The Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal): The Bugle

February 17, 2008

The Bugle

John Oliver is familiar to those who watch the Daily Show. He's the slight, very laughable, owlish-faced guy with glasses ignorant Americans might say speaks with an "English" accent, though there's really no such thing as an "English" accent, each person on the British Isles being gifted with a vocal delivery that sounds out with remorseless GPS-like precision the given geographic and social position of its speaker to anyone who pays attention to that sort of thing. Is John Oliver a native of a particular six-square block of inner London? Only his linguist knows for sure. Nevertheless, he's trained his voice, like all the people on those islands over the years, to pronounce a lot of biographical and cultural information about himself whenever he uses his words. These niceties are wasted on most Americans, who in general have no idea where people from that part of the world are coming from or why that should make any difference to an American anyway.

This makes comedy hard, since relating the funny topical thing about England or Scotland or Ireland, or even about inherently laughable Wales at times, which Oliver and his partner Andy Zaltzman valiantly set out to do each week in a half-hour podcast from timesonline called The Bugle—an audio newspaper for a visual age, must depend on a familiarity with those places with which the average American audience is famously ill-supplied. Oliver and Zaltzman have solved this problem for transatlantic listeners by taking special pains in each program to make plenty of understandable fun of America as well.

1 comment:

Unknown said...: The Bugle is simply the best comedy podcast on the internet. From the sections that are thrown directly into "the bin" to the audio cryptic crossword to "hotties from history," it is laugh out loud funny. I was familiar with John Oliver from "The Daily Show" but Andy Zalzman is new to me. He is brilliant. It is slowly moving up the "charts" on itunes. Soon it will become a cult thing. Check it out.; March 27, 2008 at 4:08 PM

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For some years now I've travelled bumptiously about the internet commenting on other people's blogs under the pseudonym "peter ramus," pointedly and I regret to say at times heatedly disclosing the general shape my own intricately devised misapprehension of current events in contradistinction to the remarkable torrent of misapprehensions made known daily on that medium by everyone else.

Nominally I associate myself as much as possible with the views of those who seem to know what they're talking about, but often enough I find myself obliged, like so many others, to go on about things I'm not in the least qualified to address simply because it is my way when the opportunity presents itself. I find this shortcoming as personally irritating as it is to those I've favored it with over the years, an as yet irrepressible feature of my discourse. Thus the admittedly defensive assumption of the nom de blog, "peter ramus."

"peter ramus" isn't to be confused with Peter Ramus, another fellow entirely, who lived and died a long time ago around the sad times leading up to the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in France, an event which saw his own undoing in the chaotic days that followed.

He was a zeolot, Peter Ramus was. He had a particular bone to pick with Aristotle over the stuff and substance of rhetoric, which led him to propose revolutionary changes in the subject and manner of teaching which prevailed in higher education in those times. A quaestio was convened, a solemn gathering of all the branches of civil society, to see what was to be done about him. The King sent a man, and the Church sent a man, and of course the University of Paris couldn't help but send one, too. Unsurprisingly, they found overwhelmingly in favor of Aristotle and against Peter Ramus. In addition, it pleased the members of the assembled body to pronounce Peter Ramus personally disagreeable and notably ugly to boot. Strictly as an aside.

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