Laughing My Arse Off

Last weekend, my wife and I saw “The Trip” at a small theater in Old Town (no ‘e’) Pasadena known for showing artsy-fartsy, lo-budget, independent films.

I laughed myself sore at the achingly funny, often poignant, mostly-improvised “dialogue” between actor-comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon (playing dangerously loose versions of themselves), as the middle-aged duo spend a week on the road traveling through Northern England’s Lake District – ostensibly to review its more esoteric inns and restaurants for a British magazine.

The movie has been edited together from an earlier six-episode BBC2 sitcom of the same name and features several spontaneous, seemingly ad-libbed, devastatingly sharp verbal duels between Coogan and Brydon, each a brilliant impressionist in his own right. These two do Michael Caine, Al Pacino, Sean Connery and even Woody Allen better than the originals themselves.

I purposely don’t do movie reviews, so I won’t go into any more details of the plot, or lack of one, than I already have. My point, however, it that as I laughed my way through the eye-wateringly entertaining film, I was once again reminded that the British accent is a God’s gift to the English people.

Maybe it’s His way of making up for giving them a taste for bland food, Benny Hill and medieval dentistry skills. Now imagine how much funnier that line would sound spoken with a British accent. See what I mean?