The Pickwick Club discussion

I am 1/4 German. But I still love Ben stiller!!

I think that you have to "get" American lifestyle to find Ben funny. The truly funny aspect of that type of humor is that although exaggerated it's all true!!! If you think it's all made up you would not get the joke.

Ben's parents are very successful comedic actors. Good genes.

Meet the parents, the royal tenenbaums , zoolander, tropic thunder ( OMG! Robert Downey jr was great in this! He played an Australian actor playing a black man in a movie!) . Ben did do a heavy drama called permanent midnight. He was very good as a raging drug addict. ( true story of writer director jerry stahl).

I am 1/4 German. But I still love Ben stiller!!

I think that you have to "get" American lifestyle to find Ben funny. The truly funny aspect of that type of humor is that although exaggerated it's all true!!! If you think it's all made up you would not get the joke.

Ben's parents are very successful comedic actors. Good genes.

Among my favorites;
Meet the parents, the royal tenenbaums , zoolander, tropic thunder ( OMG! Robert Downey jr was great in this! He played an Australian actor playing a black man in a movie!he was nominated for an oscar. Rare that comedies got oscar nods. ) Ben did do a heavy drama called permanent midnight. He was very good as a raging drug addict. ( true story of writer director jerry stahl)

Well, I also love Ben Stiller's father, who will always be Frank Costanza for me explaining to his son the intricacies of bras - and calling for "Serenity now". But Ben Stiller is a guaranty to quite silly humour to me - although, of course, that's entirely a matter of taste.

Ben Stiller is quite popular in Germany, though - so my aversion to him and his kind of movies is not typically German. When it comes to humour, I'm more in line with the English tongue-in-cheek and deadpan thing, and I like absurd stuff such as Seinfeld or Monty Python.

My impression is that most Germans tend to be attracted by and to share the American kind of humour, which is normally tinged with a moral lesson. You know that sort of thing when at the end the hero confesses to his mistakes in front of an audience of people he hardly knows, and then everybody is moved and forgives him.

This sentimentalism - no value judgement intended here - is quite German (and American), but rather un-British and un-me ;-)

Even though I grew up with jerry stiller in various rolls. He will always be frank costanza to me. He is great on king of queens too. Which shows how good he is. It is rare that an actor can even get a job after coining a character let alone right away and well excepted!!!

As I mentioned I like everything that is well done. My favorite movies are complicated and heavy even though they may be comedy. But I love to let go and enjoy any stupidity you can offer me ( again, if it is well done. Which to me means that it has been done justice in all phases. You can have good acting that is ruined by bad editing. Great script ruined by bad directing etc.

Do you like Wes Anderson? He is very dry humored.

I've been wondering if Dickens based Scrooge on a real person the way he did so many of his other characters so I did some digging and here are some of the things I found, the first is straight from Wikipedia:

In his diaries, Dickens states that Scrooge stems from a grave marker which he saw in 1841, while taking an evening walk in the Canongate Kirkyard in Edinburgh. The headstone was for the vintner Ebenezer Lennox Scroggie, a relative of Adam Smith, who had won the catering contract for the visit of George IV to Edinburgh and the first contract to supply whisky to the Royal Navy. The marker identified Scroggie as a "meal man" (corn merchant), but Dickens misread this as "mean man", due to the fading light and his mild dyslexia. Dickens wrote that it must have "shrivelled" Scroggie’s soul to carry "such a terrible thing to eternity". The grave marker was lost during construction work at part of the kirkyard in 1932.

Then there is this very real and very interesting man:

John Elwes (1714-1789) was born John Meggot. His father was a wealthy London brewer named Robert Meggot. He died when the boy was only four. John was educated at Westminster School. He spent more than a decade there, then lived in Switzerland for a few years before returning to England. In his twenties and thirties, he dressed well, spent money freely, and moved among London's most fashionable circles.

Unfortunately for Meggot, hoarding money seems to have run in the family. His mother, Amy Elwes went to her grave supposedly because she starved herself to death. She refused to use the family fortune to buy food. Her brother, Harvey, was also a miser. He lived on a country estate that he allowed to fall into ruin. The manor house's roof leaked and the often soaked walls were crumbling. Broken windows were repaired with paper, and the furniture was infested with worms.

John hoped to inherit his uncle's fortune. That's why, in 1751, he changed his last name to Elwes to assure his uncle that the family name would survive him. That's also why Elwes visited his uncle regularly and pretended to share his miserly ways. For dinner Elwes and Uncle Harvey ate whatever small game Harvey had managed to kill that day. As they ate they talked about money and how others wasted it. They would go to bed as it got dark to save money on candles. When Sir Harvey died 12 years later, John inherited £250,000.

By now Elwes shared his uncle's stinginess. After his uncle died he proceeded to spend as little as he could of his uncle's money. He dressed in rags all the time, and never cleaned his shoes -that might wear them out faster. Friends said he looked "like a prisoner confined for debt."

Like his uncle, Elwes allowed his estates to fall into ruin. He refused to buy a carriage, riding a horse was cheaper, before setting off on a journey, he'd fill his pockets with hardboiled eggs so he wouldn't have to pay for meals in taverns. He rode in the soft dirt by the side of the road so that he wouldn't have to buy horseshoes for his horses. He traveled hours out of the way to avoid toll roads.

In 1774 Elwes was offered a chance to succeed a retiring Member of Parliament in the British House of Commons, and accepted …provided he wouldn't have to spend money on his campaign. He spent just 18 pence -on a meal for himself- and won the election.

In 1784 Elwes retired from Parliament rather than spend anything on re-election. With the distraction of public office gone from his life, his penny-pinching got worse. His diet suffered most of all. On one occasion he ate a dead bird that a rat had dragged out of a river; on another, he caught a fish with a partially eaten smaller fish in its stomach. "Aye! This was killing two birds with one stone!" he said, then ate them both.

On those rare occasion when Elwes bought lamb or other meat from the butcher, he bought the entire animal to get the best price, and then ate every bit of it. This was before refrigeration, and meant he often ate meat that had reached "the last stage of putrefaction," a friend wrote. "Meat that walked about on his plate, would he continue to eat, rather than have new things killed before the old provision was finished.

He was however, very generous to his friends loaning them money, even large amounts never expecting or asking to be paid back. He had two illegitimate sons, and when he died each of them inherited nearly £500,000 ($145 million) .

So is either of these men the real Scrooge?

Kim wrote: "So is either of these men the real Scrooge? ."

No. It's our fellow Pickwickian, whom we call Everyman!!!