny Hill is to insist on its surprising relevance. The show went off the air 34 years ago, but it continues to be quoted, remembered and revered. Some of his videos posted on YouTube have more than eight million views and are part of the pop heritage of several generations. As proof, what happened in London on July 6.
On that day, a group of demonstrators celebrated the resignation of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson in front of Parliament. The atmosphere was relaxed and feverish, almost chirpy. Actor Hugh Grant suggested that the only thing missing from the impromptu party was for someone to play the theme song to The Benny Hill Show, that legendary Yakety Sax that some of you may be humming right now. Minutes later, the song began to play over the loudspeakers amidst the crowd’s boos and jeers. There was no need to explain the joke. Everyone got it.