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Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes"

• workmandan 10mo ago
  Stephen Fry made the same remarks in a Q&A session some years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k2AbqTBxao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k2AbqTBxao As a Brit I can't agree more with both, I find American humour so hard to relate to but I guess it's just a culture thing
  • oneeyedpigeon 10mo ago
    I find more modern American humour much easier to relate to, probably because it has veered more in this direction. A show like Always Sunny seems incredibly British-compatible because it's about terrible people getting their comeuppance, yet still being sympathetic despite their failings.
    • xnorswap 10mo ago
      To go full British, you need characters like David Brent, who aren't sympathetic. They have no redeeming heartfelt goodbye. No-one is sad when they're gone, life moves on. I would also say that the Always Sunny gang really aren't sympathetic either, but it's a para-social trick of having spent so much time "together" with them over so many episodes. I suspect a new viewer coming to watch the latest series of IASIP would not see them as sympathetic. That's quite different to The Office (US), where a new viewer skipping to later seasons would not have the same opinions as a new viewer watching season 1, where Scott was much closer to a Brent type character, before he was redeemed and made more pitiable than awful over the seasons.
      • lanfeust6 10mo ago
        I'm not sure it's generally true that funny English characters aren't sympathetic.
        • Beestie 10mo ago
          Mr. Bean (Rowan Atkinson) is both hilarious and sympathetic so there's that.
        • xnorswap 10mo ago
          You're right, there are plenty of sympathetic ones too, but it's the unsympathetic ones that really don't do so well to a US audience. There's a reason that The Office (US) hard pivoted Michael Scott after season 1.
      • deleted 10mo ago
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      • jccalhoun 10mo ago
        A more recent show to compare would be the UK vs the USA version of Ghosts. I like both shows but it is interesting how in the USA version all the main Ghosts are basically good people while the UK Ghosts have more serious flaws. And in the UK version, money is a constant problem while in the USA version it isn't nearly as big of a problem.
      • retsibsi 10mo ago
        > I would also say that the Always Sunny gang really aren't sympathetic either, but it's a para-social trick of having spent so much time "together" with them over so many episodes. I'd say they're charismatic and funny, but irredeemably bad people. It was refreshing that the show didn't shy away from that; in lots of comedies, the characters are basically psychopathic if taken literally, yet we're still supposed to like them and to see them as having hearts of gold if they make the occasional nice gesture. Always Sunny just leaned hard into portraying them as terrible people who were only 'likable' in the shallow sense needed to make the show fun to watch rather than an ordeal. But I think the creators eventually lost sight of that -- I remember the big serious episode they did with Mac's dance, and I just find it baffling because in order to buy into the emotion we were evidently supposed to feel, we needed to take the characters seriously. And as soon as we take the characters seriously we are (or should be) overwhelmingly aware that we're watching people who have proven over the previous umpteen years to be irredeemable sociopaths, which kind of takes the edge off the heartwarming pride story.
    • nkrisc 10mo ago
      I only watched the first few seasons of IASIP, but I don’t remember them being sympathetic characters at all. The whole concept, and what made it funny, I thought, is that they really are all terrible people who just drag each other down.
      • lotsofpulp 10mo ago
        It would be disturbing to find out people sympathize with the IASIP characters.
        • cogman10 10mo ago
          They were more human and relatable in the very early seasons. It was just a bunch of people dicking around trying to run a bar (for the most part). As time went on, they become more and more awful. I'd say it has a pretty decent parallel with Breaking Bad. In season 1 almost anyone can relate to and cheers for Walter. By the last season, you hate him and are happy he dies.
          • dyauspitr 10mo ago
            I don’t believe most Americans would hate Walter, even at the very end. Americans hate Skylar.
            • sanderjd 10mo ago
              No way. Everyone hates Walter at the end. If he had plausibly maintained the "I was doing it for my family" pose, then maybe, yeah. But the whole point of the last season was putting that idea to bed, demonstrating that it was always destructive selfishness.
              • dyauspitr 10mo ago
                Yes rationally he should be hated, it just doesn’t appear he is from a lot of discussions and forums online.
    • sanderjd 10mo ago
      Yeah this does seem right. Maybe as our own empire has been collapsing, our culture has been edging toward the brits'.
      • t-3 10mo ago
        No, nationalism and patriotism started to be embarrassing to the educated classes in the US after the USSR collapsed. We had "won", and slavish obedience and loyalty are really not consistent with the values of liberalism and democracy, and empire is quite uncomfortable if you believe in human rights and self-determination, etc. Our society has been changing because it's running into the contradictions of a culture designed to foster the unity necessary to win wars and dominate the world and an idealism that says all humanity is equal and freedom and self-determination are inherently good.
        • sanderjd 10mo ago
          I don't think "patriotism" and "slavish obedience and loyalty" are the same thing.
          • t-3 10mo ago
            Can you articulate a meaningful distinction?
  • RickJWagner 10mo ago
    As an older American, I’ve always found British humor of the Monty Python type hilarious. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a lot of newer material of this type. I may have to look harder.
    • technothrasher 10mo ago
      As a fellow older American who loves Monty Python, the more modern British shows I've enjoyed the most were Green Wing, League of Gentlemen, Peep Show, and Doc Martin. Of those, League of Gentlemen and Green Wing have the most Python-like absurdity, while Doc Martin has the most subtle humor. Peep Show is hilarious, but the most crass humor of those listed, although League of Gentlemen doesn't shy away from crassness either.
    • xnorswap 10mo ago
      What do you mean by "this type"? The sketch show format has been pretty much entirely killed off by TikTok & Instagram. It's very hard to do a sketch that hasn't already been done on TikTok with a tiny fraction of the budget. Absurdist humour still exists everywhere, it's less popular than either Python in the 70's / 80's, or the flash era in the 2000s, but it's still everywhere, but I'd also wager it is not to your taste. At the risk of offending just about everyone, I would suggest that something like "Skibidi Toilet" is just this generation's badger-badger-mushroom, which in turn was that generations' "Bring me a shrubbery!". Sketch shows in particular don't work well for TV in this era. Mitchell and Webb tried hard to return with one this year and it just fell flat, the jokes feel telegraphed from a mile-away, taking a minute to get to a punchline in a era when the same jokes are told in a 10 second short. The downside of the tiktok/insta model, is that the more successful people on Insta end up just re-telling their one good joke over and over. ( Or indeed, re-recording someone else's one good joke. ). Not that sketch shows didn't also repeat jokes sometimes, but they could at least play around with a punchline in unexpected ways, or have callbacks and nods to earlier sketches in a series. That kind of non-continuity doesn't work when you don't know which tiktoks will go viral, or which order your audience will see them in, as the algorithm dictates all.
      • m348e912 10mo ago
  • deltarholamda 10mo ago
    His point of high church vs. Protestantism is a good one. We in the US practice a kind of competitive Protestantism designed--at least partly, if not mostly--to make the adherents feel good about themselves. There is a distinct difference between submission and proselytizing. There is also something to the state of empire as well. The British empire had been in steady decline for a very long time before Adams or Fry started making people laugh, whereas the American empire has been ascending quickly since WWII. This sort of gestalt is hard to ignore and will certainly influence things. For example, would a 'Blackadder' sell as well in 1890? This is around the same time 'King Solomon's Mines' was selling briskly, and Haggard's story is instantly recognizable by any modern Hollywood writer. On some level Americans are British people time-displaced by a couple of generations.
    • arethuza 10mo ago
      "On some level Americans are British people time-displaced by a couple of generations." At a certain level I don't think the UK ever recovered from WW1.
      • biofox 10mo ago
        I think there is a lot of truth in that. It led to the death of patriotism (which is now considered embarrassing outside of sport), national purpose, institutions, empire, and coincided with the decline of heavy industry (which only happened much more recently in the US). EDIT: Saying that, there is still a strong positive national identity. We're just too embarrassed to express it strongly (see patriotism), because of our fall from grace.
        • arethuza 10mo ago
          Going by the variety of flags i see people flying I'd say there is quite a lot of patriotism about - just not for the UK.
          • arethuza 10mo ago
            To be clear - I'm in Scotland and the flags I see are the Scottish flag and the EU flag (often combined). I know there has been a spate of flag flying for other reasons but I haven't actually seen that myself.
  • teekert 10mo ago
    I also really enjoyed After Life (with Ricky Gervais). I wouldn't call him a hero, but then again maybe I would. So honest, so pissed off, so intelligent. Sick Note with Rupert Grint, same thing. Brilliant. I'm currently reading the Bobbiverse series. Sure the guy is sort of a hero. But he is also an antihero forced to do heroic things, while he just wants to geek out and enjoy his coffee while making star trek references. I'm not British btw.
