Long-running great comedy? What about Last of the Summer Wine?

Oh, all right. You win.

Comedy, like beauty and love, is for the most part a social construct and thus cannot be compared in the manner you are suggesting. One society's notions about ideal comedy, beauty or love may well be another society's great big yawn, or worse.

At this point, I suppose I would have been tempted to insult you. However, as you are a fellow Jewish conspirator in the great plot to take over the Lib Dems, I shall refrain from this. Besides, I try never to make a man cry while he's on a diet.

By the by, did you manage to infiltrate what passes for Jenny Tonge's grey matter last night with that probe supplied by Mossad to your mother while she was shopping in Waitrose?

Damn, the fun you gentiles miss out on, what with all those secret handshakes, tip-offs about "terrorist plots" engineered by Israel, and the lovely moolah we make off of your poor hardworking backs.

A note: Very Many Jews prefer American comedy for the simple reason that much American comedy has its origins in Jewish humour.

The Full Monty was very funny.

Stand-up? Eddie Izzard.

Can you confirm, Joshua, that your evidence that the BBC covered up the Holocaust is "a social construct"?

You mean "Love, Actually" wasn't funny? /sarcasm.
Yes it sucked big time

Another comedy series that was short and funny: Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister.

There used to be good British comedies but they were not precisely laugh-out-loud ones and usually had a rather dark undertone. True for almost all the Ealing Comedies.

"Can you confirm, Joshua, that your evidence that the BBC covered up the Holocaust is "a social construct"?"

I can confirm that a million of you, and more, aren't worth one hair on the head of one Jewish child murdered by the Nazis with the almost total collaboration of all of gentile Europe including Great Britain. Indeed, one of the main reasons I am against Jews contributing to charities (not Jewish charities of course) in the UK is that people like you will benefit.

For everyone else, more on the Nazi-like anti-Semitism of the British, this time courtesy of George Orwell (it's ironic that Orwell himself proves himself to be a quite vicious anti-Semite in this piece):

Antisemitism in Britain

http://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/antisemitism/english/e_antib

What I find truly amazing about the BBC is that even as the death camps were being "liberated," the anti-Semites at that vile organisation were still trying to hush up the Holocaust. Incredible that the BBC refused to air Richard Dimbleby's famous dispatch from Belsen (not even a death camp) until he threatened to resign.

And who can be surprised that a short while later the Brits were beating up and murdering those very same Holocaust survivors?

Anti-Semitism like all other forms of prejudice is obviously a social construct, but one which, at least in the most malign examples of places like Poland and the UK, is utterly ineradicable.

And now I shall take a leaf out of the book of the exceedingly wise Oliver Kamm and ignore you. Find some other Jew to bait.

Peter Cook
Stan Laurel
Peter Cook
John Cleese
Peter Cook
Charlie Chaplin
Peter Cook
Peter Sellers

Can you confirm, Joshua, that your evidence that the BBC covered up the Holocaust is "a social construct"? Answer the question.

"And now I shall take a leaf out of the book of the exceedingly wise Oliver Kamm and ignore you. "

Joshua - That's genuinely funny!!

StevenT - you forgot Peter Cook! Also, don't forget the 'Comic Strip' crowd from the early 80's (a lot of them have lost their fastball now, but at the time much of their output was genuinely groundbreaking)

James - This is a discussion about the comparative comedic talents in the US & the UK, where the hell does the Holocaust fit into that?

I've been saying this for years but there's a strange belief that most American tv/comedy is poor simply due to the fact that an awful lot of it is made. This seems to obscure the fact that the best television and comedy from America is head and shoulders above everything else. The Simpsons for example, for about 7 years or so it was the funniest show ever made. Terrible now unforunately but nothing lasts forever.

Yes, Stephen. Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Shite. The paradigm of unfunny, nauseatingly correct BBC shite. It's been commissioned for the next 30 years because it ticks all those BBC boxes...stars young people, written by a young woman of ethnic origin, etc etc.

Compare to any random episode of MASH, Cheers, Taxi, Barney Miller, Laverne & Shirley, Frasier.

Embarrassing.

What about AbFab? They're hilarious!

I won't argue Yanks have it over Brits, but I would have thought you might include "Blackadder", The Two Ronnies, and The Benny Hill Show (all of which have ran for several years) to the Brit ledger. I think Benny Hill ran for a long time as there are shows where the age difference is noticeable. Then there is "Are You Being Served?"

Lastly, one of my favs (only because the wife in the show is so cute) was from the 80's but I can't remember the name -- it was about a couple who decided hubbie would quit his job and they would live self-sufficently. Their neighbors firgured prominently in the show, the wife of which appeared in severl later shows, too.

cirby is right, Eddie Izzard is brilliant.

Yes Minister and Yes Prime Minister actually went on longer than many of the other comedies. the sesons were short, but there were 5 of them.

I'm sorry, but you're wrong:

Stephen Potter
P G Wodehouse
The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin
The News Quiz
Jeremy Hardy
Douglas Adams
Paul Merton
Kenneth Williams
Monty Python (yes I know you mentioned them but they rewrote the rules for comedy...)
and
John Cleese in his own right,
to name but a (mighty) few.