James Williams
Saturday 29th December 2007 11:03pm [Edited]
Malvern
1,366 posts
Quote: Retinend @ December 29, 2007, 5:26 PM
Yeah, but maybe it's not just plagiarism - is it possible that in the history of comedy, two jokes might be alike? I haven't encountered a similar gag (it doesn't seem like you can remember one either), and if I had, it wouldn't matter as I still laughed at it. It was a throwaway joke, but well-timed; because it may have been done before is thin grounds for criticism. I'm not sure exactly what you were expecting from it. The show generally isn't derivative (except maybe in the case of similarities between Brent and Millman/ the guest stars yeah, yeah...) - "creative bankruptcy" might reclaim the 'Most outlandish statement made about Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant 2007' award from Mannikin Bird. This and the debate over whether Maggie's room was realistically austere (it looked pretty horrid to me) are clear nit-picking.
Stop being so reactionary and reading/using what I say out of context.
I didn't say it was plagiarism. I just said I have seen a very similar joke before. (Can't recall where... so what? I'm not going to spend hours Googling it. I'm not lying!) Again, it was one example.
**
An utterly despondent Maggie goes into Carphone Warehouse to ask for a job. Merchant tells her that, unfortunately, there are none available. Maggie starts to sob. Merchant looks concerned and asks Barry for a box of tissues. Merchant takes out a hankie, blows his nose on it, and puts it in his pocket.
Jerry did the same thing when Elaine was crying over The Bubble Boy.
So any actual examples of this gag cropping up pre: Seinfeld? Gag geneology is fun.
**
Sounds very much like a variation on the same gag thats been used a million times before with drinks, food etc. I'm pretty sure its used in the Ollie pretending to be ill scene in Sons of the Desert but I can't remember the exact details.
*
*http://chilled.cream.org/boards/index.php?topic=16283.180
Actually, sourcing proof took about 5 seconds, so here we are. Try research sometime before essentially calling me a liar!
I shall say again, a lot of the stuff was too derivative of either The Office or just other stuff in general. Saying Extras isn't 'generally' derivative is no counter-argument to my thesis that that particular episode was weaker, and more derivative, than I would expect. (Besides, you even undermine your own misguided counter-argument in parentheses at the end!) As I said, I still enjoyed it. And The Office and Extras are two of my favourite shows. I think Extras can be seen in many ways to be a template of how to write a good sitcom. Which was why I was disappointed to see that the Christmas special seemed overly long, rushed out, comparatively derivative, with lots of celebs bunged in to shore up the holes. Compare the Patrick Stewart bits of series one to any of the celeb cameos in the special - no contest, no contest at all.
I'm not sure exactly what you were expecting from it.
I was expecting it to be as good as the best episodes of 'Extras'. It was still good, but I was disappointed.
And if you read my post properly you will see that I did not accuse the writers of being creatively bankrupt. I said that claiming 'nothing is new' is not an excuse for creative bankruptcy. Even taking me to mean that I did think that particular joke was creatively bankrupt, you can't extrapolate my opinion of the low points of one show to the whole series or indeed the writers themselves. Please don't mangle my words in such a way to frame any argument, let alone one that is absolute twaddle.
I agree that the whole 'Maggie's room' nonsense is bollocks and not worthy of debate, as I said, but I think most of it was tongue-in-cheek.
Re: the tissues again, it IS an old joke - that's just a fact - and I was using it to illustrate a malaise that seemed to have affected moments of the whole show. Frankly, Gervais and Merchant can't rip the piss out of sitcom unoriginality as they do so well in their mise en abyme 'When The Whistle Blows' - and fall victim to the same errors themselves - without coming away with a smattering of egg on the face. I wanted comedy perfection, and they just did not deliver this. But again, I liked it. It was funny. But far from perfect on many levels.