  • pjc50 10mo ago
    Another great example of this is British SF, especially 20th century Doctor Who and Blake's 7, vs American SF such as Star Wars/Trek. The British version can be much bleaker. And of course Red Dwarf, which doesn't translate at all into American. (There was a single pilot episode) Edit: someone downthread mentioned Limmy's Show and Absolutely, to which I would add Burnistoun. Scottish humor is even more grimly fatalist than English.
    • vintermann 10mo ago
      Does the Office have heroes? It turned out to translate very well into American. That Red Dwarf pilot was actually fine except for the bizarre choice of making Lister a hunk. Rimmer was fine, Holly was great. I think there is a divide, but it isn't the Atlantic ocean.
      • Der_Einzige 10mo ago
        Robert California and Dwight were the clear heroes of the American version of the office.
      • sanderjd 10mo ago
        As I just commented above, I do think The Office fundamentally maintained this foundation of comedic failure, but I also think it wouldn't have worked as well for American audiences (and indeed, wasn't working as well in the first season because of this) if not for the much larger emphasis on the likable-character love story with Jim and Pam. Maybe the upshot is that you can have a British edge in American comedy, as long as you sand it down a bit with some other element. I see a similar kind of dynamic in Parks and Recreation, which is maybe a more culturally native take on the same kind of show, where Leslie is also ultimately a comedic failure, but with the edge sanded down by a certain amount of (mostly fruitless) competence and especially a seemingly inexhaustible well of enthusiasm and optimism that can't help but infect most of the people around her.
        • red-iron-pine 10mo ago
          man it has nothing to do with American watchers. the UK Office had fourteen (14) episodes. The US one had 201 episodes. if you don't lean on things like inter-office romance there is nothing to put on screen. the jim-pam thing was a direct riff on the tim-lucy interactions in the UK version, they just didn't, you know, have 100+ more episodes to build on it. hell, you can even see when that ran out of steam in later seasons of the US version and they just start jamming celebrity guest stars in there
  • freedomben 10mo ago
    Yes, definitely a culture thing. I had a very difficult time finding most British humor funny when I was younger, but my personality combination of loving humor and comedy and also being incredibly interested in people, drove me to want to understand why British humor was funny when most of the time it just seemed so absurd. It was a multi-decade path so it's very difficult to identify progression points, but slowly through exposure I began to "get it" and now I adore British comedy and humor. I still adore American comedy and humor as well, but the more exposure to the culture I got, the more I understood it. Obviously that's just anecdotal, but I personally find it strong evidence that the humor divide is indeed cultural. The more similar cultures are to begin with, the easier the leap is. To me the most exciting part of this is that it means there are thousands of other cultures on this planet that have humor that I have not unlocked yet. Someday I hope to! Edit: for a very fascinating example of differences, I love comparing the UK version of the office to the US version of the office. To many Americans, David Brent mostly just came off mean and an asshole, even a poisonous one, whereas Michael Scott comes off as eccentric and clueless and unable to read the room, but overall a mostly good guy. That perception makes David Brent kind of hateable whereas Michael Scott kind of lovable. Another fascinating point of comparison is the UK version of ghosts, versus the US version of ghosts. I'll leave comparisons and contrasts on those to others as I haven't watched all of the UK version of ghosts yet. I'd be fascinated to hear what others think of that, and the office for that matter.
    • dbspin 10mo ago
      David Brent is poisonous, and indeed hatable. The point of the British version of the show is not that he's more tolerable or likeable to the British. If anything it's more pointed how awful he is this side of the water, given the preponderance of bosses exactly like this. What makes the show work in the UK (and Ireland), is a greater cultural willingness to see the worst aspects of reality reflected in entertainment. Versus the focus on escapism in even the most grim US television - i.e.: Tony Soprano is a monster, but he also has charisma and glamour. Walter White is dying and becoming more and more amoral, but he also goes from being a dork to a badass. Both characters are utter glamorisations of what their real life counterparts would be like. Along with the surrealism there's a genuine existentialism to the darkest of UK comedy - from early Alan Partridge to Nighty Night. An actual interest in examining the nature of cruelty and suffering.
  • sanderjd 10mo ago
    Very interesting! Except I noted that he referred to David Brent from The Office, and we have a direct corollary to that character, of course, in Michael Scott from The Office. They really didn't change the formula for American audiences, he's absolutely still a comedic failure. Starting in the second season, he becomes a bit more of a lovable comedic failure, but the basic point of the character stands. And he is beloved by American audiences!
    • FridayoLeary 10mo ago
      So the exact opposite of David Brent. As the show goes on you don't discover a single thing to make you like him.
      • sanderjd 10mo ago
        This is true of the Michael Scott character in the first season (which follows the same plot points as the British version). And even in the next few seasons, the core run of the show, he's only a bit more lovable. He's still pretty bad! But certainly as they went further and further along he became more and more of a lovable doofus, very unlike David Brent.
  • JCattheATM 10mo ago
    > I find American humour so hard to relate to but I guess it's just a culture thing These kind of comments always puzzle me. Hollywood makes stuff for the entire world, not just for a domestic audience. Shows like Friends, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, pretty much any big sitcom you can name is in syndication in most countries around the world, because of how relatable it is. It's often not sophisticated, and can be quite shallow (See Two and a half men or Big Bang theory), but it being hard to relate to is unlikely to be an issue.
    • peterashford 10mo ago
      Don't underestimate the power of big media corporations to push a world view. When I was a kid in NZ, British culture was impressed on us via the media. These days, there's more American influence. I don't think that's to do with the inherent quality of those cultures.
      • JCattheATM 10mo ago
        Of course not. But I think the US is unique in having it's shows be syndicated to such an extent globally, that isn't true for most other countries even English speaking ones. I assume that feeds back to them having that in mind and trying to please the lowest common denominator.
  • mrsvanwinkle 10mo ago
    As an American I'm a huge fan of HHGG and Rowan Atkinson (not just his Bean character). I'm also a huge fan of Conan O'Brien and his Harvard generation's work for The Simpsons. Would be far ahead of Adams' time. Though while I find them _okay_ I never laughed so hard that my face and stomach hurt from laughter when watching Monty Python anything, not even Black Adder. For other American comedy what made me really, really laugh so hard was Kenan & Kel and The Lonely Island's work for SNL. I've tried to find something as funny as HHGG for so long that I've read P.G. Wodehouse as Adam's main inspiration. Also watched Fry & Laurey. I guess Sacha Cohen as British humour? Since he's Cambridge Highlights alum after all. Found his works extremely hilarious though the parody of racism was disgusting. Here is Conan's best (natural) performance roasting the Google CEO and gOogLers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7TwqpWiY5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7TwqpWiY5s
  • FrostViper8 10mo ago
    As a Brit, I generally prefer American Humour when it comes to comedy. My favourite films are Happy Gilmore and Tropic Thunder. A lot of British Humour is around that everything is crap, it gets tiresome after a while.
  • ajkjk 10mo ago
    don't worry lots of americans can't stand the american humor either a lot of stuff here keeps existing because of the weird ouroboros of it being popular so people make more of it so it stays popular. but if other things were made and thrust on the mainstream instead they could easily be popular also.
• rylando 10mo ago
  What a great response by Adams! I think the acceptance, and even the celebration of failure is present among the “maker” community in the USA to some extent, which has really drawn me to it. I wonder if there’s the same outlook on failure among other creatives, would be interesting to compare the hobby communities opinions between the USA and UK.
  • scrumper 10mo ago
    That's a very interesting observation. You see it a lot in "tradesy" videos on YouTube, machinists* and welders and woodworkers and the like. The humor and self deprecation - far more apparent than in most other genres of American media - is really quite close to feeling British. As a transplanted Brit, it's pretty comforting stuff to watch. *This Old Tony's channel is a particularly good illustration of this point, among many.
    • arethuza 10mo ago
      Inheritance Machining is like that - a lot of self deprecation.
      • scrumper 10mo ago
        Yep. I haven't found any metalworking channel that isn't. Woodworking channels can be a bit more... confident, "I know best so follow my hack if you want to keep your fingers," but many of the established, higher production channels like Lincoln St, Blacktail etc. are all just as deprecatory as the metal stuff.
        • arethuza 10mo ago
          Well there is the awesome Cutting Edge Engineering channel - but they have the advantage of coming from Australia.
