RIP Rik Mayall
Jun. 10th, 2014 09:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
usernamenumber(in case anyone hasn't heard the news)
Oh man, I'd been doing ok keeping it at "almost crying" so far, thinking how silly it is for me to be this broken up about the loss of a guy whose claim to fame was bad poetry and making fun of basically who I was in high school. But losing a part of your cultural childhood is like that.
And then, this...
This image was the one that got me. Waterworks a go-go. I'd be feeling the same thing if Vyvyan was suddenly gone, too.
...and I think I just figured out why these guys mean so much to me. The Young Ones... it wasn't a good show. It had moments of brilliance, but the jokes were often more weird than clever, some of the musical guests were embarrassingly bad, and there were plenty of times it seemed that as writers they had no idea where they were going with an episode. But here's the thing... they. didn't. care. Not about that stuff, anyway. The Young Ones was many things, but it was never half-assed, and even when I didn't like it per se I couldn't stop watching, pulled in by the energy of the cast. Every crude puppet, every lousy joke, every bizarre non-sequitur, and every instance of mindless violence was done with a gusto that said "This is our world! It makes no sense, it's kind of stupid, but we are going to inhabit the everliving fuck out of it, and you're coming with us!".
We should all be so lucky as to experience that kind of simultaneous commitment and abandon. As a misfit teenager then, an entertainer now, and a human always, it matters. It's stupid *and* important. And that's life.
Oh man, I'd been doing ok keeping it at "almost crying" so far, thinking how silly it is for me to be this broken up about the loss of a guy whose claim to fame was bad poetry and making fun of basically who I was in high school. But losing a part of your cultural childhood is like that.
And then, this...
This image was the one that got me. Waterworks a go-go. I'd be feeling the same thing if Vyvyan was suddenly gone, too.
...and I think I just figured out why these guys mean so much to me. The Young Ones... it wasn't a good show. It had moments of brilliance, but the jokes were often more weird than clever, some of the musical guests were embarrassingly bad, and there were plenty of times it seemed that as writers they had no idea where they were going with an episode. But here's the thing... they. didn't. care. Not about that stuff, anyway. The Young Ones was many things, but it was never half-assed, and even when I didn't like it per se I couldn't stop watching, pulled in by the energy of the cast. Every crude puppet, every lousy joke, every bizarre non-sequitur, and every instance of mindless violence was done with a gusto that said "This is our world! It makes no sense, it's kind of stupid, but we are going to inhabit the everliving fuck out of it, and you're coming with us!".
We should all be so lucky as to experience that kind of simultaneous commitment and abandon. As a misfit teenager then, an entertainer now, and a human always, it matters. It's stupid *and* important. And that's life.
