Many people point to Douglas Adams’s 1978 radio show The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy as sci-fi comedy’s masterpiece. Mel Brooks, Spaceballs, 1987, film still. (Basil Fawlty’s inability to escape his shoddy guesthouse in Fawlty Towers, 1975–79, say, or Larry David’s inability to escape himself in Curb Your Enthusiasm, 2000–ongoing.) Maybe, however, the problem lies not in the inherent incommensurability of the two modes, but in science fiction’s habit of self-destructing through commercial overreach. In the end, perhaps it’s simply that science fiction is always already ridiculous, so needs no additional ridicule, or that, while sci-fi invites us to speculate on a universe of infinite possibilities, the best comedies often turn on constraint. Seth MacFarlane, The Orville, 2017-, film still. However, when Red Dwarf’s popularity and budget increased, it fell into two traps familiar to makers of ‘straight’ on-screen sci-fi: an overreliance on special effects and (fatally) a fan-servicing emphasis on the lore of its own fictional universe, which destroyed any tension that once existed between the show’s ‘situation’ and its ‘comedy’. Drawing on the aesthetic of John Carpenter’s slackers-in-space movie, Dark Star (1974), the show centred initially on a classic odd-couple relationship between the last human in existence, a warm-hearted scouse wastrel, and his foil, an uptight, socially ambitious hologram. Comparatively better were the first two seasons of British sitcom Red Dwarf (1988–2017). Why, then, do so many sci-fi themed comedies fail to raise a smile? Partly, it’s that parody, as a form, is hard to sustain – witness Seth Macfarlane’s television series The Orville (2017–20), a directionless send-up of Star Trek (1966–69), or Mel Brooks’s movie Spaceballs (1987), a staggering unfunny Star Wars (1977) take-off. Given the impregnable humourlessness of most sci-fi – from the rigorously logical ‘hard sf’ of the novelist Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy (1951–53) to the dreamy vision of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris (1972) – the genre’s tropes should be an open goal for the comic imagination. (The 2003–09 reboot of Battlestar Galactica seems to be a particular influence.) Compare this to Iannucci’s exemplary sitcom I’m Alan Partridge (1997–2002), cowritten by Steve Coogan and Peter Baynham, where the titular failed television presenter inhabits a world of beige Travel Taverns and petrol-station minimarts that provides the perfect mirror for his bland and haunted soul. And yet, transposed to the future, these contemporary comic targets become curiously less vulnerable to satire, while the audience is constantly distracted by the show’s glossy CGI, and its genre nods and winks. What we’re really being invited to laugh at here is billionaire tech bros, entitled tourists and the rictus grin of corporate PR in the face of disaster. ![]() After all, aside from one (admittedly pretty good) sight-gag involving the bodies of dead crew members orbiting the spaceship’s glazed exterior while passengers practice yoga and eat brunch, little of Avenue 5’s humour depends on its futuristic mise-en-scène. ![]() Seven episodes in, I’m left wondering whether the show might have been better had it been set aboard a present-day ocean liner. ![]() Is Avenue 5 funny? It’s a perfectly watchable, intermittingly amusing comedy of errors that morphs into a comedy of manners, although given the consistent brilliance of Iannucci’s work in radio, television and film across the past three decades – from On the Hour (1991–92) to The Thick of It (2005–12) to The Death of Stalin (2017) – that is faint praise, indeed. Hilarity, at least in theory, ensues.Īrmando Iannucci, Avenue 5, 2020, film still. Faced with the prospect of their luxury vacation devolving into a hell of claustrophobia, rationing and existential impotence, the passengers begin to rebel, led by a pushy stowaway (Rebecca Front), who one might equally imagine dominating a PTA meeting or a G7 nation. When a massive systems malfunction strikes, the ship is thrown off course, extending its voyage from a leisurely eight weeks to a gruelling three years. ![]() Currently screening on HBO and Sky One, Armando Iannucci’s latest sitcom, Avenue 5 (2020), is set on an interstellar cruise ship, owned by a narcissistic young billionaire entrepreneur (played by Josh Gad) and captained by an alcoholic actor (Hugh Laurie), whose reassuring hero-of-the-cosmos mien hides his utter inability to navigate.
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