The Trip

It is surprising how much Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan's The Trip parallels The Canterbury Tales. A pilgrimage to the north of England, with an ostensible purpose to which its pilgrims become increasingly indifferent as the trip. Their thoughts are occupied with a competitive relationship between each other's identity, which at times is explicitly adversarial but as the trip drags on, becomes a cooperative endeavor through which the pilgrims confront their identities as Englishmen and as humans. Cultural artifacts which by now small stretch could be said to define the English nation, tongue, and artistic oeuvre, are observed reacting in sociological situ. The ultimate effect is somewhere between the demonstration of how cultural dialogue is enacted to make functional (or indeed, dysfunctional) human beings, and a thorough exploration of the means by which that cultural dialogue is constructed.

The truly amazing comparison is, however, how raucously funny the English have found both of these works. While both of them certainly have their moments of deliberate and out of control hilarity, the tear shedding, side splitting humor to which English critics (of both these works) have claimed to find is not readily apparent to me as an American audience. I think it speaks volumes about the English character that these stories, tales of lonely, blanched people lost in a sprawling granite sea of a nation, desperately defending themselves from an alienation from their own identity as artists and a broader social fabric which removes more and more context for self-knowledge with each passing year, are considered humor of the frankest kind. It speaks to some deeper melancholy than American satirists could have ever dreamed, that sad, grey little men lost in a sad, grey little nation, forgetting more and more with each step where they came from and where they are going, causes the English to slap their knees and tap with unselfconscious ease into that cruel and poignant reserve of humor which powers such a tale.