Peter Cook - Teaching Ravens To Fly Underwater

Cook was the greatest

Shame about the Raven venture - wish him well with the old F and P. Thank you very much for posting this.

Amazing! AMAZING!

Brilliant!

British humour has a long tradition of absurdity. Milligan, Tommy Cooper, Monty Python and even early Billy Connolly. American humour (in general) seems so mundane in comparison.

"She said Arthur, if you don't get underwater, and start teaching ravens to fly, i'll smash your stupid face off."
Classic. XD

Very true, very true. However I doubt that anyone in that audience had ever seen "Teaching Ravens to Fly" before that evening. I was commenting on the singular genius of the absurd as viewed through a postmodern lens. Call it nostalgia if you will. It's hard for me to imagine that there were none new to seeing Cook and Moore that for the first time that night. Surely you can agree with me that these are nights that change lives.
However, I agree with you and will forever tread lightly.

I think not only is this routine absolutely stellar, but look at the audience in the last micro second of this film.
We look upon this comedy and understand its genius, having a long line of absurdest sketches to comment on and rank against. But these people truly have no idea what's going on, only that what they're hearing is funny. And it appears as though they are genuinely laughing. I think it's amazing.

i don't know that we can say the audience don't know what's going on. for starters, we can't see much of them to ascertain anything. and, secondly, and more importantly, there is a long history of absurdism in british comedy. for instance, the goons and spike milligan in particular preceded pete and dud and would have no doubt influenced them. the goons were immensely popular in britain throughout the 1950s and 1960s are still are today.

Amazing.

Hilarious!