alt Hacker NewsAs an older American, I’ve always found British humor of the Monty Python type hilarious.
Unfortunately, I haven’t found a lot of newer material of this type. I may have to look harder.
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As in surreal British sketch comedy? You'd like
- The Goon Show (it's this 1950s radio serial that inspired the Pythons... it's surprising how many tropes the Pythons borrowed from it)
- The Goodies
- The Kenny Everett Television Show
- Absolutely!
- The Mighty Boosh / Unnatural Acts / Noel Fielding's Luxury Comedy
- Vic Reeves' Big Night Out / The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer / Bang Bang, It's Reeves and Mortimer
- Big Train
- The League of Gentlemen
- On the Hour / The Day Today / Brass Eye
- Jam / Blue Jam
- The Armando Iannucci Shows
- Limmy's Show
Also, to throw in a US programme, I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson was pretty good
As a fellow older American who loves Monty Python, the more modern British shows I've enjoyed the most were Green Wing, League of Gentlemen, Peep Show, and Doc Martin. Of those, League of Gentlemen and Green Wing have the most Python-like absurdity, while Doc Martin has the most subtle humor. Peep Show is hilarious, but the most crass humor of those listed, although League of Gentlemen doesn't shy away from crassness either.
If you're a gamer, pick up Thank Goodness You're Here!
What do you mean by "this type"?
The sketch show format has been pretty much entirely killed off by TikTok & Instagram.
It's very hard to do a sketch that hasn't already been done on TikTok with a tiny fraction of the budget.
Absurdist humour still exists everywhere, it's less popular than either Python in the 70's / 80's, or the flash era in the 2000s, but it's still everywhere, but I'd also wager it is not to your taste.
At the risk of offending just about everyone, I would suggest that something like "Skibidi Toilet" is just this generation's badger-badger-mushroom, which in turn was that generations' "Bring me a shrubbery!".
Sketch shows in particular don't work well for TV in this era. Mitchell and Webb tried hard to return with one this year and it just fell flat, the jokes feel telegraphed from a mile-away, taking a minute to get to a punchline in a era when the same jokes are told in a 10 second short.
The downside of the tiktok/insta model, is that the more successful people on Insta end up just re-telling their one good joke over and over. ( Or indeed, re-recording someone else's one good joke. ).
Not that sketch shows didn't also repeat jokes sometimes, but they could at least play around with a punchline in unexpected ways, or have callbacks and nods to earlier sketches in a series. That kind of non-continuity doesn't work when you don't know which tiktoks will go viral, or which order your audience will see them in, as the algorithm dictates all.