        • jimnotgym 10mo ago
          Intersting. I used to be a professional woodworker, and can't stand the wood working channels. I love This Old Tony though. I feel like doing a channel that brings in the reality of being a chippy. Tools that look like they were used outside in all weathers, having to make do with the tools you have with you. The crap timber that we have to deal with...I won't ever get around to it though.
• wtcactus 10mo ago
  I call this take pseudo-intellectual indulgence form, so called, academic intelectuais. Lord of the Rings is very much English Literature, and the biggest epic form the 20th century and has none of that. Ditto for Harry Poter (I’m not saying Harry Potter is on the same level of literary grandeur as LOTR, but it’s still an important epic series for newer generations). You can always find examples for one side or the other of the argument. But, of course, only “social” scientists would be tick enough to claim some clear divide here as it suits their argument.
  • tokai 10mo ago
    What are you talking about? Frodo is exactly the kind of reluctant hero that Adams is talking about here.
    • deleted 10mo ago
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    • wtcactus 10mo ago
      There’s absolutely no nihilism about Frodo. Not there isn’t any acceptance of pre determined fate when it comes to save Middle Heart. LOTR is not empty, nor nihilist. It’s got many heroes, big and small, that fully embrace their part and fight against insurmountable odds with no expectation or any reward other than knowing they did the right thing. The text is trying to tell us that English heroes are the exact opposite of that description.
      • tokai 10mo ago
        Nihilism is the bad interpretation from someone the slashdot user met. Read the text again.
        • wtcactus 10mo ago
          I’m addressing all the claims. You mention Frodo is exactly the kind of reluctant hero the text talks about. Really? The brotherhood of the ring starts exactly when nobody is expecting or asking Frodo to step up, and he, a little hobbit, shouts above a fighting crowd : “I will take the ring to Mordor!”.
• PaulHoule 10mo ago
  Explains why Sir Keir Starmer is so relatable.
  • PokemonNoGo 10mo ago
    Don't think he is a Sir (yet) but a Right Honorable.
    • xelaboi 10mo ago
      A quick google would have saved you a comment. He is Sir Keir Starmer.
    • unfunco 10mo ago
      He was head of the crown prosecution service and knighted in 2014.
    • 6031769 10mo ago
      He has been a KCB since 2014: https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/60728/supplement/3/data.pdf https://www.thegazette.co.uk/London/issue/60728/supplement/3...
• RNanoware 10mo ago
  Although I have very little experience with British humor, I find it interesting to compare British fiction I read as a child/teenager that became popular hits in the US (Harry Potter, Alex Rider). From this article's perspective, those protagonists are the epitome of American heroes (autonomy, mastery, purpose). No wonder they garnered such acclaim in the US. Curious if these stories are the exception rather than the rule in British YA fiction? Is the comparison unfair, since these stories were not written with the comedic genre in mind?
  • codeulike 10mo ago
    Some good examples there, also Doctor Who
    • jacquesm 10mo ago
      Of which Adams was one of the writers.
    • FridayoLeary 10mo ago
      What i find in dr who is that, at least at the beginning of every episode he doesn't even attempt to control what's happening even when his life is threatened. He's perfectly happy to let events unfold before stepping in. And he hates using guns. He walks into danger with zero ability to defend himself besides some weird tool with painful limitations. In a way he's the most un American hero possible.
      • dragonwriter 10mo ago
        > And he hates using guns. He walks into danger with zero ability to defend himself besides some weird tool with painful limitations. In a way he's the most un American hero possible. I mean, that description works almost as well for MacGyver as for The Doctor, so I am not sure it is the most un-American hero possible.
  • kmeisthax 10mo ago
    At least in the case of Harry Potter specifically, there's actually a few things that contributed to its success outside of it having a traditionally successful Real American Hero™. First off, we need to remember that it was cribbing from a lot of other "kid goes to magic boarding school" books out there. The difference in sales success is down to the fact that JKR got a better US publisher. Scholastic has an unfair advantage in the young adult and graded reader markets called the "Scholastic Book Fair". Basically, it's a travelling bookstore event set up in US schools where they sell kids books. If you wanted to start a YA phenomenon in the US, especially back in the 2000s, that was the perfect way to do it. For similar reasons, Bone outsold a good chunk of other western comics purely because of the fact that Scholastic was the only company willing to touch it. Another factor is that its obvious Britishisms come across as fantastical to American audiences. I mean, who in America even knows what a boarding school is? This is the same reason why Naruto did so well in America, even though most of the things that seem unique about its world are just fantastic versions of bog-standard ninja tropes. [0] This is the same reason why Naruto arguably did better in America than in its native Japan.
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• coole-wurst 10mo ago
  I feel like the divide is very evident of each countries version of the show "The Office". Probably a common trope at this point, but not even the dialogue, already the aesthetic tells you a lot about the perspective of the characters. While the UK office is grey, washed out and gloomy, the US office is warm, surprisingly full of life and outside shots are mostly sunny.
  • lordleft 10mo ago
    IIRC, Ricky Gervais advised the showrunners of the US adaptation to make Michael Scott more optimistic than his UK counterpart. Quite savvy on his part.
  • ecshafer 10mo ago
    US Office is set in Scranton, PA but filmed in LA. So the outside shots inevitably became quite sunny.
• podgorniy 10mo ago
  Different foundations of the worldview, thus different values, thus different reprenestations of these values shown through heroes. We don't realize what are foundations of our worldview as they aren't appearing in a contrast-enough setup.
• silveira 10mo ago
  This made me think about another contrast, Hayao Miyazaki. His characters ("heroes" or "villains"), usually are more morally complex and nuanced than the ones you would find in the works I typically see depicted in Hollywood. They are not just good or evil. You may not agree with their actions, but you understand the logic of it.
  • gbear605 10mo ago
    Ironically, Ghibli's adaptation of A Wizard of Earthsea (written by Le Guin, an American author) flopped in part because Miyazaki made it much more about heroes versus villains than the original story.
    • layer8 10mo ago
      That’s because the adaptation is by Gorō Miyazaki and not Hayao Miyazaki.
• pfisherman 10mo ago
  Counterpoint: Charlie Brown A big part of what makes Charlie Brown so endearing is his undying earnestness and optimism in the face of near constant bad luck and disappointment. He is exactly the lovable loser archetype that this piece says Americans do not dig. Yet the Peanuts comics and cartoons and an American pop cultural institution.
  • lenerdenator 10mo ago
    I'd say there are more. Courage the Cowardly Dog? Very much in the lovable loser camp. The Eds from Ed, Edd 'n' Eddy also fit, but I suppose you could say that's a Canadian show.
    • tokai 10mo ago
      Those shows are also on purpose far out and weird in their style and story telling.
      • lenerdenator 10mo ago
        Courage the Cowardly Dog definitely is. EEnE is, eh, typical 90s cartoon fare, at least to me.
        • Forgeties79 10mo ago
          EEnE had a strangely surrealist quality to it that stands out in my memory. It’s goofy and slapstick, but it’s basically its own little vacuum of a world and even feels slightly unsettling at times. It’s hard to put my finger on it exactly. It tends to veer between Looney Tunes rules and being grounded in reality, but it doesn’t really spend much time making the two compatible. It just kind of swings wildly between them (see: their mouths when they eat jawbreakers). Now that I think about it, that’s probably partially why there’s that old copy pasta about it being a dystopian setting. It lends itself well to the concept.
          • cogman10 10mo ago
• dfxm12 10mo ago
  It's hard distill entire countries like this (especially based on one guy's comments, told second hand). I understand Adams' quote in the context of Hollywood, but there's more to American culture than Hollywood. These are diverse nations & diversity is good.
• lordleft 10mo ago
  As much as I love American upbeat-ness (I'm American) I think that our hatred of failure and our strained optimism puts a tremendous psychological pressure on us. Sometimes, we fail, and that's okay. Sometimes, we lose, and that's just life. I think that's an essential part of growing up, and our collective denial of that makes me feel like we, as a people, are not quite mature.
  • GMoromisato 10mo ago
    I think (we) Americans hate failure only when people give up. We have a very long tradition of failure leading to success, everything from Edison trying hundreds of lightbulbs to Don Draper in Mad Men reinventing himself after failure. Our bankruptcy laws are different from other countries in how lenient they are towards the debtor. And, of course, the entire culture of Silicon Valley is about failure after failure followed by success. And it's not even conventional, economic success that we want. We're happy when someone finds happiness even if not financial success. The rich-person-gives-up-everything-for-love is a familiar American trope. We don't like failure, but we forgive it, as long as we keep trying.
