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The Goon Show: Comedy
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The Goon Show was a popular and influential British radio comedy programme, originally produced and broadcast by the BBC from 1951 to 1960 in the BBC Home Service and sometimes rebroadcast on the BBC Light Programme. The first series, aired between May and September 1951, went out as Crazy People, with Radio's Own Crazy Gang: The Goons as its subtitle.
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The Goon Show was a popular and influential British radio comedy programme, originally produced and broadcast by the BBC from 1951 to 1960 on the BBC Home Service. It was heard in the United States as early as the mid-1950s when it was carried on NBC.[1]
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The Alberts were a jazz-comedy outfit with ties to both The Goon Show and [T]he Temperance Seven, and an inspiration to the Scaffold and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. They were founded by Bruce Lacey, formerly a special effects engineer whose background included work on The Goon Show and a bubble-blowing automaton. Dressing in Victorian clothing and utilizing a variety of outré props, they gigged regularly and had a residency at Peter Cook's Establishment Club in London. Though very popular and well-liked, they appear to have recorded very little before their breakup, with one single as the Massed Alberts ("Blaze Away," coupled with "Goodbye Dolly Grey" on Parlophone) and a pair of tracks on a compilation shared with the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and the Temperance Seven. Neil Innes was briefly a member of the ensemble.
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The second half of the 20th century would not have been as funny without these Goons. The massive influence this group had on comedy is not to be underestimated. Without the Goons, there would have been no Monty Python's Flying Circus, no National Lampoon, no Saturday Night Live, no South Park, and so on and so forth, the possible yucks enjoyed by mankind dwindling like the last flames on a burned-out log. Comedians who have never even heard the Goons -- yes Virginia, there are performers that naïve standing around doing comedy -- still imitate the group second- or even third-hand by ripping off other comedians that ripped off the group. "Oops, somebody ripped off the thing I ripped off," Cheech & Chong might have said to describe the situation when they weren't crediting the Goons for the ploy of reinventing themselves in the form of one absurd character after another. The Goon Show material has proved to be infinitely engaging to both old audiences and new, resulting in several different, confusing, and of course goony reissue series numbering in the dozens of CDs. Of great importance in an era when comedians exercise less and less censorship, and comedy itself becomes more and more raunchy and filthy, is the fact that the Goons were able to pull off the most outrageous comic material under the noses of the stuffy and controlling British Broadcasting Corporation.
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In a way, the Goon Show is a unique combination of two different fascinations: comedy and archeology. It is a remarkable cultural time capsule -- a continuous weekly window on English society from 1952 to 1960.
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The now multi-bootlegged recordings of the Beatles to their fans on the famous Christmas Message records, are masterpieces of surreal Beatle comedy that draws heavily on the Goons and their comedy. http://www.norwegianwood.org/beatles/disko/html/xmas2.html
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