Peter Moore on Rare, Piss-Taking And Monty Python

“I love Intelligent humour [as in Rare's soon-to-be-resurrected Banjo Kazooie game] - I mean, I don't want to be disrespectful; I've lived here a long time, but I liken it to the BBC version of "The Office" and the NBC version of The Office.

You can take that TV program and encapsulate the difference between British sense of humour: the wryness, the sarcasm and the sense of irony - which, without being disrespectful, is rooted in intellectualism and all goes back to Monty Python, where you've got a bunch of highly educated people who can talk about the Spanish Inquisition, right? For better or worse, the great majority of Brits in those days knew what the Spanish Inquisition was. That doesn't play in Peoria. You can't use the Spanish Inquisition as a comedy line in a [U.S.] sitcom. You could do on the BBC.

“Many of us, and Chris and Tim (Stamper) are a little younger than me, but so many of us grew up in the '70s in the U.K. with that whole sensibility. Whether it was Peter Cook and Dudley Moore - again, London School of Economics-educated people - or whether it was Monty Python. Then there was all of the BBC sense of humour, which is wry, intellectual, sarcastic and irreverent - we call it piss-taking; giving each other stick; picking on each other's physical deformities - that's very politically incorrect in America, which tends to vanilla everything. So you get the [U.S.] sitcom mentality, which has to appeal to everyone from the East Coast to the Midwest to the West Coast. As a result it loses its edge.”