    • N_Lens 10mo ago
      I think you're over optimistic about the mindset of the majority of Americans. Americans love a winner and hate losers, that's why they elected Donald Trump.
  • dlivingston 10mo ago
    At least for American technologists (if not technologists more broadly, or Americans more broadly) failure is not at all seen as a bad thing: it's seen as a data point that XYZ didn't work, so now we'll pivot to ABC and give that a go. Edison's quote about not having failed, but rather, discovering 1,000 ways not to do something captures this well.
    • wodenokoto 10mo ago
      It’s a good counter point, but I don’t think it mimics the kind of failure embracing that Clark talks about. It is more a reframing of failure as a success of learning and growing. E.g, while the project failed, you didn’t. You learned lessons and are stronger and better for it. You succeed.
• Scarblac 10mo ago
  "In the US you cannot make jokes about failure" There is also the phenomenon that serial failure Donald Duck is still a very popular character in several European countries, while we don't care about Mickey Mouse at all. Isn't it the other way around in the US? Mickey always does good and always wins, that's deeply boring. Donald is flawed and relatable.
  • wincy 10mo ago
    Interestingly growing up as an American, I watched Duck Tales which while tangentially related to Donald Duck it’s about his ultra rich uncle going on awesome adventures and just being so smart and awesome. Donald shows up every once in awhile but I don’t really remember much about him.
    • vintermann 10mo ago
      Duck Tales is basically an attempt at doing Carl Barks era adventure style minus Donald, but Scrooge being made more heroic/sympathetic (he's pretty much a lovable jerk at best in the old stories). I think Disney really wanted to tell the Donald stories Europe loved to Americans. The persistence of Carl Barks and Don Rosa style stories here is surprising even to me. My son, born 2005, seems to know every single Barks story by heart - and I can't say I pushed it that hard.
  • jccalhoun 10mo ago
    I don't think many people care about Mickey as a character. They like the image but that's about it.
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• lanfeust6 10mo ago
  There's more than one form of English humor. Last year I played through Thank Goodness You're Here!, which I think borrows from a lot of late-20th Century tv including Monty Python. It might be "nihlistic" in the sense that it's absurd but not depressing.
• dgb23 10mo ago
  Some of the best US standup comedians I know don't fit this narrative.
• blenderob 10mo ago
  100% seen it in business too. My UK colleagues often use self-deprecation while providing their business updates. But my US colleagues present their accomplishments directly with confidence.
  • TheOtherHobbes 10mo ago
    It's not just deprecation, it's systemic understatement. It drives non-British people insane because everyone is talking in code. And some of the meaning is hidden in intonation. If someone says "Interesting..." that can mean "That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard" or "Might be worth a look, but not a priority right now." Or maybe "That's very suspicious." "That's quite good" usually means "Very good, I like it!"
    • arethuza 10mo ago
      Also starting anything with "With the greatest respect..."
    • 1718627440 10mo ago
      > If someone says "Interesting..." that can mean ... Same in German.
    • jacquesm 10mo ago
      'Interesting' => 'you're stark raving mad but you're in the room with me so I'm going to be polite to you until I'm out of striking range'.
    • mnw21cam 10mo ago
      I certainly use the word "exciting" in ways that that might be non-standard, like for instance describing when everything has gone catastrophically wrong.
      • jimnotgym 10mo ago
        It is almost as good as when Sir Humphrey told the minister his idea was 'courageous', meaning an enormous risk.
• Wowfunhappy 10mo ago
  Interesting. The other book this makes me think of is Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. I think Gaiman lives in America now, but he’d only recently moved as of when Neverwhere was published, and it’s a very British novel. I love the world and plot of Neverwhere, but the protagonist, Richard Mayhew, always pissed me off because he’s such a loser. I never understood why Gaiman chose him to be in charge of the story. Now I’m wondering if that’s my American sensibility.
  • jacquesm 10mo ago
    > Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman Mixed feelings. It's one of those books where you wonder where the author gets his ideas and then you try to find out and it ruins the book for you.
    • frm88 10mo ago
      Same but with The Graveyard Book. Discovered Gaiman's Scientology history and his continued support with 30K/year and submitting his daughters.Mixed feelings ever since.
• afavour 10mo ago
  This reminds me of the differences between the US version of The Office and the UK one. I’m actually fond of both but the boss character (as played by Ricky Gervais) in the UK version is absolutely reprehensible. And he’s the main focus of the show. The US version started that way but it just didn’t work at all. By the second season Steve Carrell’s character was a lovable doofus and the show was much better for it. (I also think some line of thinking like this applies to politicians. British people almost always hate their politicians, even the ones they vote for. By comparison, in my experience, Americans really want to root for their candidate. Be that Obama or Trump, there’s a passion there you rarely see in the UK)
  • Steve16384 10mo ago
    Bill Bailey in Part Troll said "I'm British and thus crave disappointment."
  • razakel 10mo ago
    >you rarely see in the UK And when you do, the establishment resorts to skullduggery and smears them. "The life-long anti-racism campaigner is somehow a racist because he didn't act on the report we deliberately hid from him!"
• RicoElectrico 10mo ago
  > We celebrate our defeats and our withdrawals Polish people say the exact same thing about themselves while thinking this is endemic to Poland.
  • nephihaha 10mo ago
    Poland is a victim of geography (between Germany and Russia).
• Forgeties79 10mo ago
  And once again with one sentence Adams is able to all but completely articulate an incredibly nuanced cultural topic: > Terrible things happen to him, he complains about it a bit quite articulately, so we can really feel it along with him - then calms down and has a cup of tea. My kind of guy! Some people can communicate on a truly different level.
• cafard 10mo ago
  Americans don't celebrate failure? Well, there's the Alamo. There's Custer's Last Stand. There's Douglas MacArthur getting a Medal of Honor for being chased out of Luzon. And I urge American HNers to walk or drive around, and see how long it takes to see a Stars and Bars.
  • krapp 10mo ago
    Americans don't celebrate the Alamo as a failure, they celebrate it as a catalyst for the Texas revolution afterwards. If that hadn't occurred Americans wouldn't even mention the Alamo in their history books. Americans don't celebrate Custer's last stand. Indigenous people obviously do, and should, but white people don't consider him a hero. Americans don't celebrate MacArthur getting chased out of the Philippines, they celebrate his declaration "I will return" and the Allied victory. Americans only support the underdog when the underdog wins in the end.
    • sarchertech 10mo ago
      Look up Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Perhaps the biggest celebration of the losing side in history. Or the first Rocky movie. > Americans only support the underdog when the underdog wins in the end. By that definition the by far most cited example on the British side, Dunkirk, doesn’t count because Britain won in the end. No one celebrates someone who was defeated if the defeat wasn’t memorable. Usually that was because it was an inspiration to rally a cause that was later successful. Plenty of white people celebrate Custer. Search for “Custer statue” or drive around out west and see how many paintings of Custer’s last stand you can spot hanging in bars.
    • CaptWillard 10mo ago
      On the contrary ... we LOVE the perennial underdog who stays in the fight. Like the British, once you start winning consistently you quickly earn our contempt. American football is packed with great examples.
  • NoboruWataya 10mo ago
    The post is primarily about humour though - do Americans really make jokes about those things? Maybe it's not failure they are celebrating, but war?
• AlanYx 10mo ago
  The phenomenon Adams is talking about here is largely a post-WW1 phenomenon in UK culture, related to the post-WW1 malaise. His best examples are post-WW1 (Paul Pennyfeather, Tony Last, and the book by Stephen Pile). The others arguably don't really fit (e.g., the core delight in Gulliver is the reader thinking they are smarter than Gulliver; the reader doesn't identify with him). It's not exactly a new observation... one of the motivations both Tolkien and CS Lewis had for strong characters like Aragorn was to present examples falling outside this cultural drift.
  • RcouF1uZ4gsC 10mo ago
    Yes. See also Fleming’s James Bond. Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby. * This phenomenon is post-WWI and post-WWII and losing the greatest empire in history in a single generation trauma being retconned as if were the historical English perspective. * Removed previously incorrect statement including Edgar Rice Burroughs who is an American although Tarzan is English
    • bloak 10mo ago
      Edgar Rice Burroughs lived his entire life in the USA, right?
      • deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
      • RcouF1uZ4gsC 10mo ago
        You are right. Updated the post
    • AlanYx 10mo ago
      I'm not sure I understand the Burroughs example as relevant to the UK, but another good illustration is Thomas Hardy. His books sold well but were never seen as consistent with the UK cultural mainstream, and the reaction to Jude the Obscure in 1895 stopped him from writing novels entirely. Yet post-WWI he came to be seen/adopted as a mainstream cultural icon.
• sarchertech 10mo ago
  I think it could just be that America is a much bigger market with much higher production values in TV and Film, so British people get their fill of competent, triumphant heroes from American media. America has plenty of beloved sad sacks too. Charlie Brown, Donald Duck, Goofy, George Costanza, Eeyore (originally British but very popular in America and popularized by Disney) to name a few. British media has carved out a bit of a niche for itself, but British people are also consuming other English language media. And you also have plenty of British media where the hero is competent, triumphant, masterful, and autonomous with (frequent if not ubiquitous) standard happy endings. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Who.
  • arethuza 10mo ago
    Isn't Eeyore part of the Poohniverse?
    • sarchertech 10mo ago
      Yes but the Disney version is much more well known than the original books and the character is very popular in America.
  • CaptWillard 10mo ago
    > so British people get their fill of competent, triumphant heroes from American media Conversely, American culture has historically included all the best of the British. In addition to those mentioned above, Hitchhikers Guide, Monty Python, Watership Down, The Young Ones, etc.
• Munksgaard 10mo ago
  Mirroring this divide, Denmark has a TV-show called "Klovn", which is basically a copy of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" (down to the , except that while the main character in Curb is the cause of a lot of cringe moments, he always ends up getting his redemption and being the hero (at least to the viewer). In "Klovn", the main character ("Frank") causes a lot of cringe moments in the same way, but he is a tragicomic character and is almost always in the wrong.
• jll29 10mo ago
  > Charlie Brown, Donald Duck, Goofy, George Costanza, Eeyore to name a few. What about real people (not animation characters for children)? Could "Mr. Bean" only be created by the Brits, or if not, where is his U.S.-American counterpart?
  • giraffe_lady 10mo ago
    > “Iran can't hit back over Soleimani's killing.¹ Who will we take out? Spider-man or SpongeBob SquarePants? They have no real heroes.” But, fwiw, I don't think I agree with you. Mr bean is just as fictional as charlie brown, the medium or original intended audience doesn't seem very significant to me at all. Also george costanza is in there and I think 90s-2000s american sitcoms actually have a lot of the kind of character you have in mind. ¹: I don't agree with the quote either. As this article and comment section makes very clear, heroes and the definition of heroism are culturally embedded and not fully legible to outsiders, like probably every culture's heroes.
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  • bitwize 10mo ago
    > Could "Mr. Bean" only be created by the Brits, or if not, where is his U.S.-American counterpart? Pee-wee Herman, perhaps, at least in his original adult-comedy form? Pee-wee was originally created because Paul Reubens couldn't do jokes in the traditional stand-up comedy sense. So he created a character who told jokes that always miss, but had the mentality of a child and thought his own material was hilarious.
• NoSalt 10mo ago
  I think it's fantastic that Douglas Adams was on Slashdot.
  • EtienneK 10mo ago
    I assume it was an "ask me anything" type of event.
  • kergonath 10mo ago
    He was a technophile and was very involved in the Mac community. I am not that surprised. Nowadays he’d be on HN and Reddit.
    • razakel 10mo ago
      He was the first person in Europe to buy a Mac. Stephen Fry was the second.
• nephihaha 10mo ago
  [flagged]
  • tomhow 10mo ago
    Please don't post derogatory comments about nations or perpetuate national stereotypes or engage in political/ideological battle on HN. You've done this more than once. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • nephihaha 10mo ago
      I come from the UK and I see this every day. The only way to improve things is for people to stop thinking like this. The article suggests it is a good thing. My opposition to defeatism isn't ideological. Ideology suggests a complex belief system/framework which this isn't. Why should we be glorifying failure? That is not healthy psychologically, and the only good thing about failure is that it can teach us how not to do things. That is not an "ideology", it is the promotion of a healthier mindset. The linked article, on the other hand, is about the very thing you are complaining about – perpetuating a self-defeating self-image/stereotype – but you do not point that out. By the way, I have read those guidelines several times and some of the wording is very open to interpretation/subjective. I am clearly reading them differently from you. (We have a very different understanding of what constitutes politics and ideology for one.)
      • tomhow 10mo ago
        It would be nice to think we could solve problems like this via comments on HN. After nearly two decades of this site's existence, it's pretty clear that's not realistic. This site is for curious conversation, not combat or activism, and this is only a site where people want to participate because enough people make the effort to keep pushing for it to stay curious rather than combative. The only reason I saw your comments is because other users flagged them for being in breach of the guidelines. We understand the guidelines are open to interpretation, and that it can take some time to become familiar with the culture and norms here. You can learn more about how the moderators apply the guidelines by reading the comments posted by dang and myself: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Atomhow&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
• efitz 10mo ago
  Although the Anglican Church is a hybrid of Reformation era Protestantism and of Catholicism, I think that the US tradition of Protestantism is generally (not always) more positive and less fatalistic. I believe that the cultures of both nations are heavily derived from their religious traditions; even if you never practice religion in either nation you imbibe its effects from early childhood in the cultural values and norms that it influenced. For example, one of the key aspects of Protestantism is evangelism, which would not make sense if people thought they could not be successful. So I think a lot of American culture in particular is based on this tradition that encourages optimism and repeated trying even in the face of failure. Hence the way we select heroes.
  • arethuza 10mo ago
    "repeated trying even in the face of failure" That's pretty much the motto of one of Scotland's greatest heroes - Robert the Bruce: "If at First You Don't Succeed, Try Again" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_the_Bruce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_the_Bruce
  • dkarl 10mo ago
    In some flavors, Protestantism is quite focused on self-scrutiny and skepticism about human nature, making people suspicious and even actively hostile towards supposed heroes. Other flavors of Protestantism seem to have completely lost that, though. Evangelical Protestantism somehow inculcates a need for leaders to love and worship and an ability to completely suspend rational judgment about them. Their relationship to charismatic pastors and other leaders is a mystical, ecstatic experience that they have an unlimited appetite for. No matter how many times their leaders are shown to be flawed, and in many cases quite detestable and corrupt human beings, they eagerly look for the next leader to worship. Two stereotypes that illustrate the extremes of this massive cultural difference in Protestantism are the rich WASPs of the northeast and the poor Southern Baptists of the deep South. WASPs know that heroes are myths, and are unsurprised when the real people turn out to be real pieces of work. Southern Baptists kind of know this on some level -- I think they're actually a bit attracted when a man has a whiff of charlatanism about him, because it shows he knows what they want -- but when they choose their hero, they give themselves over to complete and sincere belief in him.
• gryfft 10mo ago
  This is directly relevant to my wife's and my reading of the David Tennant & Olivia Coleman vehicle Broadchurch. David Tennant's character is notably very bad at his job; that's why he got exiled to a backwater town. He bungled his last case so badly it made national news. In an American police procedural, we would either have some mitigating explanation for his failure, or at least some gritty vice or personal demon that was the real reason he got demoted. In Broadchurch, Tennant's character just sucks at his job. Every episode of the show conforms to a formula where he gets suspicious of one of the other characters in the show and we spend the episode wasting time while it's finally determined that the suspect of the week is actually innocent. I have to say, it makes for entertaining television. It also resulted in my wife and I chorusing aloud, every episode, "he's SO BAD at his job!!" (Minor Broadchurch spoilers) At the end when he finally catches the big bad, it's not because of anything he did. A coincidence and some carelessness on the part of the big bad lead to the mystery being solved. Also, every other character on the show had already been ruled out. Since watching it we've kept a lookout for protagonists who embody the "everyman in way over his head who accomplished virtually nothing himself" archetype. It's fun to know Adams held forth on the very subject.
  • arethuza 10mo ago
    "David Tennant's character is notably very bad at his job; that's why he got exiled to a backwater town." Worth noting that in Hot Fuzz (also featuring Olivia Coleman!) the main character is exiled to a rural location for being too good at his job.
    • jacquesm 10mo ago
      That movie is a long series of spoofs nicely spliced together to form a story. To the point that it even works in the reverse, you've seen Hot Fuzz and then years later you watch some other movie and suddenly you realize that's where they got it.
      • WalterBright 10mo ago
        Should watch "Zero Hour" (1957). "Airplane" is nearly a shot-for-shot remake, except it's done for laughs rather than a thriller. "I picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue!"
