alt Hacker NewsDouglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes"
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Counterpoint: Charlie Brown
A big part of what makes Charlie Brown so endearing is his undying earnestness and optimism in the face of near constant bad luck and disappointment.
He is exactly the lovable loser archetype that this piece says Americans do not dig. Yet the Peanuts comics and cartoons and an American pop cultural institution.
Stephen Fry made the same remarks in a Q&A session some years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k2AbqTBxao
As a Brit I can't agree more with both, I find American humour so hard to relate to but I guess it's just a culture thing
The phenomenon Adams is talking about here is largely a post-WW1 phenomenon in UK culture, related to the post-WW1 malaise. His best examples are post-WW1 (Paul Pennyfeather, Tony Last, and the book by Stephen Pile). The others arguably don't really fit (e.g., the core delight in Gulliver is the reader thinking they are smarter than Gulliver; the reader doesn't identify with him). It's not exactly a new observation... one of the motivations both Tolkien and CS Lewis had for strong characters like Aragorn was to present examples falling outside this cultural drift.
As much as I love American upbeat-ness (I'm American) I think that our hatred of failure and our strained optimism puts a tremendous psychological pressure on us. Sometimes, we fail, and that's okay. Sometimes, we lose, and that's just life. I think that's an essential part of growing up, and our collective denial of that makes me feel like we, as a people, are not quite mature.
Although I have very little experience with British humor, I find it interesting to compare British fiction I read as a child/teenager that became popular hits in the US (Harry Potter, Alex Rider). From this article's perspective, those protagonists are the epitome of American heroes (autonomy, mastery, purpose). No wonder they garnered such acclaim in the US. Curious if these stories are the exception rather than the rule in British YA fiction? Is the comparison unfair, since these stories were not written with the comedic genre in mind?
"In the US you cannot make jokes about failure"
There is also the phenomenon that serial failure Donald Duck is still a very popular character in several European countries, while we don't care about Mickey Mouse at all. Isn't it the other way around in the US?
Mickey always does good and always wins, that's deeply boring. Donald is flawed and relatable.
This made me think about another contrast, Hayao Miyazaki. His characters ("heroes" or "villains"), usually are more morally complex and nuanced than the ones you would find in the works I typically see depicted in Hollywood. They are not just good or evil. You may not agree with their actions, but you understand the logic of it.
This does not surprise me - and America is a big place, and I'm sure there are areas where Arthur would be seen in a similar light but I've worked in the US and the UK and this type of things reminds me of the phrase 'separated by a common language'. Slightly off topic perhaps but another area where I see a strong divide in sensibilities are the NewYorker cartoons - my wife (born in north America) thinks the are hilarious. I usually don't understand what's funny about them.
What a great response by Adams! I think the acceptance, and even the celebration of failure is present among the “maker” community in the USA to some extent, which has really drawn me to it.
I wonder if there’s the same outlook on failure among other creatives, would be interesting to compare the hobby communities opinions between the USA and UK.
I wonder if Wodehouse ties together both types of heroes in Bertie and Jeeves! Though it's been decades since I read a Wodehouse book, I'm just uncontrollably laughing now just thinking about it! My grandfather had pretty much the whole collection.
> In England our heroes tend to be characters who either have, or come to realise that they have, no control over their lives whatsoever – Pilgrim, Gulliver, Hamlet, Paul Pennyfeather (from Decline and Fall), Tony Last (from A Handful of Dust). We celebrate our defeats and our withdrawals – the Battle of Hastings, Dunkirk
I'm having rouble reconciling the first sentence with the second. At Dunkirk, the English displayed massive control over their own fate. Yes, I suppose it was a military defeat, but it's so famous and moving because the agency of everyday Englishmen saved the war effort. Perhaps that's the American in me speaking.
One big difference between the two cultures, is the British caste system.
It's important for us to Know Our Place. Me mum[0] was British, and I used to see this attitude, all the time.
Climbing is OK, but you need to do it properly. Americans are told "Don't take that shit! Force them to accept you!", while British are told "Tsk. Tsk. You can't do it that way! You need to join their club, before you try going to their level."
Heroes are often those that accept their lot.
100% seen it in business too. My UK colleagues often use self-deprecation while providing their business updates. But my US colleagues present their accomplishments directly with confidence.
I forget where, but someone was talking about a similar difference in American vs British comedy looking at The Office (the American one) and Parks and Rec. In both, the format tends to be pre-conflict -> conflict -> resolution, with the episodes almost always ending on an upbeat tone. In contrast, in a British show, it tends to be pre-conflict -> conflict -> kick them while they are down. Things can get worse, the characters can be unredeemed, and the fun is they are inept, unlucky, arseholes that don't get out of the situation with a happy ever after.
Americans like that humor as well (see Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Archer, etc.) but it definitely is less prevalent.
Interesting. The other book this makes me think of is Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. I think Gaiman lives in America now, but he’d only recently moved as of when Neverwhere was published, and it’s a very British novel.
