Rowan Atkinson

[weedie]

G'day folks,
The other night, there was a film clip of Rowan Atkinson on the TV..
This was very funny and I hav'nt laughed so much for ages ..I dont know if he was in Mr Bean character or if it was a Blackadder thing but the clip showed him meeting the Pope..He kneels and kisses the Pope's hand and then progresses up his arm ,then to the head, and ends with him licking the poor old Pope's bald head ..all the time,the Pope remaining composed......
Would anyone here know what this footage is from ??...I'd love to see it again....
Thanks and best wishes from OZ....weedie...

[Innocent Bystander]

I haven't seen the clip to which you refer. But it might have been from the "Johnny English" film, or from one of the programmes of the series "Not the Nine O'clock News" which was a bunch of comedy sketches.

[emmline]

I liked a Blackadder film I saw once at the Millennium Dome in London--it was especially made for that exhibit, and involved Blackadder and his lackey time traveling.
Everything else I've ever seen with Rowan Atkinson in it I've found intolerable. He makes me crazy in a way that is similar to Tim Conway in old Carol Burnett show sketches.

[dwest]

As I'm sure most know the first Blackadder was the Druid Priest who build Stonehenge which was designed as a children's playground and swing set.

[fel bautista]

G'day folks,
The other night, there was a film clip of Rowan Atkinson on the TV..
This was very funny and I hav'nt laughed so much for ages ..I dont know if he was in Mr Bean character or if it was a Blackadder thing but the clip showed him meeting the Pope..He kneels and kisses the Pope's hand and then progresses up his arm ,then to the head, and ends with him licking the poor old Pope's bald head ..all the time,the Pope remaining composed......
Would anyone here know what this footage is from ??...I'd love to see it again....
Thanks and best wishes from OZ....weedie...

not to distract from the thread,but is that an MV in your avatar??

[weedie]

G'day there Fel Bautista ,
Nope,not an MV ,but a 1973 Ducati 750 GT 'Special' ..I built it up from 5 boxes of rusty parts.... it ..

By the way,this post is not any dig at the church or anything like that....It would have been equally funny if it had been Barack Obama,our own Kevin Rudd or anyone else accustomed to having people kneel before them... ( not that Kev or Barack are that way inclined ! )

[john]

rowan atkinson also contributed to a show called 'peter cook and co' alongside john cleese and others in about 1980/1, after dudley moore had made it in hollywood
i'd love to see it but i don't think it has ever been made available commercially
at one of the amnesty international secret policeman's balls he took part in a peter cook 'beyond the fringe' sketch called 'the end of the world'
there was also a recording of him from about 1979 where he played to an audience in belfast - i think the show was co-written by richard curtis who went on to do 4 weddings and a funeral (where atkinson plays a vicar at one of the weddings and confuses the Holy Ghost with the holy goat)
i read an interview with him a few years ago - he didn't sound all that proud of the films he's made like the mr bean and johnny english (both directed by mel smith who was in 'not the 9 o clock show' along with gryff reece-jones, and pamela stephenson who went on to marry billy connolly)
another sketch i remember is one where he plays an indian waiter who's peed off by the banter of the english clientele ordering food ('shall i poppadum on the table?')
there's a british label called 'laughing stock' that released a lot of this stuff on cassette
regards
john

[Denny]

there's some Peter Cook and Company on you tube

[SteveShaw]

Everything else I've ever seen with Rowan Atkinson in it I've found intolerable. He makes me crazy in a way that is similar to Tim Conway in old Carol Burnett show sketches.

Now emm, you know that you and I agree on almost everything, but really. How anyone could type that after watching any episode of Blackadder bar those from the first series... I hope this is not a true reflection of all that we Brits feel about Americans and their "sense of humour..."

[Innocent Bystander]

Everything else I've ever seen with Rowan Atkinson in it I've found intolerable. He makes me crazy in a way that is similar to Tim Conway in old Carol Burnett show sketches.

Now emm, you know that you and I agree on almost everything, but really. How anyone could type that after watching any episode of Blackadder bar those from the first series... I hope this is not a true reflection of all that we Brits feel about Americans and their "sense of humour..."

I can see why Emm don't take to Rowan Atkinson. I can't take Mr Bean at all, and have a very limited tolerance for Blackadder. I thought he was best in the NTNOCN, where his presence was diluted/augmented by the presence of others. He does a nice cameo, such as in "Scooby-Do the Movie".

Blackadder starts to fail when it slips into mere inventive abuse. The situations can be funny, but the dialogue is sometimes just painful.

[emmline]

Everything else I've ever seen with Rowan Atkinson in it I've found intolerable. He makes me crazy in a way that is similar to Tim Conway in old Carol Burnett show sketches.

Now emm, you know that you and I agree on almost everything, but really. How anyone could type that after watching any episode of Blackadder bar those from the first series... I hope this is not a true reflection of all that we Brits feel about Americans and their "sense of humour..."

My sense of humo(u)r probably doesn't pin very well to either the Brit or Yank boards, when it comes right down to it.
But, let me be clear--I liked the (one) episode of Blackadder I've seen. A very brief dose of R.A. (as in his cameo as a salesclerk in Love Actually) is tolerable. It was the Mr. Bean film that acted as a sort of Rowan Atkinson Aversion Therapy infusion. So effective that I now have trouble filtering the good from the bad, memory-wise.

[JS]

I once caught on tv the end of a solo performance by RA, including a presentation in Elizabethan costume of the variety of ways of stabbing someone in the back--a very funny routine, smarter and wittier than either Mr. Bean or Blackadder (and I like Blackadder, although opinion here is sharply divided in my house--which suggests a division of temperament rather than of cultural geography, I think).

[SteveShaw]

I must confess that I didn't see Mr Bean the movie (I can't follow plots), and the only Mr Bean bits I really enjoyed were that one when he went to infinite contortions to preserve his modesty when getting changed on the beach, only to find that the guy he was preserving his modesty in front of was blind, and that one with the dodgy TV aerial. But the second, third and fourth series of Blackadder are right up there with the best as far as I'm concerned. Of course, you have to like your humour subtle.

[emmline]

Of course, you have to like your humour subtle.

Subtlety or lack thereof isn't my issue with Mr. Bean. He reminds me of Tim Conway in the sense that they both are apt to perform very long, drawn-out routines in which there's usually a straight man experiencing the antics or ineptitude of the comedian as torturous. For some reason my brain forces me to empathize with the straight man. Hence, I can't stand it.
Broadly course humor, in either the American (gross-out frat films,) or Brit (Benny Hill maybe?) are equally excruciating in their own way.
I guess I need my humor subtle but quick. Short attention span perhaps?

[s1m0n]

For some reason my brain forces me to empathize with the straight man. Hence, I can't stand it.

I've liked Rowan Atkinson since NT9O'CN, but I can't stand Fawlty Towers for very similar reasons.

And when I was a Kid, my dad took me into the city to a rep cinema to see a film he'd LOVED when he was my age, a (largely) silent French film from the talkie era, Monsieur Hulot's Holiday (aka Le Vacances de..). No doubt like most such this was a bonding exercise choreographed by my mother, but it was a total disaster. I not only hated the film, I found it so painful I had to leave. He didn't get how anyone could not enjoy such a wonderful film and tried to get me to tough it out until my irrational aversion passed. We went home angry and unhappy.