• MrDrDr 10mo ago
  This does not surprise me - and America is a big place, and I'm sure there are areas where Arthur would be seen in a similar light but I've worked in the US and the UK and this type of things reminds me of the phrase 'separated by a common language'. Slightly off topic perhaps but another area where I see a strong divide in sensibilities are the NewYorker cartoons - my wife (born in north America) thinks the are hilarious. I usually don't understand what's funny about them.
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 10mo ago
  I think this supposed English "heroes" is more post-WWI and post-WWII trauma and coping than the actual historic English culture. Basically it is cope for losing history's greatest empire in a generation. You don't see this in the pre-WWI authors. Look at Rudyard Kipling (see Mowgli who although Indian is very English). Look at Fleming and James Bond. * See also Dickens and some of his heroes such as Nicholas Nickleby. What is being passed as English culture is just fairly recent retconning due to WWI and WWII and the crisis in English thought it produced. * Removed previously incorrect statement including Edgar Rice Burroughs who is an American although Tarzan is English
  • starlight_nomad 10mo ago
    > You don't see this in the pre-WWI authors. Look at Rudyard Kipling (see Mowgli who although Indian is very English). Look at Burroughs and Tarzan. Or even Fleming and James Bond. Not to detract from your broader point, but Burroughs was an American writing a British character in Tarzan.
    • RcouF1uZ4gsC 10mo ago
      You are correct. My embarrassing mistake.
• bethekidyouwant 10mo ago
  Is Arthur Dent the hero? I imbibed him more as a passive vessel to experience the absurdity of Douglas Adams universe. But it’s been a while since I read it.
  • fullshark 10mo ago
    He's not in the book or miniseries but the film adaptation gave him some arc iirc about doing something heroic on John Malkovich's planet to get the girl (Trillian). That all seems highly intentional based on the OP.
• bethekidyouwant 10mo ago
  Is Arthur Dent the hero? I imbibed him more as a passive vessel to experience the absurdity of Douglas Adams universe. But it’s been a while since I read it, but from memory all the situations are so absurd that I never felt myself yelling at the hero to make a more logical, or “herioc” decision because there wasn’t really a lot of sense in that sort of thing
  • scrumper 10mo ago
    I think so. He's more storm-tossed survivor than Moses parting the waves, but he makes the best of the endless shit he's dumped into and preserves his sense of self throughout. I think he responds heroically, far more than he fixes anything external. For example he finds himself marooned on a strange planet and sets up a Perfectly Normal Beast sandwich shop, living very comfortably for a while. For what is he fighting against? Nothing really, he's just adrift in the universe. There's no antagonist beyond existence itself and his own circumstances. He faces off against both quite effectively.
    • jacquesm 10mo ago
      One of the characters that has some Arthur Dent in him from the US side is - I think - Forrest Gump.
      • talldan 10mo ago
        I think Forrest Gump's major quality is an indomitable spirit and an ability to overcome. (War Hero, runs across American, gets the girl) I'm not so sure it applies to Arthur Dent, who tends to roll from one situation to the next. There is resolve, but it never really rises above. I think there is similarity in the storytelling, that both characters find themselves in extreme situations, and somehow navigate them despite their own limitations.
    • bethekidyouwant 10mo ago
      Ja, storm tossed survivor /accidental stoic who do we have .. Bilbo, yossarian, Rincewind.. Bit of a tossup innit? From memory so long is a bit of a departure from the rest of the series and felt like adams was giving dent a vacation/term of being the deliberate stoic
• ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago
  One big difference between the two cultures, is the British caste system. It's important for us to Know Our Place. Me mum[0] was British, and I used to see this attitude, all the time. Climbing is OK, but you need to do it properly. Americans are told "Don't take that shit! Force them to accept you!", while British are told "Tsk. Tsk. You can't do it that way! You need to join their club, before you try going to their level." Heroes are often those that accept their lot. [0] https://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/SheilaMarshall.htm https://cmarshall.com/miscellaneous/SheilaMarshall.htm
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  • aebtebeten 10mo ago
    Caste system, as in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XmB59Ax4cE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XmB59Ax4cE ? Along the lines of https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/notes-on-nationalism/#:~:text=If%20one%20harbours,true%2c%20are%20inadmissible%2e https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel... , I'd maintain the US national fiction is "the US is a classless society". lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPPpjU1UeAo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPPpjU1UeAo vs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TQmo5TvZQY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TQmo5TvZQY vs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__HPfmvaWRw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__HPfmvaWRw
    • ChrisMarshallNY 10mo ago
      > US national fiction is "the US is a classless society" I wouldn't say that. It's just that we believe that there's no birthright caste. Mobility is possible between all classes. Sometimes, though, it's really difficult; just not impossible. Big difference, in mindset.
      • yunnpp 10mo ago
        "Mobility is possible between all classes." So it isn't classless?
• skrebbel 10mo ago
  I feel like these lines are getting increasingly blurred. Eg "The Recruit" is basically "what if Mr Bean (could say entire sentences and was young and handsome and) would get a junior legal gig at the CIA". It's very American, action packed, everybody is steaming hot and there's conspiracies behind every corner, yet it is also all about the humour in failure and the extreme escalation that results from the protagonist's screwups.
• Netcob 10mo ago
  As divided as the US is right now, there's a bunch of things like this that every American seems to agree on without even realizing that it's not the same in most of the world. For example, "work ethic". Correct me if I'm wrong, but you could write "worked very hard every day" on someone's tombstone, and almost every American seeing it, regardless of politics, will think "That was a good person". Someone to look up to. Not "did good work", not "their work helped many people", definitely not "lived well". Even "was very productive" sounds too suspicious - being productive is great and all, but a productive person might be doing 10h worth of work in 5h and then call it a day, and that's just unacceptable, so that's not going on your tombstone either. Just... work hard. The protestant ideal. Going on vacation and being too sick to work is literally the same thing, because it stops you from working hard.
  • sanderjd 10mo ago
    There's a pretty big generational divide on this point, I think. I don't think many people under the age of 45 or so still see the "never took a sick day" thing as a laudatory statement. (Also probably a regional divide too. I worry that I'm wrong about this when it comes to some places on the coasts, but I think it's accurate for most places in the country.)
    • Netcob 10mo ago
      That's good news. Hope the kids fight for some basic worker's rights.
      • sanderjd 10mo ago
        I mean, in my career (coming up on 20 years), I've never had an employer that gave me a hard time for taking time off. YMMV I guess!
        • denkmoon 10mo ago
          How many days off do you take per year? For context we get ~43 legally protected paid days of leave per year in Australia, sounds like the UK is about the same.
• oracle2025 10mo ago
  Reading this, I am immediately reminded of Al Bundy in Married with children, isn't he An American hero quite similar to Arthur Dent? Other than that I always thought of the Show King of Queens as similarly depressing, ... would be curious how that fits into the narrative of American heros
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• jobs_throwaway 10mo ago
  > In England our heroes tend to be characters who either have, or come to realise that they have, no control over their lives whatsoever – Pilgrim, Gulliver, Hamlet, Paul Pennyfeather (from Decline and Fall), Tony Last (from A Handful of Dust). We celebrate our defeats and our withdrawals – the Battle of Hastings, Dunkirk I'm having rouble reconciling the first sentence with the second. At Dunkirk, the English displayed massive control over their own fate. Yes, I suppose it was a military defeat, but it's so famous and moving because the agency of everyday Englishmen saved the war effort. Perhaps that's the American in me speaking.
  • BoxOfRain 10mo ago
    A better example is perhaps the Charge of the Light Brigade, our most famous war poem is about an cavalry charge in the wrong direction.
  • kergonath 10mo ago
    > it's so famous and moving because the agency of everyday Englishmen saved the war effort The day was more saved by lots of French soldiers who fought heroically, quite a few of them to end up stranded and then utterly forgotten in the British collective memory. Had they not held the Germans for so long, there would not have been that many British to send across the channel. The standard British vision of Dunkirk is highly misleading.
    • jobs_throwaway 10mo ago
      Besides the point. Human agency shaped the fate of the nation. Yes the French were necessary, but they also caused the encirclement in large part. The situation can obviously not be summed up in a single line. The relevant point though is that the example doesn't make much sense in context of the belief that men are powerless to shape their fate.
