The lowhighbrow

While driving to the theater for a birthday triple feature, my iTunes was at the start of “C” and so I heard both the overture to CARMEN and Jessye Norman singing “La Habanera.” And as it does, my mind wandered to what was probably my first (unwitting) exposure to Bizet’s opera.

There was a sketch on THE BENNY HILL SHOW that was a kind of parody of “La Habanera.” Benny and an older man in drag (I think) had an over-the-top marital quarrel set to that famous aria. The dialogue is in nonsense “French“ lyrics while subtitles play, showing a series of caustic insults, played in as broad and farcical a manner as you’d imagine.

By any rational definition, Benny Hill sketches are as lowbrow as it gets. This was also made in an era when they were only two channels on British TV (OK … 2 1/2 … BBC-2 was on a half-day), meaning that this was ‘broad’cast- TV not ‘’narrow’cast. And yet, parodies of a canonical opera were considered fit for the masses. And my mind wandered further to where I first seen the most famous line in English language literature … “to be or not to be.” I saw a joke about it in graffiti on a Bash Street Kids strip in the Beano. (I don’t quite know how to analogize that in contemporary American.)

When did we lose the sense that you could make highbrow jokes and references in the lowest of lowbrow contexts?