I love the world and plot of Neverwhere, but the protagonist, Richard Mayhew, always pissed me off because he’s such a loser. I never understood why Gaiman chose him to be in charge of the story.
Now I’m wondering if that’s my American sensibility.
I feel like the divide is very evident of each countries version of the show "The Office". Probably a common trope at this point, but not even the dialogue, already the aesthetic tells you a lot about the perspective of the characters. While the UK office is grey, washed out and gloomy, the US office is warm, surprisingly full of life and outside shots are mostly sunny.
The "Losers" framing is a bit American, but tragedy has a long history, illustrating the difficulty of being subject to conflicting forces (typically moral, since societies push their interests as such) as a way for understanding to at least explain the pain, taking away the panic and sometimes the isolation. Suffering with some kind of style shows that one is still free, and thus independent of the forces (think Mark Twain humor). Willa Cather's work is more about realizing the big picture itself makes our personal suffering relatively small.
The article and the comments herein remind me a conversation a few years ago with an ex RAF pilot who had done a few exchanges with the USAF. Among other things, pilot/personnel evaluations in the two organizations were worlds apart. In the RAF, at least during his time, they were what I would expect, more or less factual: Bloggins is good at X, needs to improve Y, excels at P, shouldn't do Q at all.
Meanwhile, in the USAF, anything that could even be perceived as negative was a career killer, so ratings started at mildly superlative and went up from there: Bloggins is an X top gun, is very good at Y, walks on water doing P, and is good with Q.
YMMV, of course, those are my recollections of beery convos with a former Tornado jockey.
I think it could just be that America is a much bigger market with much higher production values in TV and Film, so British people get their fill of competent, triumphant heroes from American media.
America has plenty of beloved sad sacks too. Charlie Brown, Donald Duck, Goofy, George Costanza, Eeyore (originally British but very popular in America and popularized by Disney) to name a few.
British media has carved out a bit of a niche for itself, but British people are also consuming other English language media.
And you also have plenty of British media where the hero is competent, triumphant, masterful, and autonomous with (frequent if not ubiquitous) standard happy endings. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Who.
Americans don't celebrate failure?
Well, there's the Alamo. There's Custer's Last Stand. There's Douglas MacArthur getting a Medal of Honor for being chased out of Luzon.
And I urge American HNers to walk or drive around, and see how long it takes to see a Stars and Bars.
Isn’t the whole point of Hamlet that he does have control over his life? At any moment he could have just stabbed Claudius and taken over. The dramatic tension comes from him being unable to get out of his own head and get down to businessto.
The British do have a difficult or perhaps just different relationship with heroes vs the US IMO. Some study has been made of this in the past. Even in comic books, where writers have traditionally been afforded more freedom (morally, philosophically, martially/violence, sexually even). Even in pure fantasy/sci-fi (take WH40K as an example). There are many fine US creators/studios, and excellent output, but I don't think the satirical and political elements could have come from there.
Mirroring this divide, Denmark has a TV-show called "Klovn", which is basically a copy of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" (down to the , except that while the main character in Curb is the cause of a lot of cringe moments, he always ends up getting his redemption and being the hero (at least to the viewer). In "Klovn", the main character ("Frank") causes a lot of cringe moments in the same way, but he is a tragicomic character and is almost always in the wrong.
Although the Anglican Church is a hybrid of Reformation era Protestantism and of Catholicism, I think that the US tradition of Protestantism is generally (not always) more positive and less fatalistic.
I believe that the cultures of both nations are heavily derived from their religious traditions; even if you never practice religion in either nation you imbibe its effects from early childhood in the cultural values and norms that it influenced.
For example, one of the key aspects of Protestantism is evangelism, which would not make sense if people thought they could not be successful.
So I think a lot of American culture in particular is based on this tradition that encourages optimism and repeated trying even in the face of failure. Hence the way we select heroes.
This might be a Polish thing but hero has to die. Does not matter if accomplishes a goal, just that hero put it all on the line against incredible odds.
As divided as the US is right now, there's a bunch of things like this that every American seems to agree on without even realizing that it's not the same in most of the world.
For example, "work ethic". Correct me if I'm wrong, but you could write "worked very hard every day" on someone's tombstone, and almost every American seeing it, regardless of politics, will think "That was a good person". Someone to look up to.
Not "did good work", not "their work helped many people", definitely not "lived well". Even "was very productive" sounds too suspicious - being productive is great and all, but a productive person might be doing 10h worth of work in 5h and then call it a day, and that's just unacceptable, so that's not going on your tombstone either.
Just... work hard. The protestant ideal. Going on vacation and being too sick to work is literally the same thing, because it stops you from working hard.
Different foundations of the worldview, thus different values, thus different reprenestations of these values shown through heroes.
We don't realize what are foundations of our worldview as they aren't appearing in a contrast-enough setup.