      • kergonath 10mo ago
        > Besides the point. No, it is not. The previous post’s words were that "the English displayed massive control over their own fate". They did not. Their arses were saved by French battalions who resisted well beyond what was expected from them. I am happy for them. I am an Anglophile and they were, and still are, friends and allies. Allies lives are also worth the sacrifice. But then I think you at least owe the truth to your friends that gave their lives to save you. All the other efforts would have been utterly futile otherwise. > Human agency shaped the fate of the nation. But now you’re saying something completely different. Yes, human agency was at play, but not theirs. They were saved by actions outside their control. Not completely, because the boat evacuation in itself was an achievement, but still. They could do it in 10 days; they could not have done it in 2. > The relevant point though is that the example doesn't make much sense in context of the belief that men are powerless to shape their fate. Dunkirk is a terrible example for what you were trying to prove. So yes, the example does not make sense.
• mzs 10mo ago
  This might be a Polish thing but hero has to die. Does not matter if accomplishes a goal, just that hero put it all on the line against incredible odds.
  • cafard 10mo ago
    Something to do with being located between Germany and Russia? Or, if you will, Prussia, the Hapsburg Empire, and Russia?
• gadders 10mo ago
  Brits are self-deprecating to a fault. You can be successful, but you have to attribute it to luck. It's not the done thing to try too hard. Tall poppy syndrome is also alive and well.
• AlDante2 10mo ago
  Don’t forget “Eddie the Eagle”. Quintessentially British.
  • hencq 10mo ago
    Exactly who I immediately had to think of.
• class3shock 10mo ago
  I forget where, but someone was talking about a similar difference in American vs British comedy looking at The Office (the American one) and Parks and Rec. In both, the format tends to be pre-conflict -> conflict -> resolution, with the episodes almost always ending on an upbeat tone. In contrast, in a British show, it tends to be pre-conflict -> conflict -> kick them while they are down. Things can get worse, the characters can be unredeemed, and the fun is they are inept, unlucky, arseholes that don't get out of the situation with a happy ever after. Americans like that humor as well (see Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Archer, etc.) but it definitely is less prevalent.
  • pavel_lishin 10mo ago
    I think the early episodes of Bob's Burgers leaned heavily this way as well - usually, at the end of the episode, the family was no better off and sometimes was worse off.
• PeterWhittaker 10mo ago
  The article and the comments herein remind me a conversation a few years ago with an ex RAF pilot who had done a few exchanges with the USAF. Among other things, pilot/personnel evaluations in the two organizations were worlds apart. In the RAF, at least during his time, they were what I would expect, more or less factual: Bloggins is good at X, needs to improve Y, excels at P, shouldn't do Q at all. Meanwhile, in the USAF, anything that could even be perceived as negative was a career killer, so ratings started at mildly superlative and went up from there: Bloggins is an X top gun, is very good at Y, walks on water doing P, and is good with Q. YMMV, of course, those are my recollections of beery convos with a former Tornado jockey.
  • cafard 10mo ago
    As far as I know, all branches of the US military write up a "fitness report" for each officer once a year. "Above Average" is a certain career killer. But somebody who was a dean at (I think) Virginia Tech wrote that the British "His work is quite sound, actually" could be higher praise than the American "His work sets the standard we all aspire to."
    • PeterWhittaker 10mo ago
      Exactly! Another, semi-related difference between the cultures: When Alexander chooseEitherOrBothOf(provided instructions, gave orders) during the Sicilian campaign, American generals took them as orders and did them, sometimes to their detriment, while British generals took them as intent/direction, and asked questions. Eventually, the allies realized they had very different command cultures and learned to work together. It may be that Normandy, et al, would have been far different if they hadn't have figured this out in Sicily.
• nickdothutton 10mo ago
  The British do have a difficult or perhaps just different relationship with heroes vs the US IMO. Some study has been made of this in the past. Even in comic books, where writers have traditionally been afforded more freedom (morally, philosophically, martially/violence, sexually even). Even in pure fantasy/sci-fi (take WH40K as an example). There are many fine US creators/studios, and excellent output, but I don't think the satirical and political elements could have come from there.
• w10-1 10mo ago
  The "Losers" framing is a bit American, but tragedy has a long history, illustrating the difficulty of being subject to conflicting forces (typically moral, since societies push their interests as such) as a way for understanding to at least explain the pain, taking away the panic and sometimes the isolation. Suffering with some kind of style shows that one is still free, and thus independent of the forces (think Mark Twain humor). Willa Cather's work is more about realizing the big picture itself makes our personal suffering relatively small.
• Gimpei 10mo ago
  Isn’t the whole point of Hamlet that he does have control over his life? At any moment he could have just stabbed Claudius and taken over. The dramatic tension comes from him being unable to get out of his own head and get down to businessto.
• sriram_sun 10mo ago
  I wonder if Wodehouse ties together both types of heroes in Bertie and Jeeves! Though it's been decades since I read a Wodehouse book, I'm just uncontrollably laughing now just thinking about it! My grandfather had pretty much the whole collection.
• eikenberry 10mo ago
  One problem I have with this is that the word Hero has multiple meanings and I'm not sure we are talking of the same thing. Like which of these characters follow the classic Hero's Journey, which are just the leading characters in books, which are heroes to another character, which are labelled as a hero as pretext, which are anti-heros treated as heroes, etc. These are all very different things.
  • CodeMage 10mo ago
    One of my favorite details about Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash" is the name he chose for his main character: Hiro Protagonist. It's not just a lovely bit of wordplay, it immediately makes you think about whether the protagonist is a "hero" or not. This overloaded meaning of the word "hero" is especially pertinent when discussing the differences between the interpretation of "hero" in US culture and other cultures. Outside overt dictatorships, the US is the only country I know of where people are taught that anyone who serves or served in the military is automatically a "hero", regardless of whether they've actually done anything that would normally be considered heroic.
    • incompatible 10mo ago
      That's something a bit odd about Douglas Adams's reply. Arthur Dent isn't heroic, but he's the hapless protagonist. The protagonist doesn't have to be a hero. I'm not sure in what way he has "non-heroic heroism".
      • CodeMage 10mo ago
        As GP pointed out, "hero" is a word with overloaded semantics. I think Adams was using different semantics for different occurrences of "hero" in that phrase. Arthur Dent has a "heroism", as in a kind of courage that people would want to emulate, without being "heroic", as in performing great sacrifices for a noble cause. I also believe Adams was trying to point out, very gently, the same cultural difference I called out in the comment I replied to, i.e. that the American culture attaches certain expectations and connotations to the word "hero" not because they are intrinsic to it, but because of American bias.
• rbbydotdev 10mo ago
  Do English tech interviews emphasize heroic gusto or post-mortems?
• danfunk 10mo ago
  What brings me back to hacker news are these posts that ask questions yanked unexpectedly directly from my own soul, in words more articulate than I could manage. And then somehow manages to answer those questions. Thank you.
• dwd 10mo ago
  "Keep Calm and Carry On" is very much the British way, even though us Antipodeans refer to them as whinging Poms. Keep a stiff upper lip chaps.
• lighthouse1212 10mo ago
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• marcus_holmes 10mo ago
  I bumped into this when using the YC cofounder finder a few years ago. In Australia we share the Poms' attitude to failure and success, and have refined it into "Tall Poppy Syndrome". In Australia, it is bad form to boast of your successes too much. You need to have some humility, some awareness of luck and privilege, give credit to others, and don't come over too egotistical, to succeed here. Obviously in the USA the opposite is true; any failure must be explained away, talk about as much success as possible, and claim all the credit for yourself. It resulted in a few very strange conversations. I thought most of the US potential co-founders I met were arrogant, boastful, dickheads [0]. I didn't trust that any of their claimed successes were real, I didn't believe they'd done half the things they said they'd done, and I didn't want to work with them. And I'm sure they thought I was a complete loser, incompetent and unable to succeed at anything I tried. I occasionally hear US VCs and investors complaining about this when they visit Straya; that people here don't celebrate our success, and we're not ambitious enough. I see this as a culture gap that they're not navigating successfully. As has been said about the US/British relationship; "two countries divided by a common language" [0] apologies if you were one of them. I'm sure you're not really!
• dang 10mo ago
  > There was a wonderful book published, oh, about twenty years ago I think, by Stephen Pile called the Book of Heroic Failures. It was staggeringly huge bestseller in England and sank with heroic lack of trace in the U.S. I have this! Thumbing through it randomly, it includes The Least Successful Pigeon Race, The Fastest Defeat in Chess, The Worst Canal Clearance, The Worst Mishap in a Stage Production, The Least Successful Naval Repairs, The Most Unsuccessful Attempt to Work Through a Lunch Hour ("At ten past one a cow fell through the roof"), and The Worst Hijacker: 'Take me to Detroit', he said. 'We are already going to Detroit', she replied. 'Oh...good,' he said, and sat down again.
