A Bit of Fry and Laurie - Season One [DVD] [DVD]

Amazon.com The comedy duo of Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie arrived on the British airwaves with an arsenal of false mustaches, snooty attitudes, linguistic twistiness, and deranged meta-commentary (which sometimes escalated into meta-meta-commentary). It's fascinating to see the pilot episode of A Bit of Fry & Laurie (included on the Season One DVD), in which all the tools of such comedy are in place, but there is a tentativeness about deploying them. By the first broadcast episode, as they launch into a sketch about a father objecting to his son being taught Biology in school, Fry and Laurie are in full command. Crazed flights of language spill effortlessly from their mouths, be it academic critic-babble or macho business jargon gone strangely awry. Fry and Laurie clearly owe a debt to the Monty Python troupe--in addition to verbal lunacy, Fry and Laurie recognized that when a sketch peaked they could skip on to the next one, often using on-the-street non-sequiturs for transitions-