I recently bought the boxed set of my favorite BBC comedy of all time (Fawlty Towers is my second, & I have that, too), The Black Adder. The series follows Edmund Blackadder & his descendants through pertinent ages in English history. He is always accompanied by Lord Percy & Baldrick, the Blackadder’s dogsbody. At the end of each season, he dies, unmarried & without children, so it’s never explained just how he ends up 150 years or so later in the next season. But I grew up with it and find it hysterical. Including the one episode my mother would not let me watch when I was a kid. Which, now having seen it, is much less offensive than I expected it. In fact, it has less violence and far less sex & inuendo than the rest of the series (I was allowed to see anything involving Lord Flashart…)

So! Now that I have the complete boxed set, I’m in the process of subjecting my beloved to it, one episode at a time. Most of which I can quote freely from, or laugh before the joke is made. As I watch it, though, about 10 years since I last saw any of the episodes all the way through, I notice that there’s an awful lot of homophobic comments (”What did God do to the Sodomites?” Edmund asks Baldrick & Lord Percy, after being threatened with that punishment by his father. “I don’t know, my lord,” Baldrick responds, “but I can’t imagine it was worse than what they used to do to each other!” *canned laughter*). And they make me really uncomfortable.

Which, on the one hand, makes me feel good that I’ve developed that kind of sensitivity. On the other hand, however, is the fact that I really enjoy this series otherwise. Would I like it still if I saw it for the first time today? Probably not. (The Dark Crystal falls into that category, too.) I always say about certain old sitcoms that they come from back before comedy was funny. You know the kind I mean: where you watch them & hear the canned laughter but can’t really figure out why people are pretending to laugh. British comedy being far more sophisticated than American (by which I mean there’s much more sex and swearing), there are a lot of jokes in Blackadder that actually are funny. But I’m still uncomfortable with the homophobia that underscores just about every episode. I mean, the Monty Python boys did a lot of cross dressing (it didn’t seem to me to be a commentary on transvestism, just a comment on the lack of women who worked with them), but somehow, despite Baldrick’s frequent crossdressing, and Kate (Blackadder’s manservent, Kate being short, of course, for Bob), it’s always pointed out and mocked.

Given the new series the Riches, in which the youngest son of the family that it’s about enjoys crossdressing (and the family’s okay with it), I guess we’ve come along way. And I still like Blackadder but I now watch it with a slightly different eye.