  • svat 10mo ago
    Love it. That hijacker one is one of the excerpts in the linked post: https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/the-book-of-heroic-failures/ https://shreevatsa.wordpress.com/2011/03/21/the-book-of-hero... :)
• wodenokoto 10mo ago
  Someone mentioned Charlie Brown as a counter example, which lead to an insightful discussion. Similarly I’d like to ask about the Simpson, which in the early 90s was seen as the worst role models on TV for being losers, but still incredibly popular. I guess Bart started out as a proper hero, but Homer being a loser and idiot pretty quickly became the mainstay theme of it all.
• fodkodrasz 10mo ago
  I'm on board with the feelings of the mentioned classmate about nihilism, but to be honest, reading The Sirens of Titan from Vonnegut, which is considered a comic novel for some reason, has the same impression on me, and that is an all-American classic. Neither are bad books per se, and also I can understand the reasons also why Vonnegut had such a bleak view on affairs, as he had gone through a lot, and was in a hard situation at the time of writing, but it is not a comedy, and not funny. Note: The interpretation on the difference between American and British view of affairs is almost Eastern-European (/me Hungarian), but you can set up that relation to Britain and Eastern Europe also, so this may be related geographic longitude :)
• bisekrankas 10mo ago
  I recently watched One Punch man which made me think about heroism, what a hero is and what it means. Saitama, and the top tier famous heroes in the story rarely risks anything. Their immense power just makes their actions an illusion of being heroic, theres rarely anything at stake for them, Saitama especially. Mumen rider is an example of a true hero to me in that story, his only superpower being that he rides a bicycle, and he stands before certain destruction just to delay the monsters from hurting innocents for a few seconds. Risking everything. By that definition, most superheroes, like the Avengers just look like power fantasies, does Spider-man or superman ever really risk anything substansial or acts in the face of certain destruction.
  • rkomorn 10mo ago
    And then you end up with contrived plot points like kryptonite. Or the alternative: plot armor so thick people even get brought back from the dead regularly.
    • FrostViper8 10mo ago
      In One Punch man the gag is that while everyone is fighting for their lives, Saitama is usually distracted by other priorities that are often trivial (such as getting some bug spray, or saving some money down the local convenience shop as they have a sale on noodles), he also rarely gets the recognised for saving the day once he does bother so show up.
  • watwut 10mo ago
    I especially liked when he described his super hard training to an acolyte. "What do you mean 100 pushups, 100 squats, 100 sitdows and run? It is just a standard training, not even that hard!!!"
    • nosianu 10mo ago
      Scene (wit subs): https://youtu.be/tIGeJEehzys?t=134 https://youtu.be/tIGeJEehzys?t=134
    • 10mo ago
• weinzierl 10mo ago
  The exception that immediately sprung to my mind is "the Dude" from The Big Lebowski. Maybe other Coen brothers’ "heroes" also fit the bill, but I’m not so familiar with the rest of their œuvre.
• curiousgal 10mo ago
  Okay, literature aside, I've often discussed this with my SO. I feel like Americans are obsessed with heroes/villains. Every single issue that arises and is discussed online, is always viewed from the angle of "who do we support and/or who do we hate". During COVID it was Fauci and Dolly Parton, now it's Bovino and Good. I feel like Americans often have a need to put a single person on a pedestal as if they yearn for a symbol. A true cult of personality, for better or for worse.
• jiggawatts 10mo ago
  An “Americanism” I noticed in the show Heroes first but now I see everywhere is that every hero just wants to be normal. Claire Bennet — who’s only special ability is healing — whines about the burden of this for several seasons! Just shut up already! You have what everybody wants and there’s basically no downside! Just put away the costume and get an office job if you want to be a normie. Conversely, any metahuman that fully maximises their extra abilities is almost invariably labelled as evil. Magneto is the obvious candidate here, but Wolverine is even better: same powers as Claire Bennet but he leans into them… so he’s got to be an anti-hero type.
• macleginn 10mo ago
  Well, there is this stoic British way of looking at the world and preserving the sense of self worth and then there is the ending of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is just pure cosmic despair in the face of the bureaucratic void. It was also true for me that once I saw how pathologically bleak Adams's worldview is I couldn't even really laugh at the jokes any more.
• hhgttg420 10mo ago
  DA quote from the linked Slashdot page: > any model which fundamentally prevents people getting something they want is going to fail I want to crossstitch this quote and hang it up on a wall where I would frequently see it.
• vanderZwan 10mo ago
  Speaking as a Dutch person who lives in Sweden and who has traveled a lot within the EU, I'm pretty confident that the sympathy for "loser" heroes is not limited to England, but broadly applies to most if not all of Europe. The way this is expressed however varies a lot depending on the local culture, and the English sense of humor around it is particularly loved (at least in the Netherlands, I can't really speak for other countries). I suspect that these cultural differences have a strong connection to the flavor of Christianity that historically was more dominant in a particular European region. More specifically: how bleak their takes on predestination were[0]. That relates pretty directly to the question of "are we merely victims subject to winds of chance and external circumstance, or are we powerful agents fashioning our own stories, making our own luck?" after all. Getting side-tracked for a bit, I've also seen this argument used to to explain why Donald Duck is more popular in most European countries than Mickey Mouse. That is actually a fun little rabbit hole to dive into too[1][2]. Sweden, Finland, and the Netherlands have had their own weekly Donald Duck magazine since 1948, 1951 and 1952 respectively, producing a lot of their own stories with their own established canon. Italy used to have a Donald Duck weekly from 1937 to 1940, but then it got merged into their weekly Mickey Mouse magazine. It still creates monthly Donald Duck pocket editions (which are translated and sold all over Europe). Meanwhile, Mickey Mouse has weekly magazines in Italy (1931), France (1934), Germany (1951), Greece (1966), and was even very briefly published in inter-war Poland (1938 to 1939). I can only confirm that Italy produces most of its own comics. Now I could argue that this confirms my claim, since Donald Duck appears more in the protestant side of Europe and Mickey in the catholic/orthodox side. Having grown up reading these comics I know better: in reality the magazines in different countries have been exchanging Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse stories (and others) for many decades already. However, those stories definitely have a different flavor to them depending on which country they are from. One big example: in the Dutch comics Donald Duck is not just often the loser at the end of a story, but his misery is usually self-inflicted. Meanwhile, the Italians came up with a superhero alter-ego for Donald Duck that started out as a revenge fantasy against his horrible boss (Scrooge McDuck) but that quickly evolved into actual an actually superhero comic[3]. Make of that what you will. PS: As a tangent on a tangent, if anyone from South America wants to comment on 1971's How to Read Donald Duck I'd be very interested, because I just discovered it on Wikipedia[4]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Duck_in_comics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Duck_in_comics [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_comics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disney_comics [3] https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/The_Duck_Avenger https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/The_Duck_Avenger [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_Donald_Duck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_Donald_Duck
• alex_young 10mo ago
  While there is something here, I don’t think it’s quite the stark difference stated. Go watch a Coen brothers movie and tell me why it’s funny. We mostly all agree that these “dark” comedies are funny, and it’s precisely because nothing good happens to the protagonist that makes them funny.
• draw_down 10mo ago
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• sixo 10mo ago
  Relevant Orwell from 1940: https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/boys/english/e_boys https://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/boys/english/e_boys "Boys' weeklies". Contrasting the older and newer British stories with the American ones: > If one compares the [British] Gem and Magnet with a genuinely modern [British] paper, the thing that immediately strikes one is... there are fifteen or twenty characters, all more or less on an equality, with whom readers of different types can identify. In the more modern papers this is not usually the case. Instead of identifying with a schoolboy of more or less his own age, the reader of the Skipper, Hotspur, etc., is led to identify with a G-man, with a Foreign Legionary, with some variant of Tarzan, with an air ace, a master spy, an explorer, a pugilist... This character is intended as a superman... There is a great difference in tone between even the most bloodthirsty English paper and the threepenny Yank Mags... In the Yank Mags you get real blood-lust, really gory descriptions of the all-in, jump-on-his-testicles style fighting, written in a jargon that has been perfected by people who brood end-lessly on violence.
• jgalt212 10mo ago
  > Stephen explained this to me by saying that you cannot make jokes about failure in the States. This does not ring true to me at all. The overconfident idiot appears all the time in US and UK comedy.