Mark Oates
Supporting Actor
- Joined
- Mar 12, 2004
- Messages
- 875
I can tell you that the few friends I hung out with in London earlier this year, most of which despised Benny Hill, were also mostly gay men. In that case, if you're a gay man or perhaps a lesbian woman, I can understand why you wouldn't like Benny Hill. His humor was very more geared towards the heterosexual members of the audience, while he very often poked fun at gay men(or poofs). Likewise his shows were 97% girl watching or girl grabbing or girl fondling, groping, the list goes on. So for most hetero's he was funny as hell, but for gay folks he's not only unfunny, he's offensive, insulting, etc.
Virtually all UK comedy of the 1970s-early 1980s tended to be homophobic, because that was the attitude of the time. Blinkered, yes, bigoted, yes, but done thoughtlessly like the racism of US movies of the 'thirties and 'forties. Benny's humour was heterosexual, but then so was the British establishment of the era. If you don't like his humour, don't buy the discs.
Benny Hill was a comic of his time. That time has passed, and those of us who appreciate these fondly remembered shows can see them again on disc. Those of us on this side of the puddle will have to import from the US because of the UK's f*cked-up paranoiac obsession with political correctness.