Chris Morris-Blue Jam...Does Humor Belong on the Radio?

I'm a huge Chris Morris fan. Blue Jam, all of it, is in permanent residence on my MP3 player. VERY dark humor for sure. (Great music too.) I remember at the time Morris said the sketches themselves aren't where the comedy lies. The comedy comes from the inappropriate actions of those in the sketches. (Like the parents who don't really care about their son going missing, the recurring Doctor character, or the TV lizards sketch with the repair man saying his name is "Mister Lizard".) It is a show most definitely NOT for the easily offended as a lot of the themes and comedy is very far from what most people expect from comedy.

One of my favourite sketches is the aforementioned TV Lizards sketch. A man calls in the TV repair man because the TV is pouring lizards into his living room. Now most comedy, THAT would be the gag. A TV pouring lizards into the room. However the sketch in Blue Jam goes far FAR beyond that and that's just the start point.

Of course humor belongs on the radio. A lot of the best UK TV comedy started out as radio shows. Blue Jam even had a TV version called "Jam". (Available on DVD in region 2.) Sadly the TV version was missing one of the best features of the radio version, which was Morris' monologues. (The first episode starts with one of the best IMO. The other great one is the "Suicide Journalist".)

Morris himself has referred to the show as "ambient comedy", or "ambient stupid". Either way it's an amazing mix of very dark and offensive humor, coupled with some absolutely fantastic music. One of the most unique listening experiences ever. You'll either adore it, or despise it. I really don't think there's any other reaction to it.

Series 1, episode 6: The BBC deemed the episode inappropriate and replaced it with a repeat. However, at the last minute someone at the BBC, presumably a fan of Morris, swapped the tape for the originally planned episode 6, so the first few minutes aired. The reason it was pulled was because of a very funny cut-up speech by the Archbishop of Canterbury at Princess Diana's funeral (bear in mind this was mere months after she died). It almost airs in it's entirety in the broadcast episode, but is faded into episode 1 before the speech ends and the re-run continues from there, meaning episode 6 of the first series is about 15 minutes long. As far as I'm aware, most, if not all of the material from the episode that didn't air was used in series 2.

I'll certainly give this a look, thanks from one Graham to another.

Awesome. I'm digging this a lot. Thanks!

"The coin lands on the third side...the INSIDE."

I can only echo the sentiments expressed by Graham. Blue Jam is the tits and everyone here will almost definitely love it!

I used to sit up till 1 a.m. on Thursdays during my student days in the late 90s to listen to (and record) them and I still revisit them often to this day.

Season 2, I think, is my favourite of the three and the Rothko the Dog monologue in S2 Ep 4 is a genius piece of sound collage. The use of musical cues throughout the series is pretty flawless in general. Also, who wouldn't enjoy a series where sketches are titled "Synchronised Cocks", "Plumber Fixes Dead Baby" and "Woman with Duck's Genitals".

Funnily enough, though, I find the tone quite light on the radio shows, certainly compared to the TV version. I might just be odd, though.

Also worth checking out if you can find them anywhere are Chris Morris's 1994 "straight" Radio 1 shows. Which on the surface were "DJ plays music, talks a bit between songs" but were mining the same dark vein of humour that Blue Jam was - albeit presented under the guise of a breezy FM DJ persona.

Morris and his collaborator Peter Baynham, who went on to co-write the Borat movie, would spend an hour each week:

-Having to dispose of the bodies of dead presenters in the studio next door by having them stuffed at a French Taxidermists (but not before making the corpse "talk" by blowing into a hole in the back of the corpse's neck and waggling its mouth a bit.

- Finiding out the problems encountered when you take the shell off a tortoise to see what it's like inside (an old man's hand, apparently). i.e. it dies.

- Worrying about the fact that Neil Young looks like he's from out of Planet of the Apes

- Playing the non-radio edits of Gangsta Rap songs

- Getting Alice Cooper to cheerfully call another radio 1 DJ a twat.

- Generally getting fired and re-hired for their misbehaviour several times in a 6 month run.

Marvellous stuff all round.

Edit: Oh and to answer the question, yes, humour definitely belongs on radio. There's been so much great stuff over the years, certainly in the UK and no doubt in the US and elsewhere too, that one hardly knows where to start with it. In many ways, comedy works better on the radio than on film/TV. Blue Jam is a particularly great example of this. Jam was funny and all, but the thought of a baby being plumbed into the Central Heating was funnier than its visualisation.