Reading this, I am immediately reminded of Al Bundy in Married with children, isn't he An American hero quite similar to Arthur Dent? Other than that I always thought of the Show King of Queens as similarly depressing, ... would be curious how that fits into the narrative of American heros
Brits are self-deprecating to a fault.
You can be successful, but you have to attribute it to luck. It's not the done thing to try too hard.
Tall poppy syndrome is also alive and well.
> Charlie Brown, Donald Duck, Goofy, George Costanza, Eeyore to name a few.
What about real people (not animation characters for children)?
Could "Mr. Bean" only be created by the Brits, or if not, where is his U.S.-American counterpart?
This reminds me of the differences between the US version of The Office and the UK one. I’m actually fond of both but the boss character (as played by Ricky Gervais) in the UK version is absolutely reprehensible. And he’s the main focus of the show. The US version started that way but it just didn’t work at all. By the second season Steve Carrell’s character was a lovable doofus and the show was much better for it.
(I also think some line of thinking like this applies to politicians. British people almost always hate their politicians, even the ones they vote for. By comparison, in my experience, Americans really want to root for their candidate. Be that Obama or Trump, there’s a passion there you rarely see in the UK)
I feel like these lines are getting increasingly blurred. Eg "The Recruit" is basically "what if Mr Bean (could say entire sentences and was young and handsome and) would get a junior legal gig at the CIA". It's very American, action packed, everybody is steaming hot and there's conspiracies behind every corner, yet it is also all about the humour in failure and the extreme escalation that results from the protagonist's screwups.
Is Arthur Dent the hero? I imbibed him more as a passive vessel to experience the absurdity of Douglas Adams universe. But it’s been a while since I read it.
Some of the best US standup comedians I know don't fit this narrative.
And once again with one sentence Adams is able to all but completely articulate an incredibly nuanced cultural topic:
> Terrible things happen to him, he complains about it a bit quite articulately, so we can really feel it along with him - then calms down and has a cup of tea. My kind of guy!
Some people can communicate on a truly different level.
> We celebrate our defeats and our withdrawals
Polish people say the exact same thing about themselves while thinking this is endemic to Poland.
It's hard distill entire countries like this (especially based on one guy's comments, told second hand). I understand Adams' quote in the context of Hollywood, but there's more to American culture than Hollywood. These are diverse nations & diversity is good.
England's celebration of failure has empowered self-pity and defeatism. Also Gulliver was written by an Irishman.
I think this supposed English "heroes" is more post-WWI and post-WWII trauma and coping than the actual historic English culture.
Basically it is cope for losing history's greatest empire in a generation.
You don't see this in the pre-WWI authors. Look at Rudyard Kipling (see Mowgli who although Indian is very English). Look at Burroughs and Tarzan. Or even Fleming and James Bond.
See also Dickens and some of his heroes such as Nicholas Nickleby.
What is being passed as English culture is just fairly recent retconning due to WWI and WWII and the crisis in English thought it produced.
There's more than one form of English humor. Last year I played through Thank Goodness You're Here!, which I think borrows from a lot of late-20th Century tv including Monty Python. It might be "nihlistic" in the sense that it's absurd but not depressing.
Is Arthur Dent the hero? I imbibed him more as a passive vessel to experience the absurdity of Douglas Adams universe. But it’s been a while since I read it, but from memory all the situations are so absurd that I never felt myself yelling at the hero to make a more logical, or “herioc” decision because there wasn’t really a lot of sense in that sort of thing
I call this take pseudo-intellectual indulgence form, so called, academic intelectuais.
Lord of the Rings is very much English Literature, and the biggest epic form the 20th century and has none of that. Ditto for Harry Poter (I’m not saying Harry Potter is on the same level of literary grandeur as LOTR, but it’s still an important epic series for newer generations).
You can always find examples for one side or the other of the argument. But, of course, only “social” scientists would be tick enough to claim some clear divide here as it suits their argument.
This is directly relevant to my wife's and my reading of the David Tennant & Olivia Coleman vehicle Broadchurch.
David Tennant's character is notably very bad at his job; that's why he got exiled to a backwater town. He bungled his last case so badly it made national news. In an American police procedural, we would either have some mitigating explanation for his failure, or at least some gritty vice or personal demon that was the real reason he got demoted.
In Broadchurch, Tennant's character just sucks at his job. Every episode of the show conforms to a formula where he gets suspicious of one of the other characters in the show and we spend the episode wasting time while it's finally determined that the suspect of the week is actually innocent. I have to say, it makes for entertaining television. It also resulted in my wife and I chorusing aloud, every episode, "he's SO BAD at his job!!"
(Minor Broadchurch spoilers) At the end when he finally catches the big bad, it's not because of anything he did. A coincidence and some carelessness on the part of the big bad lead to the mystery being solved. Also, every other character on the show had already been ruled out.
Since watching it we've kept a lookout for protagonists who embody the "everyman in way over his head who accomplished virtually nothing himself" archetype. It's fun to know Adams held forth on the very subject.