Hear Me Out: Matt Berry is the quintessential British comedian
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(Credits: Far Out / Ben Meadows / BBC / Objective Fiction)
British humour is a notoriously hard thing to pin down. It’s silly, but not too much and always in a self-aware way. It’s sarcastic but not too cynical. It plays on the line of pushing something to the edge but not over it, applying that ethos to everything from how many times you can repeat a gag to the level of questionable content you can play around with. Matt Berry pulls off all of the above.
Really, British humour feels like it can only be defined or exemplified by its masters. You can trace the history of it back through a series of portraits; Morecambe and Wise were the satirical answer to England’s call for our own take on golden age Hollywood Comedy. French and Saunders made TV comedy snappy and cool again, while people like Peter Kay, Ricky Gervais and Matt Lucas have bottled up our dark comedic streak and sold it to the masses. Currently, you could argue that James Acaster is the next step as the current generation’s leading light, but Acaster is a master of one character: himself. Matt Berry is a master of all, learning from every era that’s come before to dominate the one he’s working in.
If you take all the strengths of the whole lineage of great British comedians and boil them down, you’d find a shape much like Berry’s, but you’d find it all with a new edge. When he broke out in Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, he became a key part of a new crowd of faces on a mission to make British comedy cool again.
As the country veered towards recession, the resurgence of surrealist comedy through shows like Darkplace, The Mighty Boosh, or Snuff Box, made in collaboration with Brass Eye’s Michael Cumming, felt like a way of acknowledging how messed up everything was getting and laughing through it. Berry, sitting at the centre of this sphere, seemed to find a comedic language that was plugged into current culture but didn’t tie itself to it. Somehow, his work was both timely and fresh while also disconnecting itself from the often stuffy or tiresome world of observational comedy.
Instead, Berry returns to the glory that the country’s comedy has always been built on, which is complete and utter ridiculousness. More specifically than that, its ridiculousness balanced perfectly with a cool, quick-witted nonchalance.
Toast Of London in its entirety could be used as an example of that. The world of Steven Toast is about as ridiculous as you can get, with its infamous names like Cocker Boo, Ken Suggestion or the repeated call of “Yes, I can hear you, Clem Fandango”. But Berry’s perfect comedic timing and talent for pulling things back from the edge of being overdone right at the last second has made Toast one of the most beloved comedic characters of recent history.
It makes sense. British comedy, in its essence, is all based on banter, and Banter is all about veering easily between the big and overblown into off-the-cuff comments. Humour is found in those moments when the switch is flicked between melodrama and nonchalance. When you think about Matt Berry’s most famous characters, that’s what they all do.
But even in projects where Berry is nowhere near the writing room, he’s become the go-to man for tasteful silliness. Merging the charisma and theatrical flair of the old-school greats with the new-school coolness, he’s found golden ground somewhere between the left-field comedy circle and the mainstream legends that used to dominate British television. From that perfect mid-section, he’s staked his claim as perhaps the quintessential British comedic working today, representing British humour at its best.
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