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PaperclipPerfector  22d ago (text post)   3727 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 26, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Are Brits on average more intelligent than Americans, at least verbally (restricting both sets to college-educated people, say)? As an American I know I might be conditioned by silly tropes of British sophistication but I feel like there's something here.

  • Based on what Youtube serves up to me occasionally, British talk shows seem more clever
  • Prime Minister's Questions, despite being nonsense, seem to require more quick-wittedness than any comparable American political event I can think of
  • Social customs seem to require saying lots of things in subtler, more roundabout ways, which is simply more mentally taxing for both the speaker and listener

Not that any of these are amazing displays of intelligence. There just seems to be a greater demand on one's verbal faculties in everyday life.

Some element might be cultural. Britain dominates the high end of very sophisticated TV programs. Consider University Challenge, Mastermind or Only Connect. These are very hard questions! There's also Yes Minister.

American TV seems to be courser. Even early Veep used much cruder language than Yes Minister. By late Veep it gets ridiculous, they're constantly trying to one-up themselves in crassness. The Thick of It is a bit more contemporary than Yes Minister yet also has a certain level of groundedness and seriousness that Veep lacks. Ianucci made both, there seems to be a US desire for heightened drama and rudeness over pure wordplay.

I can't find an American equivalent to University Challenge, only 'Are you smarter than a 5th grader' and 'Jeopardy' which is understandably less sophisticated. Ironically University Challenge was a copy of the American College Bowl, perhaps things were different in the past.

The Thick of It isn’t less sweary than Veep. It’s more that Veep was written by outsiders rather than insiders and so after season 3 the jokes were less creative or funny and they had to rely on a combination of character-based humor and funny profanity. They swapped to a largely American writers’ room afterward and that had advantages in some ways and made things worse in others. Veep season 1 makes no effort to even be American, it’s about as American as GTA, half the expressions are British.

half the expressions are British

Would you mind giving some examples? I've been curious ever since I heard this claim, but for a few reasons I'm not very good at distinguishing them myself.

It’s a common complaint about Succession, too. Things like ending sentences in “yeah?”. Here’s an interview with Matt Walsh (not that one) who plays Mike in Veep where he discusses it. GTA is a good example, I played 4 again recently and it’s full of Americans saying stuff that just sounds off for Americans to say. Even Red Dead 2 has it on occasion, and they made a real effort there. The same of course exists in reverse when American writers try to write British characters.

Isn't Succession based on the Murdochs, though? Rupert is notoriously Australian, and it looks like all three of James, Lachlan and Elizabeth spent most of their careers outside the US.

Per Wikipedia, Logan Roy (the Rupert-equivalent) is British in-universe.

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