[cyberferret]

Someone once told me - "British comedy is about making fun of yourself, whereas American comedy is about making fun of other people", and I have found it to be true in a lot of shows I've witnessed. Probably why I personally tend to prefer British comedies over American ones. I have a thing against people having a laugh at the expense of others.

[atombender]

That doesn't ring true to me at all. I'm more inclined to agree with Stephen Fry [1], who explains that it's ultimately a matter of optimism versus pessimism.

The great American comics are people like John Belushi, the wisecracking charmer who gets the girl in the end, while the British comedian prefers to play the failure; British comedy comes from strife and tragedy and embarrassment and loss of dignity, which is why most British comedy focuses on lower/middle class people and their relationship with the hierarchy: Basil Fawlty (John Cleese's character in Fawlty Towers), Blackadder, David Brent (The Office), and so on.

The types of comedic personalities you tend to see in American culture are the likes of Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler, featuring people who may be average, but generally don't start as failures, and if they do (or if they have an unfortunate fall from grace in the middle of the story), the central theme isn't the inevitability of their failure, but an optimistic path towards self-betterment and reclaiming control over their own destiny.

The US also doesn't have the kind of history of tensions between the classes that Britain has (even though wealth inequality is objectively worse, and the system is simply not recognized as being a class system among ordinary people). The American style of comedy goes hand in hand with the idea of the American dream, that anyone can succeed if they try hard enough.

The most "British" American comedy I've seen in recent times was Forgetting Sarah Marshall (written by Jason Segel, an American, but directed by a Brit, Nicholas Stoller), which basically revels in the haplessness and constant failures of the main character, and his path to happiness isn't the traditional American one (though it has that "pull yourself by the bootstraps" approach).

I recommend watching the clip. Fry delivers a very eloquent thesis. If you're not familiar with Fry, his answer might sound rehearsed, but it's clearly not; he's just extremely articulate.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8k2AbqTBxao

[missedthecue]

98% of the jokes in Blackadder are making fun of other people. I really don't find that axiom to be true